JOSEPH PRIESTLEY: BIOGRAPHY, EXPERIMENTS, CONTRIBUTIONS - ARTE - 2025

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) was a multifaceted intellectual of the 18th century; He stood out as a scientist, philosopher, theologian, politician and linguist. His view of science reconciled materialism and philosophical determinism with Christian theism; for this reason he was considered in his time as an innovative thinker who went against the tide.

He was an ingenious experimentalist, which allowed him to make several highly relevant discoveries for the study of electricity and gases. Chemistry was his main area of ​​research.

Joseph Priestley discovered what we know today as oxygen. Source: English: Ellen Sharples (1769 - 1849)

Among other things, he is recognized for having invented carbonated water, a product popularly known as soda. However, without a doubt his greatest contribution to science was having discovered the existence of oxygen.

Biography

Early years of education

Joseph Priestley was born in West Yorkshire on March 13, 1733, specifically in the town of Hackney.

He was the first child of the marriage of Jonas Priestley and Maria Swift, a Calvinist Protestant couple who were engaged in the cloth trade.

At just one year old, he was sent to live with his grandfather, probably due to the illness of his mother, who died five years after his birth. After the death of his mother, Joseph returned to his father's house.

At the age of eight, he had to move again since his father remarried. In 1741 he passed into the care of his uncles Jhon and Sarah Keighley, who enjoyed a well-off economic position. With them the young Joseph had access from a very young age to the best education, being able to take advantage of his natural gifts.

Biographers often emphasize the fact that at an early age Joseph Priestley could recite the entire Westminster Shorter Catechism from memory. Such skill made his tutors decide to guide him on the religious path to be a minister; for this reason he was widely instructed in the ancient languages ​​(Latin, Greek and Hebrew).

In addition to the classical languages, he also learned French, Italian, German, Arabic, and Chaldean. Under the tutelage of a reverend named George Haggerston, he learned mathematics, logic, philosophy, and metaphysics.

Dissident rationalism: ecclesiastical and pedagogical career

In 1752 he enrolled in the Daventry Academy, an institution marked by dissident thought in which his theological convictions were imbued by the theories of political liberalism, becoming a rational dissident who later advocated the critical study of the Bible from the logic of the natural Sciences.

While at Daventry he ordained himself as a minister. In 1755 he was sent to the parish of Needham, a rural and traditional village where his revolutionary ideas did not have much acceptance.

After several of his initiatives failed in Needham due to the mentality of its inhabitants, in 1758 he managed to move to Nantwich, a more open town. There they allowed him to found a school where he taught science and natural philosophy.

During this stage, he also wrote a book entitled The rudiments of English grammar (1761), with which he sought to overcome the deficiencies in the teaching of the British language. This publication was very popular and earned him great recognition for which he was invited to teach at Warrington Academy.

It was in Warrington that Priestley met his wife, Mary Wilkinson, whom he married on June 23, 1762. A year later they had their first daughter, Sarah Prietsley, named after her aunt.

Leeds and his religious preaching

In 1767 Joseph Priestley moved again to the town of his childhood, West Yorkshire, specifically to the city of Leeds. There he became the leader of one of the oldest and most important dissident congregations in England: that of Mill Hill Chapel.

Before Priestley was its minister, this congregation was fractured because many of its adherents had become Methodists. Priestley's mission was to strengthen the ties of this religious community through rational education.

During this stage he wrote one of his most important theological works, Institutes of natural and revealed religion (1772-1774). There he declared his ideas about religious instruction and his sympathy for Socialism, an anti-Trinitarian doctrine that disbelieves of the existence of hell and advocates a rationalist and free interpretation of the Gospels.

This book represents a crossroads in the evolution of his religious thought. Here Priestley declared that the only truth revealed could be that which was consistent with the physical experience of the believer.

Calne

After Priestley was recognized by the Royal Society for his writings on natural philosophy and won the Copley Medal in 1772, those close to him thought it was time to find him a more comfortable financial position.

Clergyman Richard Price and his famed American colleague Benjamin Franklin recommended him to Lord Shelburne to become their children's tutor. Priestley accepted the position and said goodbye to the Mill Hill Chapel congregation giving his last sermon on May 16, 1773.

Joseph moved to Calne, a town in the county of Wiltshire, to serve the earl. At his services the workload was intentionally reduced so that he could devote himself to his investigations. He quickly gained the trust of Shelburne, who made him his political advisor.

During this period Priestley wrote most of his philosophical books and also carried out an extensive process of experimentation and scientific theorizing dedicated to the subject of gases or "airs", as he called them at that time. Among the discoveries of this period is that of "dephlogisticated air", which today is known as oxygen.

For unclear reasons, in 1779 Lord Shelburne and Priestley broke off their relations. Joseph then accepted a proposal to serve as minister in Birmingham.

Birmingham

Priestley moved to New Meeting in Birmingham on the condition that he would only do religious and pedagogical work on Sundays, which would give him time to research and write.

However, he soon established a school in his parish attended by about 150 students. His salary in this parish was meager, so his friends and employers contributed to his livelihood with donations.

In 1782 he was decorated as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also became part of the Lunar Society, a group of renowned Birmingham scientists who met monthly to exchange their discoveries and collaborate on projects.

