Priestley, Joseph

born March 13, 1733, Birstall Fieldhead, near Leeds, Yorkshire, Eng.

died Feb. 6, 1804, Northumberland, Pa., U.S.

English theologian, political theorist, and physical scientist.

He worked as a teacher and lecturer in various subjects before joining the ministry in 1767. His early scientific studies resulted in his History and Present State of Electricity (1767), which became a fundamental text in the field. His Essay on Government (1768) influenced later utilitarianism. He did important work in the field of chemical reactions and change. He is considered the discoverer of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, ammonia, and several other gases, and in 1774 he became the first to identify oxygen; his report led Antoine Lavoisier to repeat the experiment, deduce oxygen's nature and role, and name it. His theological works include History of the Corruptions of the Christian Church (1782), burned as sacrilegious in 1785, and A General History of the Christian Church, 6 vol. (1790–1802). His nonconformist religious views and his political activities, particularly in support of the French Revolution, made him increasingly controversial in England, and he immigrated to the U.S. in 1794.

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▪ English clergyman and scientist

Introduction

born March 13, 1733, Birstall Fieldhead, near Leeds, Yorkshire [now West Yorkshire], England

died February 6, 1804, Northumberland, Pennsylvania, U.S.

 English clergyman, political theorist, and physical scientist whose work contributed to advances in liberal political and religious thought and in experimental chemistry. He is best remembered for his contribution to the chemistry of gases.

Education and early career

      Priestley was born into a family of moderately successful wool-cloth makers in the Calvinist stronghold of West Riding, Yorkshire. He entered the Dissenting Academy at Daventry, Northamptonshire, in 1752. Dissenters (Nonconformist), so named for their unwillingness to conform to the Church of England, were prevented by the Act of Uniformity (1662) from entering English universities. Priestley received an excellent education in philosophy, science, languages, and literature at Daventry, where he became a “furious freethinker” in religion. He renounced the Calvinist doctrines of original sin and atonement, and he embraced a rational Unitarianism (Unitarianism and Universalism) that rejected the Trinity and asserted the perfectibility of man.

      Between 1755 and 1761, Priestley ministered at Needham Market, Suffolk, and at Nantwich, Cheshire. In 1761 he became tutor in languages and literature at the Warrington Academy, Lancashire. He was ordained a Dissenting minister in 1762. That year he married Mary Wilkinson, daughter of the ironmaster Isaac Wilkinson. They had one daughter and three sons.

Work in electricity

 Priestley's interest in science intensified in 1765, when he met the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin (Franklin, Benjamin), who encouraged him to publish The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments (1767). In this work, Priestley used history to show that scientific progress depended more on the accumulation of “new facts” that anyone could discover than on the theoretical insights of a few men of genius. Priestley's preference for “facts” over “hypotheses” in science was consistent with his Dissenting conviction that prejudice and dogma of any sort presented obstacles to individual inquiry and private judgment.

      This view of scientific methodology shaped Priestley's electrical experiments, in which he anticipated the inverse square law of electrical attraction, discovered that charcoal conducts electricity, and noted the relationship between electricity and chemical change. On the basis of these experiments, in 1766 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of London. This line of investigation inspired him to develop “a larger field of original experiments” in areas other than electricity.

The chemistry of gases (gas)

      Upon his return to the ministry at Mill Hill Chapel, Leeds, in 1767, Priestley began intensive experimental investigations into chemistry. Between 1772 and 1790, he published six volumes of Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air and more than a dozen articles in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions describing his experiments on gases, or “airs,” as they were then called. British pneumatic chemists had previously identified three types of gases: air, carbon dioxide (fixed air), and hydrogen (inflammable air). Priestley incorporated an explanation of the chemistry of these gases into the phlogiston theory, according to which combustible substances released phlogiston (an immaterial “principle of inflammability”) during burning.

