This story of Joseph Priestly is set in the context of what was going on in the rest of the world of ideas. Steven Johnson is a writer who is comfortable in the world of science and ideas.

In this book, he goes back to the eighteenth century and beyond to examine the scientific “revolution” and the advance of civilization. “If there is an overarching moral to this story, it is that vital fields of intellectual achievement cannot be cordoned off from one another and relegated to the specialists, that politics can and should be usefully informed by the insights of science.”

Priestly was an ordained priest, “among the most accomplished men of his generation, rivaled only by Franklin in the diversity of his interests and influence.” His close friends included Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Josiah Wedgewood, and Erasmus Darwin. He left for America, however, at the age of 61, one of the most hated men in Britain.

Johnson looks back to the Carboniferous Era to the formation of coal to show how the flow of energy affected the development of modern economy and concepts. Priestly is known as the discoverer of oxygen, but more importantly, he discovered that breathable air came from plants and unleashed a new way of thinking. He was fearless and optimistic and freely shared his experiments and theories (sometimes to his detriment, as in his devotion to the erroneous idea of phlogiston.)

Priestly believed in the free flow of ideas and corresponded with men like Franklin to the benefit of both and to the world of science. They both explored the mystery of ocean currents, for example, with Franklin delivering the first empirical proof of the Gulf Stream’s existence. Priestly was responsible for publicizing Franklin’s kite experiments.

Johnson’s interest is in science rather than history, but he tells interesting anecdotes about how the coffeehouse culture affected British society. “How much of the Enlightenment do we owe to coffee? Most of the epic developments in England between 1650 and 1800 that still warrant a mention in the history textbooks have a coffeehouse lurking at some crucial juncture in their story.”

It was Priestly’s hunch about why things died when you cut off their air supply that led to his experiments and discoveries about oxygen and carbon dioxide. In addition, air had become an intriguing problem as pumps, thermometers, and scales were developed. Priestly was the first to discover that breathable air was a “concoction” of plants, and he grasped and described the consequences that we are still dealing with.

The subtitle to The Invention of Air is “A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America.” Priestly had more difficulty with John Adams, but the later correspondence between Jefferson and Adams shows that he was a major influence on both.

The Invention of Air is an absorbing look at the history of science and individual scientists, especially Joseph Priestly. It is available at the Mary Willis Library.