The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America by Steven Johnson (PDF)

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From the bestselling author of How We Got To Now, The Ghost Map and Farsighted, a new national bestseller: the “exhilarating”( Los Angeles Times) story of Joseph Priestley, “a founding father long forgotten”(Newsweek) and a brilliant man who embodied the relationship between science, religion, and politics for America’s Founding Fathers. In The Invention of Air, national bestselling author Steven Johnson tells the fascinating story of Joseph Priestley—scientist and theologian, protégé of Benjamin Franklin, friend of Thomas Jefferson—an eighteenth-century radical thinker who played pivotal roles in the invention of ecosystem science, the discovery of oxygen, the uses of oxygen, scientific experimentation, the founding of the Unitarian Church, and the intellectual development of the United States. As he did so masterfully in The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson uses a dramatic historical story to explore themes that have long engaged him: innovative strategies, intellectual models, and the way new ideas emerge and spread, and the environments that foster these breakthroughs.

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Editorial Reviews: About the Author Steven Johnson is the author of seven bestsellers, including Future Perfect, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, and Everything Bad Is Good for You, and is the editor of the anthology The Innovator’s Cookbook. He is the founder of a variety of influential websites—most recently, outside.in—and writes for Time, Wired, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Table of ContentsTitle PageCopyright PageDedicationEpigraph CHAPTER ONE – The ElectriciansCHAPTER TWO – Rose and NightshadeCHAPTER THREE – Intermezzo: An Island of CoalCHAPTER FOUR – The Wild GasCHAPTER FIVE – A Comet in the System AcknowledgementsNOTESBIBLIOGRAPHYALSO BY STEVEN JOHNSON Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern WorldRIVERHEAD BOOKSa member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York 2008RIVERHEAD BOOKSPublished by the Penguin GroupPenguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2008 by Steven JohnsonAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada Johnson, Steven, date. The invention of air : a story of science, faith, revolution, and the birth of America / Steven Johnson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.eISBN : 978-1-440-68531-61. Priestley, Joseph, 1733-1804. 2. Chemists—Great Britain—Biography. 3. Scientists—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title. QD22.P8J 540.92—dc22 [B] While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.For JayThe English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble at an air pump, or an electrical machine.—JOSEPH PRIESTLEY That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.—THOMAS JEFFERSONAUTHOR’S NOTEA few days before I started writing this book, a leading candidate for the presidency of the United States was asked on national television whether he believed in the theory of evolution. He shrugged off the question with a dismissive jab of humor. “It’s interesting that that question would even be asked of someone running for president,” he said. “I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book. I’m asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States.”It was a funny line, but the joke only worked in a specific intellectual context. For the statement to make sense, the speaker had to share one basic assumption with his audience: that “science” was some kind of specialized intellectual field, about which political leaders needn’t know anything to do their business. Imagine a candidate dismissing a question about his foreign policy experience by saying he was running for president and not writing a textbook on international affairs. The joke wouldn’t make sense, because we assume that foreign policy expertise is a central qualification for the chief executive. But science? That’s for the guys in lab coats.That line has stayed with me since, because the web of events at the center of this book suggests that its basic assumptions are fundamentally flawed. 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. The protagonists of this story lived in a climate where ideas flowed easily between the realms of politics, philosophy, religion, and science. The closest thing to a hero in this book—the chemist, theologian, and political theorist Joseph Priestley—spent his whole career in the space that connects those different fields. But the other figures central to this story—Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson—suggest one additional reading of the “eighth-grade science” remark. It was anti-intellectual, to be sure, but it was something even more incendiary in the context of a presidential race. It was positively un-American.In their legendary thirteen-year final correspondence, reflecting back on their collaborations and their feuds, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote 165 letters to each other. In that corpus, Benjamin Franklin is mentioned by name five times, while George Washington is mentioned three times. Their mutual nemesis Alexander Hamilton warrants only two references. By contrast, Priestley, an Englishman who spent only the last decade of his life in the United States, is mentioned fifty-two times. That statistic alone gives some sense of how important Priestley was to the founders, in part because he would play a defining role in the rift and ultimate reconciliation between Jefferson and Adams, and in part because his distinctive worldview had a profound impact on both men, just as it had on Franklin three decades before. Yet today, Priestley is barely more than a footnote in most popular accounts of the revolutionary generation. This book is an attempt to understand how Priestley became so central to the great minds of this period—in the fledgling United States, but also in England and France. It is not so much a biography as it is the biography of one man’s ideas, the links of association and influence that connect him to epic changes in science, belief, and society—as well as to some of the darkest episodes of mob violence and political repression in the history of Britain and the United States.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Steven Johnson, “The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America” (Riverhead Books, 2008). The fact that Joseph Priestley’s name doesn’t appear in the title of this book, the best account of his life, work, and historical context, is a silent but unfortunate indication of how partisan advocates of that great man have failed to capture, represent, and promote the essence of his work. Admittedly that essence is not easy to grasp. Although Priestley was admired and consulted by some of the founding fathers of the United States, especially Jefferson and Franklin, he was in fact an expatriate Englishman whose reputation was made before he arrived in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, in 1804. Although he is most often celebrated today as a chemist who discovered oxygen, Johnson clearly shows that Priestley’s “dephlogisticated air” was more than a blunder in naming. It was Lavoisier who named and understood the properties of oxygen, and it was Carl Scheele who had succeeded in isolating oxygen before Priestley. It is not that Priestley’s achievements have been exaggerated; instead, they have been too narrowly described. Johnson does a magnificent job of delineating Priestley’s contributions to knowledge about electricity, grammar, the history of Christianity, political theory, biology, pedagogy, and a host of other subjects. In showing how Priestley’s interests in these seemingly far flung topics hold together, Johnson emphasizes two neglected but fundamental characteristics of his thinking: its basis in sociability and its early celebration of the Enlightenment sense of scientific progress. When Priestley arrived in London from Warrington Academy in 1765, he immediately made contact with a group of intellectuals known as the Honest Whigs, who met regularly at the London Coffee House. Here is Johnson’s account of the warm reception Priestley received: “Despite their intimidating scholarship and cosmopolitan ways, the coffeehouse group was quick to embrace Priestley. He was personally likable, with a striking mix of intellectual acuity and gentleness. …New acquaintances took to him immediately.” It was the stimulating and receptive conversation that he enjoyed with this group that prompted Priestley to write his first major book, “The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments” (1767). The beginning of that book provides an excellent example of Priestley’s determination to look beneath the surface of natural events to uncover their internal structure and his fundamental understanding of the progressive dynamics of scientific knowledge. His history is itself an uncovering of the internal structure of the progression of scientific thought about electricity: “Hitherto philosophy has been chiefly conversant about the more sensible properties of bodies; electricity, together with chemistry, and the doctrine of light and colours, seems to be giving us an inlet into their internal structure, on which all their sensible properties depend. By pursuing this new light, therefore, the bounds of natural science may possibly be extended, beyond what we can now form an idea of. New worlds may open to our view, and the glory of the great Sir Isaac Newton himself, and all his contemporaries, be eclipsed, by a new set of philosophers, in quite a new field of speculation. Could that great man revisit the earth, and view the experiments of the present race of electricians, he would be no less amazed than Roger Bacon, or Sir Francis, would have been at his.” The thread that runs through the internal structure of Priestley’s thought, Johnson shows, is his life-long fascination with the properties of air. As a young boy, he trapped spiders inside jars in order to determine what properties of air lengthened or shortened their lives. From these primitive experiments he went on to experiment with mice and later with plants. Eventually he discovered the process that we know as photosynthesis. In the preface to his book Johnson offers a stark warning of how our recent national leaders have abandoned the responsibility of being sufficiently knowledgeable about science to be informed citizens. In the legendary 13-year correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, they mention Priestley 52 times, commenting knowledgeably about his work. This is both a tribute to Priestley’s genius and to the Enlightenment engagement of two great presidents.*Michael Payne

