Robert Boyle’s remarkable to-do list for future scientists ranged from
“the Art of Flying” to “Potent Druggs to alter or Exalt Imagination.”
Robert Boyle, the seventeenth-century polymath, chemist, and fellow of the Royal Society, left in his papers a twenty-four-item list of predictions of the future. Though he discovered the famous law of gaseous pressure and volume that bears his name, Boyle was not just blowing hot air. The Royal Society was the first government-sponsored scientific society in the world. As part of a charter granted by King Charles II, the Society charged itself, in that delightfully immodest manner characteristic of the Restoration, to “extend not only the boundaries of the Empire, but also the very arts and sciences.”So, the list Boyle left us was all about boundary breaking, and a successful list it was. Many of the items, such as “the art of flying,” “the art of continuing long under water, and exercising functions freely there,” and even “Varnishes perfumable by Rubbing” have been achieved in the form of airplanes, scuba diving, and scratch-and-sniff. A designer even recently created minty scratch-and-sniff jeans, the smell lasting through ten washes.Boyle’s list reminds us that science has always been bound together with novelty and entertainment. The early Royal Society’s meetings were in fact characterized as “entertainments” for wealthy and interested gentlemen, and Boyle himself demonstrated a trick of writing with a finger dipped into luminescent phosphorus, the “icy noctiluca” as he termed it, making enchanting displays.
Boyle Papers 8, fol. 208, The Royal Society
Boyle Papers 8, fols. 209, The Royal Society
Boyle’s “Desiderata,” transcribed:
The Prolongation of Life.
The Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour’d as in youth.
The Art of Flying.
The Art of Continuing long under water, and exercising functions freely there.
The Cure of Wounds at a Distance.
The Cure of Diseases at a distance or at least by Transplantation.
The Attaining Gigantick Dimensions.
The Emulating of Fish without Engines by Custome and Education only.
The Acceleration of the Production of things out of Seed.
The Transmutation of Metalls.
The makeing of Glass Malleable.
The Transmutation of Species in Mineralls, Animals, and Vegetables.
The Liquid Alkaest and Other dissolving Menstruums.
The making of Parabolicall and Hyperbolicall Glasses.
The making Armor light and extremely hard.
The practicable and certain way of finding Longitudes.
The use of Pendulums at Sea and in Journeys, and the Application of it to watches.
Potent Druggs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, etc.
A Ship to saile with All Winds, and A Ship not to be Sunk.
Freedom from Necessity of much Sleeping exemplify’d by the Operations of Tea and what happens in Mad-Men.
Pleasing Dreams and physicall Exercises exemplify’d by the Egyptian Electuary and by the Fungus mentioned by the French Author.
Great Strength and Agility of Body exemplify’d by that of Frantick Epileptick and Hystericall persons.
A perpetuall Light.Varnishes perfumable by Rubbing.
These wish lists of future predictions derived in part from the natural philosophical projects of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), whose scientific method of empirical observation and induction were revered by the Royal Society. As the historian Vera Keller has demonstrated, invention—whether ancient, modern, or not-yet-discovered—was a major preoccupation of early modern thinkers. Bacon, in particular, formulated the idea of the desiderata or wish list, or inventions that were seen as particularly desirable. Keller writes that these lists served as “markers for what humankind might achieve together… serving to expand the horizon of possibility.” Some of his motivation for making such lists was purely political, economic and practical, as Bacon called them, “experiments of fruit,” whereas other investigations were to advance knowledge, or for “experiments of light.” Wish lists appeared as part of political projects before they appeared as scientific projects; desiderata about improvements in navigation, for example, were written with the aim of extending England’s empire....MUCH MORE