Immersed in this intellectual environment, the controversy he had with Antoine Lavoisier developed. He criticized Prestley for his fixation on the phlogiston theory.

Prestley was firm in his defense of this theory from which he got the term "dephlogisticated air", as well as was reticent to the concepts of elements and compounds, and to the chemical nomenclature that Lavoisier proposed.

Finally, the theoretical system proposed by Lavoisier prevailed despite criticism from Prestley and the Lunar Society, becoming the foundation of modern chemistry.

Political conflicts

This was perhaps the most controversial stage of his theological and political work. While in Birmingham in 1782 he published A History of the Corruptions of Christianity, the second volume of his Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion.

He then published A History of Early Opinions on Jesus Christ, compiled from the original writers, proving that the Christian Church was the first Unitarian. She also published The Importance and Scope of Freedom of Research. With these texts Priestley proclaimed the political right of the unitary and dissident church.

Later, the scientist became involved in a controversy against Prime Minister William Pitt and the philosopher Edmund Burke, who attacked the proposal to revoke the so-called act of evidence and the act of corporation, measures that limited the political rights of citizens not belonging to the Anglican religion.

Pitt branded the dissidents of supporting the French Revolution and endangering the status quo of the British monarchy. For his part, Burke criticized the fact that Priestley believed that Church and State should be separate.

In July 1791, on the anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille, the dissidents had organized a celebration that was interrupted by a group of agitators who burned down the hotel where the party was taking place. They then attacked the home and the church where Priestley was a minister, as well as other dissenting churches and even the headquarters of the Lunar Society.

Hackney

Due to the attacks of the Birmingham riot, Priestley was forced to leave the city. He fled with his family to the Hackney town of Lower Clapton.

There he was appointed minister of the congregation of Gravel Pit Meeting. His political and religious message in that place became even more intertwined: he began to preach that the French Revolution was an announcement of the Last Judgment.

The attacks against him continued. He was the subject of satire in the official newspapers and received constant threats by correspondence.

Before the purge promoted by William Pitt known as the Test of Treason of 1794 began, Priestley decided to go into exile in the United States.

U.S

His last ten years of life were spent in North America. He arrived in New York in 1974, where he was acclaimed by various political sectors; However, tired of the controversy, Priestley decided not to get involved with the sycophants.

One of his first relevant actions in the American territory was founding the first Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. After this she tried to withdraw from public life by isolating herself in a country house located in Pennsylvania.

However, he could not escape the controversy. In 1795 the journalist William Cobbet wrote an article entitled Observations on the Emigration of Dr. Joseph Priestley, in which he accused the scientist of betraying the United Kingdom. The article was based on the correspondence he received from people linked to revolutionary France.

Last years and death

Prestley's life was further complicated by a string of family misfortunes. First came the death of her son Henry in 1795; the following year his wife died.

However, Joseph remained active dedicating himself to the academic field. He helped found the Northumberland Academy and advised Thomas Jefferson in the gestation of the University of Virginia.

He continued with his scientific investigations, although during these years being isolated from the European avant-garde made his thinking stagnate. Without much more to give, he fell ill in 1801 and ended up dying in 1804.

Experiments

Priestley recorded most of his most relevant experiments in a book entitled Experiments and Observations on Different Types of Air.

His most important experiments were those that led him to discover "dephlogisticated air." Using a magnifying glass, he concentrated the heat of the sun's rays on a sample of mercury oxide encapsulated in a glass container.

He soon realized that the air generated by the calcined mercury could come into contact with the water without losing its properties.

More surprising was the discovery that such air, which was much denser, caused the flame of a spark plug to ignite vigorously.

He then experimented with this air with mice. These rodents could stay alive for about fifteen minutes after being hermetically enclosed in a container with common air. By repeating this experiment but with the air removed from the mercury oxide, he found that the mice could survive twice as long.

He deduced that the new air was much more beneficial for breathing. Apart from this, he observed that some difficult-to-burn substances burned more easily with fresh air; For this reason, he deduced that this air did not contain phlogiston and that it absorbed the substances with which it came into contact, allowing its combustion.

Contributions and discoveries

The conclusions about the concept of dephlogicated air were denied by Antoine Lavoisier, but Priestley's achievement was to discover that what we now call oxygen is a gas in itself.

Besides oxygen, Priestley discovered the existence of ten other types of gases. Some of them are ammonia, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, and hydrogen chloride.

His studies with electricity also produced important contributions to science. He anticipated the inverse square law, discovered the conductivity of coal, and further deduced that electrical energy generates chemical changes. This is why Priestley's legacy is so important to the development of experimental chemistry.

References

1. "Joseph Priestley and deflogsticated air" (no date) in Educar. Retrieved on July 4, 2019 from Educar: contributions.educ.ar.
2. Chang, H. "Joseph Priestley, Champion of Enlightenment in Science and Education" (April 4, 2013) in Royal Society of Chimestry. Retrieved on July 4, 2019 from YouTube: youtube.com.
3. Martínez, N. "Joseph Priestley, a revolutionary of experimental chemistry (I)" (December 17, 2010) in Corporación de Radio y Televisión Española. Retrieved on July 4, 2019 from the Spanish Radio and Television Corporation: rtve.es.
4. Priestley, J. "Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air" (1774). Johnson: London
5. Schofield, Robert E. "The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804" (1997). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.