As I mentioned last month, my bff Andrea and I took a day trip through some of the more northeastern counties to collect a few markers, and this post is a result of that. After this there's just one more quest remaining for 2023 before I do my annual wrap-up for the year. My longtime readers may recall that, because I work in retail, I take the month of December off from blogging in order to have more time for little things like sleep.
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| This marker stands in the median on US 11, just northeast of the community of Northumberland; a second, identical marker stands at the intersection of Tenth and Duke Streets |
Joseph was a sharp child, and the family - anticipating a career in ministry for him - arranged for him to be as well educated as possible. He became fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew as a child; later he also studied French, Italian, German, Arabic, and Aramaic.
As a teenager, he fell gravely ill with what is believed to have been tuberculosis, and although he recovered, it left him with a permanent stutter, so for the time being he gave up any thoughts of entering the ministry. But he also dropped the idea for another reason - some introspection he had during his illness led him to question and ultimately reject the Calvinist beliefs with which he'd been raised. Calvinism maintains the idea that some people have been predestined to receive salvation, and Joseph's illness caused him to instead take up the belief in Christian universalism, meaning that sooner or later all people will receive salvation. He was privately tutored in philosophy, mathematics, logic, and physics, but later decided to pursue ministry after all and enrolled at Daventry Academy. (Daventry no longer exists, as it was later merged into New College London, but Joseph is remembered as its most famous alumni.)
Also during his time at Warrington, he married Mary Wilkinson; it was a happy marriage of mutual affection. He later wrote that his wife was "a woman of excellent understanding, much improved by reading," as well as having a generous temper and being an excellent household manager. They had one daughter, Sarah, and three sons, Joseph, William, and Henry. This must have been a comfort to Joseph, because as far as records indicate, most members of his birth family seem to have cut contact with him after his religious conversion. His brother Timothy still talked to him, and they even published a book on electricity together, but he was in the minority.
Well, while all this teaching and ministering and such was happening, Joseph also continued to experiment and research, being quite fascinated with science and with chemistry in particular. I'm glossing over some things here to try to make this accessible to people (like me) whose understanding of such things isn't anywhere near what his was. As I mentioned, he published a book on electricity with his brother; he had been encouraged to continue in his electrical experiments by our old friend Benjamin Franklin, whom he met in London in 1765. He wrote extensively on various scientific subjects, and performed experiments at Bowood House, the home of his friend Lord Shelburne. It was there in August 1774 that he first discovered what he thought was a new kind of air. He didn't get to study it in detail until January of 1775, because he and Lord Shelburne went on a tour of mainland Europe. After he got back, though, he continued working and started writing about what he called "dephlogisticated air," which he created by focusing sunlight on mercuric oxide. He isolated some mice with this air, and was surprised at how well they survived in the conditions, so then he tried it on himself. The air he had discovered was, he wrote, "five or six times better" than regular air.
Long story short, what he had discovered was oxygen.
Although a couple of other scientists had decent claims to having also made the same discovery, it was Joseph who published his findings first. For this reason, modern science still remembers him as the one who officially discovered oxygen.
This is all very interesting, of course, but we're still in England, so we need to skip ahead in time a little bit. A few years after Joseph's major discovery, he and Lord Shelburne had a falling out, the reasons for which were never adequately made clear. (Joseph's chief modern biographer thinks the probable culprit was Lady Shelburne, who apparently didn't like Joseph or Mary.) The Priestleys moved to Birmingham in 1780, and lived there happily; Joseph accepted a ministerial position that allowed him plenty of time for writing and research, and established another school. He joined a group called the Lunar Society, which met monthly to discuss their work on science, manufacturing, and philosophy, and in 1782 he was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Unfortunately, this happy period came to an end in 1791, when the Priestley Riots - mob violence motivated by religion - forced them out of Birmingham. Joseph and Mary went into hiding, and their house was burned to the ground, along with his laboratory and just about everything the family owned. Fortunately, none of the Priestleys themselves were harmed.
The Priestleys remained in England just a few years longer. Joseph was granted honorary French citizenship, which he accepted and called "the greatest of honours," but the ongoing tensions between England and France made it impossible for him to move there. His three sons all left for America in 1793, and Joseph and Mary joined them the following year, though I haven't found any record of what their daughter Sarah did or if she was even still living.
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| The marker stands in front of the Joseph Priestley House Museum at 472 Priestley Avenue |
In Point Township (today the community of Northumberland), they established a beautiful farm with a large white house. Joseph Sr. had a laboratory and continued to experiment. He ran afoul of some of his neighbors, having assisted in the circulation of a questionable handbill, but defended himself. He helped with the creation of a school called Northumberland Academy, even donating his personal library to it. He also became good friends with Thomas Jefferson, providing the latter with useful advice when he founded the University of Virginia, and although his experiments lessened as he became more and more ill, his presence in the country inspired a number of Americans to take an interest in chemistry.
The experiments and writing came to an end in 1801, when Joseph's health forced him to give them up entirely. He died on February 6, 1804, and is buried in Northumberland's Riverview Cemetery. By the time of his death, Joseph had been inducted into literally every major scientific organization in the western hemisphere. Remembered as the man who discovered oxygen and the father of modern chemistry, he has been honored with an asteroid, two colleges in England, and the chemistry labs at the University of Leeds all being named after him. Statues of him can be found in Birmingham and Leeds, and Dickinson College here in Pennsylvania presents an annual Priestley Award to "a distinguished scientist whose work has contributed to the welfare of humanity." The American Chemical Society presents the annual Priestley Medal to prominent scientists, and consider it their highest honor.
Sources and Further Reading:
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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