Joseph Priestley facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Joseph Priestley
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Priestley by William Artaud
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| Born | 13 March 1733 |
| Died | 8 February 1804 Northumberland, Pennsylvania
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Joseph Priestley FRS ( 24 March [O.S. 13 March] 1733 – 6 February 1804) was an 18th-century English Separatist theologian, natural philosopher, chemist, innovative grammarian, multi-subject educator, and liberal political theorist who published over 150 works. He has historically been credited with the discovery of oxygen, having isolated it in its gaseous state, although Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Antoine Lavoisier also have strong claims to the discovery.
During his lifetime, Priestley's considerable scientific reputation rested on his invention of soda water, his writings on electricity, and his discovery of several "airs" (gases), the most famous being what Priestley dubbed "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen).
A scholar and teacher throughout his life, Priestley also made significant contributions to pedagogy, including the publication of a seminal work on English grammar and books on history, and he prepared some of the most influential early timelines. These educational writings were among Priestley's most popular works.
By 1801, Priestley had become so ill that he could no longer write or experiment. He died on the morning of 6 February 1804, aged seventy and was buried at Riverview Cemetery in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. By the time he died in 1804, Priestley had been made a member of every major scientific society in the Western world and he had discovered numerous substances.
Recognition for Priestley's work is marked by a National Historic Chemical Landmark designation for his discovery of oxygen, made on 1 August 1994, at the Priestley House in Northumberland, Penn., by the American Chemical Society. Similar international recognition was made on 7 August 2000, at Bowood House in Wiltshire, UK. The ACS also awards their highest honor, the Priestley Medal, in his name.
Contents
Early life and education
Priestley was born in Birstall (near Batley) in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to an established English Dissenting family who did not conform to the Church of England. He was the oldest of six children born to Mary Swift and Jonas Priestley, a finisher of cloth. Priestley was sent to live with his grandfather around the age of one. He returned home five years later, after his mother died. When his father remarried in 1741, Priestley went to live with his aunt and uncle, the wealthy and childless Sarah (d. 1764) and John Keighley, 3 miles (4.8 km) from Fieldhead.
Priestley was a precocious child – at the age of four, he could flawlessly recite all 107 questions and answers of the Westminster Shorter Catechism – and his aunt sought the best education for him, intending him to enter ministry. During his youth, Priestley attended local schools, where he learned Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.
Around 1749, Priestley became seriously ill and believed he was dying. Raised as a devout Calvinist, he believed a conversion experience was necessary for salvation, but doubted he had had one. This emotional distress eventually led him to question his theological upbringing.
Priestley's illness left him with a permanent stutter and he gave up any thoughts of entering the ministry at that time. In preparation for joining a relative in trade in Lisbon, he studied French, Italian, and German in addition to Aramaic, and Arabic. He was tutored by the Reverend George Haggerstone, who first introduced him to higher mathematics, natural philosophy, logic, and metaphysics through the works of Isaac Watts, Willem 's Gravesande, and John Locke.
In 1752, Priestley matriculated at Daventry, a Dissenting academy. Because he was already widely read, Priestley was allowed to omit the first two years of coursework.
Ecucator and historian
In 1761, Priestley moved to Warrington in Cheshire and assumed the post of tutor of modern languages and rhetoric at the town's Dissenting academy, although he would have preferred to teach mathematics and natural philosophy. He fitted in well at Warrington, and made friends quickly.
On 23 June 1762, Priestley married Mary Wilkinson of Wrexham.
All of the books Priestley published while at Warrington emphasised the study of history; Priestley considered it essential for worldly success as well as religious growth.
In his Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (1765), Lectures on History and General Policy (1788), and other works, Priestley argued that the education of the young should anticipate their future practical needs. He recommended modern languages instead of classical languages and modern rather than ancient history. He also promoted the education of middle-class women, which was unusual at the time.
Some scholars of education have described Priestley as the most important English writer on education between the 17th-century John Locke and the 19th-century Herbert Spencer. Lectures on History was well received and was employed by many educational institutions, such as New College at Hackney, Brown, Princeton, Yale, and Cambridge.
The atmosphere of Warrington encouraged Priestley's growing interest in natural philosophy. He gave lectures on anatomy and performed experiments regarding temperature with another tutor at Warrington, his friend John Seddon. Despite Priestley's busy teaching schedule, he decided to write a history of electricity.
In 1767, the 700-page The History and Present State of Electricity was published to positive reviews. The first half of the text is a history of the study of electricity to 1766; the second and more influential half is a description of contemporary theories about electricity and suggestions for future research.
Perhaps prompted by Mary Priestley's ill health, or financial problems, Priestley moved with his family from Warrington to Leeds in 1767, and he became Mill Hill Chapel's minister. Two sons were born to the Priestleys in Leeds: Joseph junior on 24 July 1768 and William three years later.