      Priestley discovered 10 new gases: nitric oxide (nitrous air), nitrogen dioxide (red nitrous vapour), nitrous oxide (inflammable nitrous air, later called “laughing gas”), hydrogen chloride (marine acid air), ammonia (alkaline air), sulfur dioxide (vitriolic acid air), silicon tetrafluoride (fluor acid air), nitrogen (phlogisticated air), oxygen (dephlogisticated air, independently codiscovered by Carl Wilhelm Scheele (Scheele, Carl Wilhelm)), and a gas later identified as carbon monoxide. Priestley's experimental success resulted predominantly from his ability to design ingenious apparatuses and his skill in their manipulation. He gained particular renown for an improved pneumatic trough in which, by collecting gases over mercury instead of in water, he was able to isolate and examine gases that were soluble in water. For his work on gases, Priestley was awarded the Royal Society's prestigious Copley Medal in 1773.

      That same year Priestley moved to Calne, Wiltshire, where he served as librarian and tutor for William Petty, Earl of Shelburne, and his family. Here he sought and gained further evidence supporting his newly found belief in a benevolent God rather than the vengeful God of his Calvinist youth. Upon contemplating the processes of vegetation and the “agitation” of seas and lakes, Priestley envisioned the means by which a benevolent nature restored the “common air” that had been “vitiated and diminished” by such “noxious” processes as combustion and respiration. Apart from strengthening his own spiritual views, these observations informed the photosynthesis experiments performed by his contemporaries, the Dutch physician Jan Ingenhousz (Ingenhousz, Jan) and the Swiss clergyman and naturalist Jean Senebier (Senebier, Jean).

      Priestley viewed his scientific pursuits as consistent with the commercial and entrepreneurial interests of English Dissenters. He embraced the 17th-century statesman and natural philosopher Francis Bacon's argument that social progress required the development of a science-based commerce. This view was reinforced when he moved to become a preacher at the New Meeting House in Birmingham in 1780 and became a member of the Lunar Society, an elite group of local gentlemen, Dissenters, and industrialists (including Josiah Wedgwood (Wedgwood, Josiah), Erasmus Darwin (Darwin, Erasmus), James Watt (Watt, James), and Matthew Boulton (Boulton, Matthew)), who applied the principles of science and technology toward the solving of problems experienced in 18th-century urban life. When confronted by the multitude of diseases that plagued the growing populations in towns and military installations, Priestley designed an apparatus that produced carbonated water, a mixture that he thought would provide medicinal benefit to sufferers of scurvy and various fevers. Although it ultimately proved ineffective in treating these disorders, the “gasogene” that employed this technique later made possible the soda-water industry. Priestley also designed the “eudiometer,” which was used in the general movement for sanitary reform and urban design to measure the “purity” (oxygen content) of atmospheric air. Contemporary interest in pneumatic medicine culminated in the short-lived Pneumatic Institution, which the physician and chemist Thomas Beddoes (Beddoes, Thomas Lovell) founded in Bristol in 1798 in order to ascertain the effects of different “airs” on a variety of common ailments.

The discovery of oxygen and the chemical revolution

      Priestley's lasting reputation in science is founded upon the discovery he made on August 1, 1774, when he obtained a colourless gas by heating red mercuric oxide. Finding that a candle would burn and that a mouse would thrive in this gas, he called it “dephlogisticated air,” based upon the belief that ordinary air became saturated with phlogiston once it could no longer support combustion and life. Priestley was not yet sure, however, that he had discovered a “new species of air.” The following October, he accompanied his patron, Shelburne, on a journey through Belgium, Holland, Germany, and France, where in Paris he informed the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent) how he obtained the new “air.” This meeting between the two scientists was highly significant for the future of chemistry. Lavoisier immediately repeated Priestley's experiments and, between 1775 and 1780, conducted intensive investigations from which he derived the elementary nature of oxygen, recognized it as the “active” principle in the atmosphere, interpreted its role in combustion and respiration, and gave it its name. Lavoisier's pronouncements of the activity of oxygen revolutionized chemistry.

