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Joseph Priestley: Enlightened Chemist
| Article
# : |
11671 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
4,429 Words |
| Author
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David J. Rhees
David J. Rhees is a historian of science working at the
American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia. |
Joseph Priestley was born the son of a cloth dresser in Fieldhead, a village near Leeds in Yorkshire, England, on March 13, 1733. By the time of his death in 1804 in the frontier community of Northumberland, Pennsylvania, Priestley had won universal recognition for his scientific achievements and partisan notoriety for his religious and political views. Both his admirers and detractors agreed he was a man of many talents, the author of more than 150 books and pamphlets on an astonishing range of subjects. He was a theologian, a historian, a linguist, and a writer of learned tracts on education, literary criticism, oratory, grammar, psychology, perspective, metaphysics, electricity, and optics. Today he is chiefly remembered as a chemist, but in his own eyes he was above all a Christian minister, specifically a dissenting one. His religious dissent passed through several phrases, and he became a seminar figure in the history of modern Unitarianism. He was a fearless political critic, particularly of the Test Acts (British laws intended to preserve the hegemony of the Anglican state) and he was the early supporter of the American and French Revolutions. He became and honorary citizen of France, but it was in America that he found refuge in the last ten years of his life.
As a chemist, Joseph Priestley was the first to describe the properties of oxygen and seven other common gases, the first to observe the basic process in photosynthesis, the first to note differential gaseous diffusion, and the inventor of soda water. Yet Priestley was something more, an enlightened chemist whose life and work encompassed all branches of philosophy, moral as well as natural. He was also a chemist of the Enlightenment, exemplifying the age's faith in liberty, progress, and the ability of human reason to discover the rational laws of God and God's world. In Priestley's words, "The more we see of the wonderful structure of the world, and of the laws of nature, the more clearly do we comprehend their admirable uses."
From an early age Joseph Priestley aspired to the ministry, a calling which required the study of classical and ancient languages. Accordingly he prevailed and ancient languages. Accordingly he prevailed upon his aunt, with whom he lived after his mother's death, to send him to the academy at Daventry in 1752. At this time the Dissenting academies were vital centers of intellectual freedom and practical education, unlike what Priestley called the "pools of stagnant water" at Oxford and Cambridge. It was at Daventry that he first showed signs of the "furious free-thinker" he was to become. By 1755 he was an accomplished scholar, familiar with nine languages and well-versed in theology, history, logic and metaphysics.
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