Robert William Boyle, a native of Carbonear, Newfoundland, is one of the truly unsung figures in Canadian scientific history.

Boyle was both an influential force in the development of modern physics methods within this country and one of the foremost researchers on radioactivity and ultrasonics in the first half of the twentieth century.
 

Robert Boyle’s mentor was Lord Rutherford, considered the greatest experimental physicist of the 20th century. Both Rutherford and Boyle were at McGill together, teacher and student respectively. Rutherford left for the University of Manchester in 1907. Following completion of his Ph.D. at McGill in 1909, the same year Rutherford won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Boyle rejoined his mentor at Manchester. Upon completion of his post-graduate studies there, Boyle accepted a position as the first head of the Department of Physics at the University of Alberta. There he began a lifelong career in ultrasonic research.

But even more significantly, he can be remembered as one of the fathers of “Sonar” (Sound Navigation and Ranging) discovered during World War I. Sonar became a crucial British antisubmarine tracking defence during World War II and is now a standard feature on virtually all commercial fishing boats (to locate schools of fish and underwater obstacles).

Boyle’s academic career would foreshadow his greatness as a researcher. While in undergraduate studies at McGill University in Montreal, he qualified for several awards (including the British Association Medal) and it was there that he first came under the wing of Sir Earnest Rutherford, the world’s most prominent experimental physicist at the time, whose research on radioactivity won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908. Boyle’s important work on the properties of radium can be found in Rutherford’s “Radioactivity,” and for these efforts he was granted McGill’s first Ph.D. in 1909.

That same year he followed Rutherford to Manchester University to undertake further research on radioactivity alongside several other notable young graduates including H.C. Mosley and Niles Bohr, the latter winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923. In 1912 Boyle returned to Canada accepting, a position as the first head of the department of physics at the University of Alberta where he began his ground-breaking research on ultrasonics.

However with the outbreak of World War I, Boyle joined the staff of Britain’s Board of Invention and Research, working for the Royal Navy at Parkeston Quay. In 1916 he was placed in charge of top secret research on “asdics” (the code name for Sonar) – submarine detection by the “echo method” using high frequency sound waves. By the end of 1918, Boyle’s research team was obtaining ranges of 1400 yards with good bearing and the Royal Navy was ready to try out this new technology – which would later prove invaluable against German U-Boats.

This breakthrough was achieved without the benefit of modern electronics.

After the war, Boyle returned to the University of Alberta where he continued his research on ultrasonics (with his contributions cited in both the Dictionary of Applied Physics and Encyclopedia Britannica). He was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Science in 1921 and became a member of the Alberta Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, positions that were instrumental in establishing western Canada as a presence for original scientific investigation.

In 1929 Boyle accepted another challenge, becoming Director of the National Research Council Laboratories’ new Division of Physics and Electrical Engineering in Ottawa – a post he held until his retirement in 1948. Over the course of those 19 years, his division contributed major innovations in radar and related devices to the Allied war effort, helped to build up Canadian industry, and took root as a world-class scientific laboratory.

A garrulous bachelor known to friends as “Billy,” Boyle was an avid fisherman and world traveller. He died suddenly in London, England, at the age of 71 with a long list of achievements to his name.

He was elected to The Royal Society of Canada in 1921 (serving as president of Section III in 1924-25), was awarded an LL.D. by the University of Alberta in 1933, was a member of the Engineering Institute of Canada and Chairman of the Imperial Oil Fellowship Selection Committee (1946-49), and sat on the advisory board of the Royal Military College (1927-38). Well-known and esteemed in international circles, he was a much respected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Acoustical Society of America.

And while his name is conspicuously absent from the nation’s annals, in 1940 Boyle joined the company of such celebrated Canadian scientists as Sir Frederick Banting, Dr. Wilder Penfield, and Michael Smith, Ph.D. as a recipient of the esteemed Flavelle Medal from the Royal Society of Canada (RSC). In handing down its annual award for Science, the RSC acknowledged Boyle’s research on submarine detection during the latter part of World War I (specifically the development of asdics) “which led to results of great value during World War II and is cited as an important scientific contribution to the techniques of anti-submarine warfare and national defence.”

Michael Beggs