⭐The preface explains the goal is to explain the key role of Priestly in the formation of America. In the fourteen year correspondence of Adams and Jefferson, Washington is mentioned three times and Priestly fifty-two times. Why? This book explains.Covers Priestly’s connection to Benjamin Franklin and the ‘Honest Whigs’ in London. In his twenties, Priestly came to these scientists to ask permission to write a book on the history of electricity. He did. It became a book of seven hundred pages used as the basic text for a hundred years. Developed close friendship with Franklin, Erasmus Darwin, etc.Became a leading scientist in Europe. Royal Society, French Royal Society, American Philosophical Society, etc. Nevertheless, his primary work was as a clergyman. Eventually his penchant for analysis impelled him the write a detailed history of Christianity.Priestly wrote on 1774, “this rapid process of knowledge will, I doubt not, being the means, under God, of extirpating error and prejudice, and a putting an end to all undue and usurped Authority in the business of religion, as well as of science.”In 1782 he published “A History of the Corruptions of Christianity”:”The Corruptions was a kind of historical deconstruction of the modern church. Starting, of coarse, with divinity of Jesus Christ. . . and tracing each back to the distortions of Greek and Latin theologians starting the fourth and fifth century A.D. about the time of the Council of Nicaea. The corruptions opens with a meticulous assault on the Trinity, which takes up the first quarter of the book, and then widens into a long litany of smaller abuses, the false mysticism of the Eucharist, predestination, the immateriality of the soul, the last supper.”Priestly explained his method in the preface, “this historical method will be found to be one of the most satisfactory modes of argumentation, in order to prove that what I object to is really of the corruption of genuine Christianity and no part of the original scheme.” Servetus, Newton and Whiston used the same method and reached the same conclusions.(Page 172) “A religious man forced to alter and reinvent his beliefs – and challenge the orthodoxies of the day – in the light of science and history, who was nevertheless determined to keep the core alive. Priestly was a heretic the first order who nonetheless possessed an unshakable faith. . . Ironically, it was “The Corruptions” itself – a work devoted to dismantling so many central values of modern Christianity – that finally gave Jefferson enough philosophical support to call himself a Christian again.”(Page 174) Jefferson wrote to Adams, “I have read Priestley’s corruptions of Christianity, and early opinions of Jesus, over and over again; and I rest on them as the basis of my own faith. These writings have never been answered.”Most today have never considered Preistly’s conclusions.(Page 175) To Jefferson “christianity was not the problem; it was the warped, counterfeit version that had evolved over the centuries that he could not subscribe to. Thanks to Priestly, he could be a Christian again in good faith – indeed, his Christianity would be pure, more elemental then that of believers who clung to the supernatural trappings of modern sects.”Interesting that Servetus wrote in the 1500’s “On the Errors of the Trinity” to help Moslems convert to Christianity.Priestly also spoke out in favor of the French Revolution. These two radical ideas led to the Birmingham riots. His home and laboratory were burned to the ground. Dozen others houses and some churches also. Priestly went in to hiding. Emigrated to Pennsylvania. First became friends with Adams and then very close to Jefferson. Converted Jefferson from deism to Unitarianism.Johnson uses Priestly’s faith in future progress to contrast today’s faith in self-destruction. However, Preistly’s faith was a result of decades of keen Bible study and analysis. Today’s faith, or loss of faith, is the result of the keen misery from human reason.