      Priestley did not accept all of Lavoisier's conclusions and continued, in particular, to uphold the phlogiston theory. Convinced that the French chemists were imposing their beliefs on the scientific community in ways similar to the Anglican “establishment” of religious and political dogma, Priestley's Dissenter leanings strengthened his opposition to Lavoisier's “new system of chemistry.” To clarify his position, in 1800 he published a slim pamphlet, Doctrine of Phlogiston Established, and That of the Composition of Water Refuted, which he expanded to book length in 1803. The Doctrine of Phlogiston provided a detailed account of what he envisioned to be the empirical, theoretical, and methodological shortcomings of the oxygen theory. Priestley called for a patient, humble, experimental approach to God's infinite creation. Chemistry could support piety and liberty only if it avoided speculative theorizing and encouraged the observation of God's benevolent creation. The phlogiston theory was superseded by Lavoisier's oxidation theory of combustion and respiration.

Theology, teaching, and politics

      Science was an important part of Priestley's “Rational Christianity.” In Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–74), he described how he rejected the “gloomy” Calvinist doctrines of the natural depravity of man and the inscrutable will of a vengeful God. Priestley used psychologist and liberal Anglican David Hartley's (Hartley, David) “doctrine of association of ideas” to support his view that mankind's perfectibility was the inevitable consequence of a growing awareness of man's place in a deterministic system of benevolence. In An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782), Priestley claimed that the doctrines of materialism, determinism, and Socinianism (Unitarianism) were consistent with a rational reading of the Bible. He insisted that Jesus Christ was a mere man who preached the resurrection of the body rather than the immortality of a nonexistent soul.

      In 1765 he was awarded an LL.D. from the University of Edinburgh for his educational (education) and literary accomplishments at Warrington. These included his writings on Theory of Language and Universal Grammar (1762), An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (1765), and Lectures on History and General Policy (prepared at Warrington but not published until 1788). Priestley used “the doctrine of association of ideas” to support his views on language, history, and education as well. In particular, he based what he deemed to be the correct use of language on the customary association of ideas. He also employed teaching techniques that were based on the experiences of his students and were designed to prepare them for a practical life.

      Priestley united theory and practice in his work in politics. In 1767 he became involved in the Dissenter's national struggle against the Test and Corporation Act (1661) that restricted their civil and political liberties. In An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), he argued that scientific progress and human perfectibility required freedom of speech, worship, and education. As a proponent of laissez-faire economics, developed by the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (Smith, Adam), Priestley sought to limit the role of government and to evaluate its effectiveness solely in terms of the welfare of the individual. The English economist and founder of utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham (Bentham, Jeremy) acknowledged that Priestley's influential book inspired the phrase used to depict his own movement, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”

Turmoil and exile

      The English press and government decreed that Priestley's support, together with that of his friend, the moral philosopher Richard Price, of the American and French Revolutions (French Revolution) was “seditious.” On July 14, 1791, the “Church-and-King mob” destroyed Priestley's house and laboratory. Priestley and his family retreated to the security of Price's congregation at Hackney, near London. Priestley later began teaching at New College, Oxford, and defended his anti-British government views in Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Burke, Edmund) (1791).

      Priestley's defense fell on deaf ears as the conservative reaction to the French Revolution intensified in England. In 1794 he fled to the United States, where he discovered a form of government that was “relatively tolerable.” His best-known writing in the United States, Letters to the Inhabitants of Northumberland (1799), became part of the Republican response to the Federalists. Priestley died at Northumberland, Pennsylvania, mourned and revered by Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States.

John G. McEvoy

Additional Reading

Recent Priestley scholarship that contextualizes his scientific accomplishments within the religious and political milieu of his time includes R.G.W. Anderson and Christopher Lawrence (eds.), Science, Medicine, and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) (1987); and A. Truman Schwartz and John G. McEvoy (eds.), Motion Toward Perfection: The Achievement of Joseph Priestley (1990). For reliable biographical accounts, see Robert E. Schofield, “Joseph Priestley,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1975), vol. 11, pp. 139–147. For more thorough biographical coverage, see Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1733 to 1773 (1997), and F.W. Gibbs, Joseph Priestley: Adventurer in Science and Champion of Truth (1965).John G. McEvoy

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