Joseph Priestley, (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 right into a household of reasonably profitable wool-cloth makers within the Calvinist stronghold of West Riding, Yorkshire. He entered the Dissenting Academy at Daventry, Northamptonshire, in 1752. Dissenters, so named for his or her unwillingness to evolve to the Church of England, have been prevented by the Act of Uniformity (1662) from getting into English universities. Priestley acquired a wonderful schooling in philosophy, science, languages, and literature at Daventry, the place he grew to become a “furious freethinker” in faith. He renounced the Calvinist doctrines of unique sin and atonement, and he embraced a rational Unitarianism 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 grew to become tutor in languages and literature on the Warrington Academy, Lancashire. He was ordained a Dissenting minister in 1762. That yr he married Mary Wilkinson, daughter of the ironmaster Isaac Wilkinson. They had one daughter and three sons.
Work In Electricity
Priestley’s curiosity in science intensified in 1765, when he met the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin, who inspired him to publish The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments (1767). In this work, Priestley used historical past to point out that scientific progress depended extra on the buildup of “new facts” that anybody might uncover than on the theoretical insights of some males of genius. Priestley’s desire for “facts” over “hypotheses” in science was constant along with his Dissenting conviction that prejudice and dogma of any type introduced obstacles to particular person inquiry and personal judgment.
This view of scientific methodology formed Priestley’s electrical experiments, through which he anticipated the inverse sq. regulation {of electrical} attraction, found that charcoal conducts electrical energy, and famous the connection between electrical energy and chemical change. On the premise of those experiments, in 1766 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of London. This line of investigation impressed him to develop “a larger field of original experiments” in areas apart from electrical energy.
The Chemistry Of Gases
Upon his return to the ministry at Mill Hill Chapel, Leeds, in 1767, Priestley started intensive experimental investigations into chemistry. Between 1772 and 1790, he printed six volumes of Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air and greater than a dozen articles within the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactionsdescribing his experiments on gases, or “airs,” as they have been then known as. British pneumatic chemists had beforehand recognized three varieties of gases: air, carbon dioxide (fastened air), and hydrogen (inflammable air). Priestley integrated a proof of the chemistry of those gases into the phlogiston principle, in accordance with which flamable substances launched phlogiston (an immaterial “principle of inflammability”) throughout burning.
Priestley found 10 new gases: nitric oxide (nitrous air), nitrogen dioxide (pink nitrous vapour), nitrous oxide (inflammable nitrous air, later known as “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), and a fuel later recognized as carbon monoxide. Priestley’s experimental success resulted predominantly from his means to design ingenious apparatuses and his ability of their manipulation. He gained specific renown for an improved pneumatic trough through which, by gathering gases over mercury as an alternative of in water, he was capable of isolate and study gases that have been soluble in water. For his work on gases, Priestley was awarded the Royal Society’s prestigious Copley Medal in 1773.
That similar yr Priestley moved to Calne, Wiltshire, the place he served as librarian and tutor for William Petty, Earl of Shelburne, and his household. Here he sought and gained additional proof supporting his newly discovered perception in a benevolent God reasonably than the vengeful God of his Calvinist youth. Upon considering 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 personal religious views, these observations knowledgeable the photosynthesis experiments carried out by his contemporaries, the Dutch doctor Jan Ingenhousz and the Swiss clergyman and naturalist Jean Senebier.
Priestley seen his scientific pursuits as in line with the business and entrepreneurial pursuits of English Dissenters. He embraced the Seventeenth-century statesman and pure thinker Francis Bacon’s argument that social progress required the event of a science-based commerce. This view was strengthened when he moved to turn out to be a preacher on the New Meeting House in Birmingham in 1780 and have become a member of the Lunar Society, an elite group of native gents, Dissenters, and industrialists (together with Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, and Matthew Boulton), who utilized the ideas of science and know-how towards the fixing of issues skilled in 18th-century city life. When confronted by the multitude of ailments that plagued the rising populations in cities and navy installations, Priestley designed an equipment that produced carbonated water, a combination that he thought would offer medicinal profit to victims of scurvy and varied fevers. Although it finally proved ineffective in treating these problems, the “gasogene” that employed this system later made potential the soda-water business. Priestley additionally designed the “eudiometer,” which was used within the common motion for sanitary reform and city design to measure the “purity” (oxygen content material) of atmospheric air. Contemporary curiosity in pneumatic drugs culminated within the short-lived Pneumatic Institution, which the doctor and chemist Thomas Beddoes based in Bristol in 1798 to be able to verify the results of various “airs” on a wide range of widespread illnesses.
