
A reconstructive photo (Greer, 2007) of Robert Hooke, left, and Robert Boyle, right, doing pressure and volume experiments with their pneumatical engine, which is a glass bulb, aka “receiver” (or vacuum bulb), attached to a vacuum pump (aka air pump). [12]

On 20 Dec 1659, Boyle sent his famous “Spring of the Air” experiments overview letter, to his nephew Lord Dungarvan, aka “Charles Lord Viscount of Dungarvan, eldest son to the Earl of Cork” (Ѻ). This famous “Spring of the Air” dedicatory letter to his nephew, the young Lord Dungarvan, is dated from Beaconsfield, Dec 20, 1659—where, in all probability, according to existographer Flora Mason (1914), Boyle was spending Christmas with his friend Edmund Waller, the Poet, at his house. [16]

In 1660, Boyle, as described in his New Experiments, had completed 43 experiment; some of which are summarized as follows:

		Experiment	Description	Notes
-------		------------------------------------------------------------
	1.		He sucked out the air by several "exsuctions" until he got to the point that if he let the handle go, the piston would rise up on its own, spinning the handle, or something to this effect (pgs. 7-8).
	2.		Talked about the difficulty of raising a cap or stopper (stopple) from the evacuated receiver.	Discussed by Henry More in his Anecdote Against Atheism. [10]
	3.
	4.	Half full lamb's bladder	He puts a lamb's bladder, with half of its full capacity of air, ties it off, puts it in the receiver, and begins to do several exsuctions, and watches the bladder expand.	Boyle cites Gilles Roberval, and his carp's bladder experiment, as being the originator of this.
	5.		Does another variation of the bladder experiment, where he breaks the bladder.
	6.		Did some type of bladder tied to a small tube, either with air, with air and water, or with water, and tested to see expansion.	“It hath seemed almost incredible, which is related by the industrious Mersennus (Marin Mersenne), that air, by the violence of heat, though as great as our vessels can support without suction, can be made so dilated as to take up seventy times as much room as before.” — Robert Boyle (1660), New Experiments (pg. 15)
	7.		Made some kind of glass blown bubble figure which the put into the receiver.
	8.		Did something with the glass apparatus of figure 7.
	9.
	10.		Did various candle's lit inside the vacuum, seeing how long they could make the flame last, observing the smoke, etc.
	11.		Used the coiled wire (figure 10) and put burning coals in it.
	12.		Did some type of experiment with a soldier's lit match in the receiver.
	13.		Put a match and a sealed bladder into the receiver to test to see if smoke would replenish the receiver.
	14.		Fired the trigger of a pistol against gunpowder to test for sparks.
	15.		Put some combustible material in the receiver and tried to light it on fire with a magnifying glass.
	16.		Put an iron needle into the receiver and found that a loadstone (magnet) attracted the needle.
	17.	Void-in-void	A Torricellian apparatus was put into the receiver and then evacuated to see if the tube level would fall to the level in the basin; Boyle said this was "the principle fruit I promised myself from our engine". [10] The could not, however, get the mercury down to the basin level, the level remaining a few inches above.	Done earlier by the French school. Note the second generation Boyle pump did get the level all the way down.
	18.		Put some mercury in a long tube, with some air (or something) and put in his bedroom window next to a weather glass, and observed the two for several weeks; talked a lot about it.
	19.		Repeated the void-in-void experiment, but with water.	Then noted that Blaise Pascal had tried this earlier.
	20.		Did some type of water in an egg-shaped vessel; and talked about some type of syringe experiment they did a few years back.	Talked about the experimental philosophy of a Mr. Wilkins.
	21.		Put an oiled bladder into a tube of water and put it into the receiver, to test for atmospheric pressure on water, or something.
	22.		Did some type of modified water experiment to try to test to see what the bubbles were.
	23.		Did something similar to experiment #22, but with distilled rainwater and used vessels called "philosophical eggs" as the chemists call them.
	24.		Did some experiments with other liquids, such as salad oil, wine, etc.
	25.		Did some experiment with mercury and water, and something floating, to test the bubbles.
	26.	Pendulum experiment	Put a pendulum inside receiver and put one outside receiver, set them swinging, and tested to see if there was a difference.
	27.	Sound in vacuum	Did a variant of Kircher's bell in vacuum experiment with a watch.	Cited Athanasius Kircher as originating the bell test in a vacuum experiment.
	28.		Did some kind of water in glass egg experiment.
	29.		Used some kind of metal like liquid, that smoked or something, to test how meteors might move in space, or something.
	30.		Let smoke settle into the receiver, then turned and shoke the receiver to see what would happen, or something along these lines.
	31.	Two flat marble discs	This was the separation of two plane surfaces experiment. [10]	This dates back to Lucretius who used it to prove the existence of the vacuum.
	32.	Weight-raising experiment	Disconnected the evacuated receiver, and used a special tapered valve (figure 9) with attached scale to see how much weight the receiver could raise, testing up to 10 pounds, by throwing on ounce pieces onto the scale until the vacuum broke.	A variant, supposedly, of #2. Boyle, here, in his annotations, digressed on anti-teleology in nature, or something along these lines. [10]
	33.	Weight-raising experiment	Did a variant of #32, where (pg. 46) they attached 14 to 28 pounds of weight to the teeth of the piston, to be raise or lowered; talked a good deal about this experiment.	“More appealed to Boyle’s experiments #32 and #33 in which large weights were lifted by the sucker [piston] reascending into the cylinder. More claimed that these trials showed the limited applicability of any mechanical law of gravity, and that there ‘is a principle transcending the nature and power of matter that does umpire and rule all.” — Steven Shapin (1985), Leviathan and the Air Pump (pg. 212)
	34.		Did some type of Archimedes buoyancy of two different objects in water.
	35.		Did some type of siphon experiment.
	36.		Attempted to weight air, with some kind of glass bubble, a scale, balanced against a piece of lead; talked for awhile about this.	Cited Galileo.
	37.		Did some tests to figure out the possibility that they saw some strange flashes of light in the vacuum when they turned the key, to let air in or out or something.
	38.		Tested to see how fast snow and salt would melt in a vacuum.
	39.		Did something with air and water using figure 14.
	40.		Put a fly, bee (and a bee with a flower), and a butterfly into the vacuum.
	41.		Tested classical theories about "respiration" in a vacuum, first by putting lark and a mouse in the receiver, he the tried to find a fish to put in, but put in an ell instead.
	42.		Tested corrosive liquids on the dissolving of bodies.
	43.		Did some experiment where they caused water to be boiled.

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