The polymath that inspired Jefferson

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, scientists

Joseph Priestley was very fortunate to have a very sunny, optimistic disposition. Few men could have borne becoming the most hated man in England, then in exile a target of the Alien and Sedition Acts, and remained sane. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson is a biography not just of "Dynamite Joe" (from a quote falsely attributed to him at the time), but of the progressive view of science, religion and politics that he embraced and its effect on three of the most famous figures of the late 18^th Century: Ben Franklin, Tom Jefferson, and John Adams, all of whom Priestley counted as dear friends.

For these four men, the conceptual barriers we experience today—because of which a politician can get away with putting his scientific views and his faith in compartments and claiming they'll have no bearing on his public service—did not exist and would be considered both ludicrous and criminally counterproductive.

Thus, Priestley was not "just a natural philosopher", an inspiration to both Franklin and Lavoisier, but an ordained minister who helped found Unitarianism as a denomination, and a first-rate writer of political tracts. As a proto-scientist, he is best known for discovering "dephlogisticated air", which Lavoisier determined was a positive, not a negative, quantity and named Oxygen. Yet prior to this he was one of the foremost "electricians", as electrical experimenters were then known, second only to Franklin, and the first to produce soda water.

But it is as a dissenting preacher that he experienced the most severe life changes. Firstly, his deconstruction of all supernatural elements in the Bible, and of Jesus's divinity, in his book An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, which convinced Jefferson that he himself was indeed a Christian, led to public fury throughout England, the burning of his house, and his eventual flight to the new republic "across the pond".

Secondly, once in America, during a breakfast with President John Adams, Priestley enthusiastically (he did everything enthusiastically) discoursed on his millennial views of world politics and America's place in it, something that thoroughly alarmed Adams. While Adams claimed in later letters to Jefferson (a decade after Priestley's death) that he did not have the old dissenter in mind when enacting the Alien and Sedition Acts—his real target was French spies—, the fact remains that Priestley had good reason to expect a second exile should his protection by Vice President Jefferson ever fail.

One other stellar quantity he had: he never kept a secret. He (enthusiastically) shared the results of all his experiments immediately, to his current correspondents and often in tracts or books for the public. He might have been richer had he kept a trade secret here or there (such as for his invention of seltzer water), but he thought the benefit of openness, and avoiding the damage that secrecy does to scientific advancement, was worth the "trivial" loss he might have incurred. He and his openness thrived in the coffee-house culture that nourished so many scientists and philosophers of the time, and brought so many diverse minds together to cross-pollinate one another.

He wrote copiously on scientific experiments, religion, philosophy, education and politics. The sum total of his published writings is probably exceeded by none except possibly Isaac Asimov (However, Asimov's nonfiction was largely explaining or repackaging the work of others, while Priestley nearly always wrote from personal experience).

Looking back more than 200 years, the author takes what he calls a "long zoom" approach, placing the cultural history of two great English-speaking nations in a context not just of centuries, but millions of years, as he fits the British Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution eras into the emerging, ever (so far) increasing concentration of energy, both chemical and social, that an individual could muster.

Consider that today, the mayor of a medium-sized city such as Oklahoma City (half a million) wields more political power than the emperor of the Akkadians did in 1000 BC, or that the average teenager has more raw power at his disposal (100-400 horsepower) when he borrows the family car, than entire societies did before the invention of the steam engine. Rewind history to just before 1800 AD, and you can just about take the square root of either quantity, for an assessment of available energy and influence.

Priestley was a great genius, there is no doubt, and it is equally true that he rode the ascending cusp of a wave of innovation powered by both coal and a rising urbanization of society. And, there was so much to discover! It is a bit too late for any of us to discover new elements using a few beakers and a laundry tub.

Priestley's influence can be seen most clearly, however, in the famous spate of letters written between Adams and Jefferson after 1812. References to Priestley greatly outnumber references to either Washington or Franklin! His political writings, his dissenting faith and writings, and his scientific inspiration had shaped their world most of all.

The great gulf between the two old Presidents encompasses today's political pendulum swings. If today's US President could exchange letters with Ronald Reagan, I suspect the polarization would not quite reach that between Jefferson and Adams (And it is largely due to that polarization that the "second-place becomes Vice President" provision was changed to make it a "candidate plus running mate" race). Their common link, the factor that allowed the aging statesmen to communicate at all, was a cheerful, brilliant Englishman who embodied the best of America at least as much as the two of them.