Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle was a founding member of the Royal Society and the most prominent English advocate for the experimental philosophy in the seventeenth century. Born into aristocratic wealth—his father was the Earl of Cork—Boyle had the social standing and financial independence to construct what Schaffer calls the 'three-technology system' of experimental knowledge production: the material technology of the air pump (an expensive, complex apparatus requiring skilled technicians to operate), the social technology of gentlemanly witnessing (converting private observations into public knowledge through collective testimony), and the literary technology of detailed experimental reports (published accounts that allowed distant readers to virtually witness the experiments). Boyle's 1660 New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall established that a vacuum could be produced mechanically and that air was necessary for life, combustion, and sound. But Schaffer's analysis reveals that Boyle's greater achievement was social: constructing the witnessing community and the protocols of credibility that made experimental demonstration a legitimate form of knowledge.