Natural philosopher: electricity, Optics, and carbonated water
Although Priestley claimed that natural philosophy was only a hobby, he took it seriously. In his History of Electricity, he described the scientist as promoting the "security and happiness of mankind". Priestley's science was eminently practical and he rarely concerned himself with theoretical questions; his model was his close friend, Benjamin Franklin. When he moved to Leeds, Priestley continued his electrical and chemical experiments. Between 1767 and 1770, he presented five papers to the Royal Society from these initial experiments; the first four papers explored coronal discharges and other phenomena related to electrical discharge, while the fifth reported on the conductivity of charcoals from different sources. His subsequent experimental work focused on chemistry and pneumatics.
Priestley published the first volume of The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light and Colours (referred to as his Optics), in 1772. He paid careful attention to the history of optics and presented excellent explanations of early optics experiments. Unlike his History of Electricity, it was not popular and had only one edition, although it was the only English book on the topic for 150 years. The hastily written text sold poorly; the cost of researching, writing, and publishing the Optics convinced Priestley to abandon his history of experimental philosophy.
Priestley was considered for the position of astronomer on James Cook's second voyage to the South Seas, but was not chosen. Still, he contributed in a small way to the voyage: he provided the crew with a method for making carbonated water, which he erroneously speculated might be a cure for scurvy. He then published a pamphlet with Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air (1772). Priestley did not exploit the commercial potential of carbonated water, but others such as J. J. Schweppe made fortunes from it. For his discovery of carbonated water Priestley has been labelled "the father of the soft drink", with the beverage company Schweppes regarding him as "the father of our industry". In 1773, the Royal Society recognised Priestley's achievements in natural philosophy by awarding him the Copley Medal.
Priestley's friends wanted to find him a more financially secure position. In 1772, prompted by Richard Price and Benjamin Franklin, Lord Shelburne wrote to Priestley asking him to direct the education of his children and to act as his general assistant. Although Priestley was reluctant to sacrifice his ministry, he accepted the position, resigning from Mill Hill Chapel on 20 December 1772, and preaching his last sermon on 16 May 1773. In 1773, the Priestleys moved to Calne in Wiltshire.
Discovery of oxygen
Priestley's years in Calne were the only ones in his life dominated by scientific investigations; they were also the most scientifically fruitful. His experiments were almost entirely confined to "airs", and out of this work emerged his most important scientific texts: the six volumes of Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1774–86).
In August 1774 he isolated an "air" that appeared to be completely new, but he did not have an opportunity to pursue the matter because he was about to tour Europe with Shelburne. While in Paris, Priestley replicated the experiment for others, including French chemist Antoine Lavoisier. After returning to Britain in January 1775, he continued his experiments and discovered "vitriolic acid air" (sulphur dioxide, SO2).
In March he wrote to several people regarding the new "air" that he had discovered in August. One of these letters was read aloud to the Royal Society, and a paper outlining the discovery, titled "An Account of further Discoveries in Air", was published in the Society's journal Philosophical Transactions. Priestley called the new substance "dephlogisticated air", which he made in the famous experiment by focusing the sun's rays on a sample of mercuric oxide. He first tested it on mice, who surprised him by surviving quite a while entrapped with the air, and then on himself, writing that it was "five or six times better than common air for the purpose of respiration, inflammation, and, I believe, every other use of common atmospherical air". He had discovered oxygen gas (O2).
Priestley assembled his oxygen paper and several others into a second volume of Experiments and Observations on Air, published in 1776.
In his paper "Observations on Respiration and the Use of the Blood", Priestley was the first to suggest a connection between blood and air.
Around 1779 Priestley and Shelburne – soon to be the 1st Marquess of Landsdowne – had a rupture, the precise reasons for which remain unclear. Although Priestley considered moving to America, he eventually accepted Birmingham New Meeting's offer to be their minister.
Birmingham (1780–1791)
In 1780 the Priestleys moved to Birmingham and spent a happy decade surrounded by old friends, until they were forced to flee in 1791 by religiously motivated mob violence in what became known as the Priestley Riots. Priestley accepted the ministerial position at New Meeting on the condition that he be required to preach and teach only on Sundays, so that he would have time for his writing and scientific experiments. As in Leeds, Priestley established classes for the youth of his parish and by 1781, he was teaching 150 students. Because Priestley's New Meeting salary was only 100 guineas, friends and patrons donated money and goods to help continue his investigations. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1782.
Pennsylvania (1794–1804)
The couple's friends urged them to leave Britain and emigrate to either France or the new United States, even though Priestley had received an appointment to preach for the Gravel Pit Meeting congregation.
As relations between England and France worsened, a removal to France became impracticable. Following the declaration of war of February 1793, and the Aliens Bill of March 1793, which forbade correspondence or travel between England and France, William Priestley left France for America. Joseph Priestley's sons Harry and Joseph chose to leave England for America in August 1793. Finally Priestley himself followed with his wife, boarding the Sansom at Gravesend on 7 April 1794.
Priestley continued the educational projects that had always been important to him, helping to establish the "Northumberland Academy" and donating his library to the fledgling institution. He exchanged letters regarding the proper structure of a university with Thomas Jefferson, who used this advice when founding the University of Virginia. Jefferson and Priestley became close, and when the latter had completed his General History of the Christian Church, he dedicated it to President Jefferson.
