Joseph Priestley

English scientist and scholar

• Born: March 13, 1733
• Birthplace: Birstall Fieldhead, Yorkshire, (now West Yorkshire) England
• Died: February 6, 1804
• Place of death: Northumberland, Pennsylvania

One of the eighteenth century’s significant experimental scientists, Priestley was a supporter of civic and religious liberty who wrote extensively in a variety of scientific, educational, religious, and philosophical areas.

Early Life

Joseph Priestley’s father, Jonas Priestley, was a weaver and cloth dresser, while his mother, née Mary Swift, was the only daughter of a Yorkshire farmer. The eldest of six children, young Joseph, after the death of his mother in 1739, was adopted by Sarah Keighley, his father’s sister. Reared in a Dissenting atmosphere, Priestley was brought into contact with a variety of religious and philosophical ideas that challenged conventional norms. Perhaps because of recurring illnesses during this period, Priestley became an avid reader interested in a diverse range of topics.

Priestley’s schooling was a combination of classroom activity, independent study, and work with tutors. At an early age, he became proficient in philosophy, mathematics, and a number of ancient and modern languages. In 1752, he entered the newly established Daventry Academy, an institution that fixed his independent thought. In addition to the required curriculum, he pursued his own interests in history, science, and philosophy. Priestley acknowledged that David Hartley’s Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations had an especially important influence, as did Caleb Ashworth, the director of the academy, and Samuel Clark, one of the tutors. It was during this period that Priestley was convinced of the potential for the perfectibility of humankind through proper education and development.

In 1755, Priestley became minister for the small Dissenting congregation of Needham Market in Suffolk. He was not altogether happy, however, as members of his flock opposed his Arian ideas. This opposition led him, in 1758, to move to another congregation at Nantwich in Cheshire. There he operated a small school and pursued a variety of scientific experiments dealing with air and static electricity. Increasingly, he saw science as a tool to improve human life. Several years later, Priestley was appointed tutor in languages and literature at Warrington Academy in Lancashire, a famous and innovative Dissenting academy, and in 1762, he married Mary Wilkinson. They had a happy marriage, rearing three sons and a daughter, until Mary’s death in 1796.

Life’s Work

Joseph Priestley firmly believed that humanity could be improved through education and through a proper understanding of the physical and spiritual worlds. During his tenure at Warrington, from 1761 to 1767, he published speculative and scientific works in a variety of fields in which he was to maintain interest throughout his life. In the realm of education, Priestley argued that schools should be designed to serve the needs of contemporary society rather than follow slavishly the classical models of the past. In The Rudiments of English Grammar (1761), he stressed contemporary usage rather than an imitation of classical style. In An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (1765), he argued that contemporary subjects such as modern history and languages, public administration, and science were better suited to Dissenters than the classics. The University of Edinburgh awarded him the doctor of laws degree for his popular A Chart of Biography (1765), a work that portrayed the succession of eminent men throughout the ages.

His work in a number of areas in science during this period and his experiments and progress with electricity won for him election to the Royal Society in 1766. In The History and Present State of Electricity (1767), Priestley described many of his own experiments as well as those of others in an effort to show the development of humanity in discovering and directing the forces of nature.

In 1767, Priestley accepted a position as minister in Leeds, which gave him far more time for experimenting and for writing in areas as diverse as theology, science, and politics. His religious writings included a number of works on rational religion as well as attacks on traditional dogma; the latter incurred the ire of many of his contemporaries. Most notable among these writings was the three-volume Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religions (1772-1774), which he had begun during his student days at Daventry. He also founded the Theological Repository, a journal of biblical criticism.

Priestley’s work in science continued unabated. As the first part of a projected history of experimental philosophy, he published The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colours (1772). After this first work, the project was never continued. His numerous and significant studies of the properties of gases laid the foundations for modern chemistry. In August, 1774, he discovered oxygen, although because of his persistent belief in the phlogiston theory, he never fully understood the implications of the discovery.

Priestley also published a series of political writings that stressed themes similar to those of his theological works: civil liberty, social responsibility, and the potential for human perfectibility. In An Essay on the First Principles of Government and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty (1768), he argued that both freedom of conscience and civic liberty were fundamental to the welfare of society. At the same time, he contended that political liberty should be extended only to those who would support the welfare of society as a whole. His support of John Wilkes in an anonymous pamphlet of 1769 and his criticism of the government for attempting to deprive Americans of their rights as Englishmen made him suspect to the authorities.

From 1773 to 1780, Priestley served the earl of Shelburne as librarian and supervised the education of Shelburne’s two sons. This post gave him considerable free time for study and writing and brought him into contact with a variety of important persons. During this period of estrangement and then war with the Americans, he generally avoided political topics, instead concentrating on his scientific work as well as on metaphysics and theology. He defended theories of materialism, while rejecting atheism; God’s existence could be seen through design, though not necessarily through revelation.