⭐Do you subscribe to the Great Men or the Collectivist vision of history? You can tell the history of the world through the lives of individuals and part of the explanation is no doubt true. But you can tell the story with the individuals in the supporting role.In 1765, Joseph Priestley, an iconoclast teacher from Warrington, comes to London to the Coffee House meetings of the Honest Whigs, and Benjamin Franklin in particular. Benjamin Franklin in 1740 had described the basic model of electricity with positive and negative charges interacting in a predictable way. Priestley’s first great scientific achievement was to write the History and Present State of Electricity followed by his role in identifying oxygen and a number of other elements. He was the first to observe plants ability to absorb carbon dioxide “foul air” and synthesise oxygen “good air”. He established himself as a leading World scientist.But this was an era of opportunity for open minded polymaths. Priestly found the circle of the Honest Whigs and then the Lunar Society in Birmingham – groups of eminent men who were pushing back the frontiers not just of science but appreciating its implications on religion and on the social order i.e. politics. In France Lavoisier was leading a French scientific revolution.The French Revolution was gathering pace and the American War of Independence was about to happen. Franklin went back to America and became influential. Priestley published the History of Corruption of Christianity, he became a key figure in the founding of the Unitarian church that eventually led to him being hounded out of Britain – the Quakers were seen as undermining religious belief. He went at quite a late stage in life to the USA, and with his for his close friendship with Franklin and with John Adams and Jefferson – the second and third US Presidents – he was a major power in the intellectual basis upon which the US is based.Stephen Johnson has an ability to draw big conclusions about how ideas arise among groups of people , exemplified by the Honest Whigs and the Lunar and the Lunar Society, about how innovation and the ways e a new ideas emerge and spread.The book fills you with optimism of the triumph of ideas and progress over fatalism.

⭐There was slightly less narration of Priestley’s scientific life than I was expecting, however his experiments and contributions to chemistry are detailed elsewhere.This book covers Priestley’s relationships with several of the founding fathers of the United States, their discussions about religion, the French Revolution and the future. It is well-written and just the right length.

⭐This book describes a most interesting time in the history of science and politics. Makes one want to go tinker on some new gadget or inventipn in the basement. My only complaint is that there is too much “filler” sometimes. But a must read nonetheless.

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