The Discovery Of Oxygen And The Chemical Revolution
Priestley’s lasting popularity in science is based upon the invention he made on August 1, 1774, when he obtained a colourless fuel by heating pink mercuric oxide. Finding {that a} candle would burn and {that a} mouse would thrive on this fuel, he known as it “dephlogisticated air,” primarily based upon the assumption that abnormal air grew to become saturated with phlogiston as soon as it might now not help combustion and life. Priestley was not but positive, nevertheless, that he had found a “new species of air.” The following October, he accompanied his patron, Shelburne, on a journey by way of Belgium, Holland, Germany, and France, the place in Paris he knowledgeable the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier how he obtained the brand new “air.” This assembly between the 2 scientists was extremely important for the way forward for chemistry. Lavoisier instantly repeated Priestley’s experiments and, between 1775 and 1780, performed intensive investigations from which he derived the elementary nature of oxygen, acknowledged it because the “active” precept within the ambiance, interpreted its function in combustion and respiration, and gave it its title. Lavoisier’s pronouncements of the exercise of oxygen revolutionized chemistry.
Priestley didn't settle for all of Lavoisier’s conclusions and continued, specifically, to uphold the phlogiston principle. Convinced that the French chemists have been imposing their beliefs on the scientific neighborhood in methods much like the Anglican “establishment” of spiritual and political dogma, Priestley’s Dissenter leanings strengthened his opposition to Lavoisier’s “new system of chemistry.” To make clear his place, in 1800 he printed a slim pamphlet, Doctrine of Phlogiston Established, and That of the Composition of Water Refuted, which he expanded to e book size in 1803. The Doctrine of Phlogiston supplied an in depth account of what he envisioned to be the empirical, theoretical, and methodological shortcomings of the oxygen principle. Priestley known as for a affected person, humble, experimental method to God’s infinite creation. Chemistry might help piety and liberty provided that it averted speculative theorizing and inspired the statement of God’s benevolent creation. The phlogiston principle was outmoded by Lavoisier’s oxidation principle of combustion and respiration.
Theology, Teaching, And Politics
Science was an vital a 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 pure depravity of man and the inscrutable will of a vengeful God. Priestley used psychologist and liberal Anglican David Hartley’s “doctrine of association of ideas” to help his view that mankind’s perfectibility was the inevitable consequence of a rising consciousness 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) have been in line with a rational studying of the Bible. He insisted that Jesus Christ was a mere man who preached the resurrection of the physique reasonably than the immortality of a nonexistent soul.
In 1765 he was awarded an LL.D. from the University of Edinburgh for his instructional 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 (ready at Warrington however not printed till 1788). Priestley used “the doctrine of association of ideas” to help his views on language, historical past, and schooling as properly. In specific, he primarily based what he deemed to be the right use of language on the customary affiliation of concepts. He additionally employed educating methods that have been primarily based on the experiences of his college students and have been designed to arrange them for a sensible life.
Priestley united principle and observe in his work in politics. In 1767 he grew to become concerned within the Dissenter’s nationwide battle towards 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 schooling. As a proponent of laissez-faire economics, developed by the Scottish thinker Adam Smith, Priestley sought to restrict the function of presidency and to judge its effectiveness solely by way of the welfare of the person. The English economist and founding father of utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham acknowledged that Priestley’s influential e book impressed the phrase used to depict his personal motion, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”
Turmoil And Exile
The English press and authorities decreed that Priestley’s help, along with that of his pal, the ethical thinker Richard Price, of the American and French Revolutions was “seditious.” On July 14, 1791, the “Church-and-King mob” destroyed Priestley’s home and laboratory. Priestley and his household retreated to the safety of Price’s congregation at Hackney, close to London. Priestley later started educating at New College, Oxford, and defended his anti-British authorities views in Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (1791).
Priestley’s protection fell on deaf ears because the conservative response to the French Revolution intensified in England. In 1794 he fled to the United States, the place he found a type of authorities that was “relatively tolerable.” His best-known writing within the United States, Letters to the Inhabitants of Northumberland (1799), grew to become a 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.