Joseph Priestley

Joseph Priestley isolated oxygen, invented carbonated water, wrote on theology and politics, had his house burned by a mob and died in Pennsylvania. He was a Dissenting minister, excluded by his religion from Oxford and Cambridge, and was educated at a Dissenting academy where the teaching was in many respects better. He produced what he called dephlogisticated air in 1774 by heating mercuric oxide with a burning glass, and described the mouse that lived in it and the lightness he felt breathing it; Carl Wilhelm Scheele had made it earlier without publishing, and Lavoisier, to whom Priestley described the experiment at dinner in Paris, understood what it was and named it. Priestley never accepted the oxygen theory and defended phlogiston to the end, which is the standard example of a discoverer who could not read his own discovery. He identified several other gases, including ammonia and nitrous oxide, and his method of dissolving carbon dioxide in water was taken up commercially by Schweppe. He was a founder of English Unitarianism, denied the Trinity and the virgin birth, and supported the American and French revolutions in print. On the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille a Church and King mob in Birmingham burned his house, laboratory and papers, along with Dissenting chapels; the rioters were treated leniently and Priestley never returned to the city. He emigrated to Northumberland, Pennsylvania, in 1794, corresponded with Jefferson and Adams, and was threatened with deportation under the Alien Act. He is the only person to have a chemical society medal and a Unitarian denomination trace themselves to him at once. Coleridge wrote a sonnet about his exile. The American Chemical Society was founded in 1876 at his Pennsylvania house on the centenary of his oxygen experiments.

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