The decade of the 1780’s was a crucial one for Priestley. He was recognized as one of Great Britain’s important men of science. He also was frequently in the public eye because of his attacks on revealed religion and his challenges to the established order. In 1780, he terminated his relationship with Shelburne and settled in Birmingham, near his brother-in-law, John Wilkinson. While there, he became close to a circle of distinguished men in the Lunar Society, a group of individuals who actively promoted the application of science to society, and continued his investigations into the nature of gases, electricity, and acids.

During this period, Priestley increasingly became identified as a disruptive force in society. His frequent defenses of Unitarianism and attacks on scriptural inspiration, the Trinity, and the nature of Jesus Christ brought him into conflict with clerics. Some of his comments in opposition to the Test and Corporation Acts seemed to suggest that he was a threat to the established political order, although he stressed that he advocated change through persuasion rather than through force. The rising disorder of the late 1780’s, coupled with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, reinforced societal suspicions of voices of dissent.

In a strong attack on Edmund Burke, Priestley expressed his support of the French Revolution; he suggested that the revolution would lead to the triumph of reason and thus bring “the extinction of all national prejudices and enmity, and the establishment of universal peace and good-will among all nationals.” In A Political Dialogue on the General Principles of Government (1791), he called for a reform of the House of Commons that would allow that body to serve as the popular voice of the people.

It was doubtless Priestley’s association in the popular mind with the events in France as well as his championing of unorthodox religious ideas that caused him to be singled out by the Birmingham rioters in July, 1791. Priestley’s home and laboratory were destroyed, as were most of his scientific equipment, papers, and books.

Although Priestley had hoped to return to Birmingham after the riots, continued hostility made this impossible. He settled at Hackney, near London, and taught history and science at the New College (Hackney College). Although he sought to retain a low profile, the growing estrangement between Great Britain and France and the execution of Louis XVI made his position untenable. In the spring of 1794, Priestley and his wife emigrated to America, where their sons already lived, hoping to find greater freedom for his intellectual pursuits.

Yet Priestley’s life in the United States, where he spent his last years, was filled with some of the same tensions that he had left behind. Clergymen attacked his ideas, and the intolerance of the Alien and Sedition Acts alarmed him. His defense of his political and religious ideas in Letters to the Inhabitants of Northumberland and Its Neighbourhood (1799) was in many ways a recapitulation of ideas he had long held. Although he wrote a large number of scientific papers during this period, they were generally of little substance. He died on February 6, 1804, in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, and was interred in the local Quaker burial ground.

Significance

In many ways Joseph Priestley embodied the spirit of the eighteenth century. A man of broad interests and an effective writer, Priestley published extensively on the subjects of education, metaphysics, theology, history, physics, chemistry, and politics. He was convinced that science and its applications could improve humankind and that creating a synthesis of revealed religion and natural science would further contribute to social and material progress. A supporter of religious and civil liberties, he wrote important essays on those topics and became a prominent victim of the intolerance of the late eighteenth century. An active experimenter and contributor to the development of the new science of chemistry, he was unwilling to abandon some of his theories and thus become part of that new science.

Bibliography

Davis, Kenneth S. The Cautionary Scientists: Priestley, Lavoisier, and the Founding of Modern Chemistry. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966. A popularly written and useful account of these two important figures of eighteenth century science. Successfully portrays the intellectual and social milieu of the British and French societies in which they lived and describes their contributions to the scientific tradition.

Gibbs, F. W. Joseph Priestley: Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965. The most accurate and readable of the biographies of Priestley, although it lacks an analysis of Priestley and his ideas. Contains many excerpts from contemporary documents.

Graham, Jenny. Revolutionary in Exile: The Emigration of Joseph Priestley to America, 1794-1804. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1995. Examines Priestley’s career before and after he emigrated to the United States. Graham explains why he left England, his involvement in American politics, and his influence on Thomas Jefferson. The appendix includes correspondence between Priestley and American statesmen.

Kieft, Lester, ed. Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Theologian, and Metaphysician. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980. The most valuable analytical studies of three major facets of Priestley’s career by three leading scholars of science: Erwin N. Hiebert, Aaron J. Ihde, and Robert E. Schofield.

Priestley, Joseph. Autobiography of Joseph Priestley. Edited by Jack Lindsay. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970. With a very useful introduction by Lindsay, this book contains the Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley, 1806.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley, 1733-1804: Selected Scientific Correspondence, with Commentary. Edited by Robert E. Schofield. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966. A virtually complete collection of Priestley’s scientific statements. Invaluable for a study of this aspect of his career.

Schofield, Robert E. The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1733 to 1773. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. A comprehensive two-volume biography written by a leading Priestley authority. The first volume recounts Priestley’s early years in England; the second volume describes the final forty years of his life, with discussions of his discovery of oxygen, his activism in the Unitarian Church, and his life in the United States.

Uglow, Jenny. The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002. Describes how Priestley and other inventors and scientists formed the Lunar Society of Birmingham in the late 1700’s. The group’s members shared ideas for creating technological and scientific innovations and helped usher in the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.