Sometime in the 1660s, in a candlelit Oxford laboratory, a wealthy young natural philosopher took a small scrap of folded paper and listed twenty-four things he wished science would one day be able to do. He had no way of building any of them. He just wanted them on the record. Three hundred and fifty years later, almost everything on his list has been built.

His name was Robert Boyle. Seventh son of the Earl of Cork, born at Lismore Castle in Ireland in 1627. By his thirties he was running England's most rigorous experimental laboratory in Oxford. He worked out the gas law that still carries his name. In 1660 he and eleven other men founded a small society to study nature by experiment. The king chartered it. They called it the Royal Society. Sometime in that decade, alone with a quill, Boyle wrote out his list.

One wish: the prolongation of life. Done. Another: the recovery of youth, or at least the signs of it. Done. Another: the art of flying. The Wright Brothers, 1903. Another: the art of continuing long under water, and exercising functions freely there. Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, 1943. Another: a practicable and certain way of finding longitudes. Solved by John Harrison's chronometer in 1761, and by satellite navigation in 1973. Another: making armour light and extremely hard. Kevlar, 1965. Another: making glass malleable. Bend-proof phone screens. Another: potent drugs to alter or exalt imagination, waking, memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams. Anaesthesia. Antidepressants. Sleeping pills.

Boyle died on the thirty-first of December, 1691, in his sister's house in Pall Mall. The folded paper sat in his archive for three centuries. It is now manuscript RB slash one slash eight slash thirty in the Royal Society vault in London. Of his twenty-four wishes, only a handful remain unrealised. Everyone reading this carries Boyle's list in their pocket, under their skin, and in their bloodstream.

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