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Book Review: The Invention of Air - An experiment, a journey, a new country and the amazing force of scientific discovery, by Steven Johnson
I'm behind with book reviews again. This is a short but well-written biography of Joseph Priestley; it's not particularly in-depth but chooses to pick out some focal points in his life. There is an early howler, when Johnson places Warrington in Yorkshire, and throughout one has the feeling it's written with an American audience primarily in mind. The journey takes in his friendships with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, his early meetings with leading science researchers in the coffee houses of London, and experiments and writings on electricity, before moving on to his most famous (if flawed) discovery of oxygen, which he continued throughout his lifetime to believe was the absence of something ("dephlogisticated air") rather than the presence of a pure chemical. But there are also darker threads in Priestley's life, as he pursued nonconformist religious and unpopular political views, and the description of rioting in Birmingham that would ultimately drive him, as an old man, from his house and from his country, is a disturbing reminder of the power of the mob. Johnson also offers a genuinely educative interlude, describing how the carboniferous era likely came about, and how we have benefited from it (but at what cost?) in the last few centuries.
I'm behind with book reviews again. This is a short but well-written biography of Joseph Priestley; it's not particularly in-depth but chooses to pick out some focal points in his life. There is an early howler, when Johnson places Warrington in Yorkshire, and throughout one has the feeling it's written with an American audience primarily in mind. The journey takes in his friendships with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, his early meetings with leading science researchers in the coffee houses of London, and experiments and writings on electricity, before moving on to his most famous (if flawed) discovery of oxygen, which he continued throughout his lifetime to believe was the absence of something ("dephlogisticated air") rather than the presence of a pure chemical. But there are also darker threads in Priestley's life, as he pursued nonconformist religious and unpopular political views, and the description of rioting in Birmingham that would ultimately drive him, as an old man, from his house and from his country, is a disturbing reminder of the power of the mob. Johnson also offers a genuinely educative interlude, describing how the carboniferous era likely came about, and how we have benefited from it (but at what cost?) in the last few centuries.