Priestley tried to continue his scientific investigations in America with the support of the American Philosophical Society, to which he had been previously elected a member in 1785. Despite Priestley's reduced scientific output, his presence stimulated American interest in chemistry.
By 1801, Priestley had become so ill that he could no longer write or experiment. He died on the morning of 6 February 1804, aged seventy and was buried at Riverview Cemetery in Northumberland, Pennsylvania.
Priestley's epitaph reads:
Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the
Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.
I will lay me down in peace and sleep till
I awake in the morning of the resurrection.
Legacy
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By the time he died in 1804, Priestley had been made a member of every major scientific society in the Western world and he had discovered numerous substances. The 19th-century French naturalist George Cuvier, in his eulogy of Priestley, praised his discoveries while at the same time lamenting his refusal to abandon phlogiston theory, calling him "the father of modern chemistry [who] never acknowledged his daughter". Priestley published more than 150 works on topics ranging from political philosophy to education to theology to natural philosophy. He led and inspired British radicals during the 1790s, paved the way for utilitarianism, and helped found Unitarianism. A wide variety of philosophers, scientists, and poets became associationists as a result of his redaction of David Hartley's Observations on Man, including Erasmus Darwin, Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer. Immanuel Kant praised Priestley in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), writing that he "knew how to combine his paradoxical teaching with the interests of religion". Indeed, it was Priestley's aim to "put the most 'advanced' Enlightenment ideas into the service of a rationalized though heterodox Christianity, under the guidance of the basic principles of scientific method".
Considering the extent of Priestley's influence, relatively little scholarship has been devoted to him. In the early 20th century, Priestley was most often described as a conservative and dogmatic scientist who was nevertheless a political and religious reformer. In a historiographic review essay, historian of science Simon Schaffer describes the two dominant portraits of Priestley: the first depicts him as "a playful innocent" who stumbled across his discoveries; the second portrays him as innocent as well as "warped" for not understanding their implications better. Assessing Priestley's works as a whole has been difficult for scholars because of his wide-ranging interests. His scientific discoveries have usually been divorced from his theological and metaphysical publications to make an analysis of his life and writings easier, but this approach has been challenged recently by scholars such as John McEvoy and Robert Schofield. Although early Priestley scholarship claimed that his theological and metaphysical works were "distractions" and "obstacles" to his scientific work, scholarship published in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s maintained that Priestley's works constituted a unified theory. However, as Schaffer explains, no convincing synthesis of his work has yet been expounded. More recently, in 2001, historian of science Dan Eshet has argued that efforts to create a "synoptic view" have resulted only in a rationalisation of the contradictions in Priestley's thought, because they have been "organized around philosophical categories" and have "separate[d] the producers of scientific ideas from any social conflict".
Priestley has been remembered by the towns in which he served as a reforming educator and minister and by the scientific organisations he influenced. Two educational institutions have been named in his honour—Priestley College in Warrington and Joseph Priestley College in Leeds (now part of Leeds City College)—and an asteroid, 5577 Priestley, discovered in 1986 by Duncan Waldron. In Birstall, the Leeds City Square, and in Birmingham, he is memorialised through statues, and plaques commemorating him have been posted in Birmingham, Calne and Warrington. The main undergraduate chemistry laboratories at the University of Leeds were refurbished as part of a £4m refurbishment plan in 2006 and renamed as the Priestley Laboratories in his honour as a prominent chemist from Leeds. In 2016 the University of Huddersfield renamed the building housing its Applied Sciences department as the Joseph Priestley Building, as part of an effort to rename all campus buildings after prominent local figures.
Since 1952 Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, has presented the Priestley Award to a "distinguished scientist whose work has contributed to the welfare of humanity". Priestley's work is recognised by a National Historic Chemical Landmark designation for his discovery of oxygen, made on 1 August 1994, at the Priestley House in Northumberland, Penn., by the American Chemical Society. Similar recognition was made on 7 August 2000, at Bowood House in Wiltshire, England. The ACS also awards their highest honour, the Priestley Medal, in his name.
Several of his descendants became physicians, including the noted American surgeon James Taggart Priestley II of the Mayo Clinic.
Images for kids
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Title page of Rudiments of English Grammar (1761)
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Mary Priestley, by Carl F. von Breda (1793); daughter of ironmaster Isaac Wilkinson, sister of industrialist John Wilkinson
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A portrait of Priestley commissioned by his publisher and close friend Joseph Johnson from Henry Fuseli (c. 1783)
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By 1782, at least a dozen hostile refutations were published to Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, and Priestley was branded an atheist.
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DOCTOR PHLOGISTON, The PRIESTLEY politician or the Political Priest: An anti-Priestley cartoon shows him trampling on the Bible and burning documents representing English freedom. "Essays on Matter and Spirit", "Gunpowder", and "Revolution Toasts" bulge from his pockets.
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"A Word of Comfort" by William Dent (dated 22 March 1790). Priestley is preaching in front of Charles James Fox who asks "Pray, Doctor, is there such a thing as a Devil?", to which Priestley responds "No" while the devil prepares to attack Priestley from behind.
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The attack on Priestley's home, Fairhill, Sparkbrook, Birmingham
See also
In Spanish: Joseph Priestley para niños
