Joseph Priestley

• 1. Childhood And Theological Doubt

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  Joseph Priestley was born in Birstall, West Yorkshire, on the 24th of March 1733. He grew up as the oldest of six children to Mary Swift and Jonas Priestley, a finisher of cloth. His early years were marked by instability when he lived with his grandfather around age one before returning home five years later after his mother died. When his father remarried in 1741, Priestley went to live with his aunt Sarah Keighley at Old Hall in Heckmondwike. This wealthy childless couple provided him with an education that included Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. At age four, he could flawlessly recite all 107 questions and answers of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. A serious illness around 1749 changed everything. He believed he was dying and doubted whether he had experienced the conversion necessary for salvation. This emotional distress led him to question his Calvinist upbringing and eventually reject election theory. The elders of the Independent Upper Chapel of Heckmondwike refused him admission as a full member because of these doubts. The illness left him with a permanent stutter and made him give up thoughts of entering the ministry initially.

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• 2. Electrical Experiments And Conductivity

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  In 1767, Joseph Priestley published The History and Present State of Electricity, a massive 700-page volume that became the standard history of electricity for over a century. Friends introduced him to major experimenters like John Canton, William Watson, Timothy Lane, and Benjamin Franklin during his time at Warrington Academy. Franklin encouraged Priestley to perform experiments he wanted to include in his book. While replicating others' work, Priestley became intrigued by unanswered questions and began designing his own experiments. He reported discoveries such as the conductivity of charcoal and other substances. This finding overturned what he called one of the earliest and universally received maxims of electricity, which claimed only water and metals could conduct electricity. His experiments demonstrated a continuum between conductors and non-conductors. Based on tests with charged spheres, Priestley was among the first to propose that electrical force followed an inverse-square law similar to Newton's law of universal gravitation. He wrote: May we not infer from this experiment, that the attraction of electricity is subject to the same laws with that of gravitation? Although he did not generalize or elaborate on this fully, French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb would enunciate the general law in the 1780s. His observation of a current of real air between two electrified points later interested Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell.

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• 3. Discovery Of Dephlogisticated Air

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  In August 1774, Joseph Priestley isolated an air that appeared completely new while working at Bowood House in Wiltshire. He focused the sun's rays on a sample of mercuric oxide to create this substance. He first tested it on mice who surprised him by surviving quite a while entrapped with the air. Then he tested it on himself, writing that it was five or six times better than common air for respiration and inflammation. He called this new substance dephlogisticated air, which we now know as oxygen gas. In March 1775, he wrote to several people regarding the discovery, and one letter was read aloud to the Royal Society. A paper titled An Account of further Discoveries in Air was published in the Society's journal Philosophical Transactions. Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele had actually discovered the gas around 1772 by heating potassium nitrate and other substances, but Priestley published his findings first. French chemist Antoine Lavoisier later described it as purified air itself entire without alteration. Priestley did not emphasize his discovery of dephlogisticated air in the preface of his second volume of Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air published in 1776. Instead, he argued how important such discoveries were to rational religion.

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• 4. Founding British Unitarianism

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  On the 17th of April 1774, Theophilus Lindsey held the first Unitarian service in Britain at the newly formed Essex Street Chapel in London. Joseph Priestley defended his friend in a pamphlet titled Letter to a Layman, on the Subject of the Rev. Mr. Lindsey's Proposal for a Reformed English Church. He claimed that only the form of worship had been altered, not its substance, while attacking those who followed religion as a fashion. Priestley attended Lindsey's church regularly throughout the 1770s and occasionally preached there. He continued to support institutionalized Unitarianism for the rest of his life, writing several Defenses of Unitarianism. He encouraged the foundation of new Unitarian chapels throughout Britain and the United States. His theological views became the standards for Unitarians in Britain through his three-volume Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion published between 1772 and 1774. These works outlined his belief in Socinianism and challenged basic Christian orthodoxies like the divinity of Christ and the miracle of the Virgin Birth. Methodists in Leeds even penned a hymn asking God to expel the Unitarian fiend and chase his doctrine back to Hell.

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• 5. Political Philosophy And Civil Rights

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  In 1768, Joseph Priestley published Essay on the First Principles of Government, an early work of modern liberal political theory. This text distinguished political rights from civil rights with precision and argued for expansive civil rights. Priestley identified separate private and public spheres, contending that government should control only the public sphere. Education and religion were matters of private conscience that should not be administered by the state. He defended the rights of Dissenters against William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England which stated dissent from the Church of England was a crime. Priestley lashed out with Remarks on Dr. Blackstone's Commentaries correcting Blackstone's interpretation of law, grammar, and history. Blackstone altered subsequent editions to rephrase offending passages but retained his description of Dissent as a crime. Later writings supported the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts which restricted Dissenters' rights to hold office or attend Oxford and Cambridge unless they subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles. Priestley believed the British government was infringing upon individual freedoms and wrote Letters to William Pitt and Letters to Burke challenging their opposition to equal rights during the French Revolution era.

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• 6. Birmingham Riots And Exile

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  On Bastille Day in July 1791, rioters gathered outside a hotel where Joseph Priestley and other Dissenters had arranged a celebratory dinner. The mob attacked attendees as they left and moved on to burn both the New Meeting and Old Meeting churches to the ground. Priestley and his wife fled from their home Fairhill at Sparkbrook while their son William stayed behind to protect property. The mob overcame them and torched Priestley's house destroying his valuable laboratory and all family belongings. Twenty-six other Dissenters' homes and three more churches were burned during the three-day riot. Priestley spent several days hiding with friends before traveling safely to London then eventually to the United States. Local Birmingham magistrates planned and condoned these carefully executed attacks according to modern historians. George III sent troops to the area but expressed feeling better pleased that Priestley suffered for the doctrines he and his party held. The riots forced him to flee first to London and then to Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, where he spent his last ten years.

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