Religion & Spirituality
A Q&A with Steven Johnson
Why did you decide to write a book about Joseph Priestley, who is today such a relatively little-known figure?
What's the fun in writing about someone everyone already knows about? I think there's something exciting about taking historical figures who should be better know, and telling their story in a way that hopefully shows their importance to modern readers. That's exactly what I tried to do with John Snow in The Ghost Map—take a relatively obscure event and make the case for why it was one of the turning points in modern civilization. There's a comparable argument here with Priestley: not only was he a brilliant and influential scientist and intellectual, but he's a missing link between some of the most famous names in American history, a kind of "lost" founding father.
What connection did he have to America's Founders? How did he get to know Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson intimately?
Priestley got to know Franklin first, because of course Franklin lived in London for many years of his life. (In fact, had the conflict that led to the Revolutionary War not broken out, it's entirely likely that Franklin would have remained in London for the rest of his life.) They were both part of an informal club of scientists and political thinkers—Franklin dubbed it the "Club of Honest Whigs"—that met that the London Coffeehouse once every two weeks. He met Adams during the 1780s when he was Ambassador to England, and they had a somewhat volatile relationship the next decade after Priestley emigrated to America. Priestley didn't meet Jefferson until he moved to America, but the two men had a wonderful correspondence in the final years of Priestley's life.
How did he come to have such a major influence on them? What values and beliefs did he share with them?
One of the reasons that I think this story is so important to us today is that it sheds a new light on the values of the Founders when you recognize the importance of Priestley in their story. (Priestley is mentioned more than ten times as frequently as Washington or Hamilton in the famous Adams-Jefferson letters, after their reconciliation in 1812, which gives you some sense of his centrality.) One key value that they shared was an abiding belief in science and the enlightened progress that science had brought to the world. (Priestley called it "natural philosophy" in the language of the period.) The other was the recognition that this enlightenment would force us to reinvent all our old conventions and beliefs about religion, society, and politics. The idea of political figure adopting a know-nothing attitude towards the innovations of science would have been appalling to the Founders.
What were his major scientific discoveries? Was he really the first person to discover oxygen?
Priestley is most famous for discovering oxygen, but one of the interesting twists in the story of his life is that he didn't really discover oxygen first, and some of his analysis of what he had discovered turned out to be fundamentally flawed. Part of the argument of the book is that Priestley should be remembered more for another discovery of his, which in its own way was every bit as important: He was the first person to recognize that plants were creating oxygen. The original oxygen content of the earth's atmosphere was vanishingly small; the whole reason we have an atmosphere that we can breathe is because the plants manufacture oxygen for us. And Priestley was the first person to grasp that essential life-support system. (Interestingly, Franklin helped him understand the full implications of his discovery, so in a way, it was a collaboration between the two men.)
How is Priestley related to today's ecosystem science?
The discovery of plant respiration is now seen as one of the founding insights that ecosystem science is based on, but Priestley also played a key role in teasing out the energy flows of photosynthesis, and published an influential paper on the way animals use oxygen as an energy source via the bloodstream. Priestley helped sketch out the first draft of the cycle of life on Earth: plants convert the energy of light into chemical energy, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere and absorbing carbon dioxide; animals power themselves through the energy stored in plant tissue and oxygen itself, releasing carbon dioxide as a waste product.
How was he supported in his endeavors? And how was that support linked in a hidden way to the scientific discoveries he was making?
At various points in his life, Priestley drew a salary as a minister and a teacher, but he was also supported by a series of patrons, most notably Lord Shelburne, on whose estate he worked for most of the 1770s, and then the extended group of the Lunar Society in Birmingham, a band of pioneering industrialists who endowed Priestley with enough money in the 1780s to support his research and writing. The Birmingham magnates had themselves built their wealth by exploiting the stored energy of the coal deposits in the British Midlands; that coal was originally laid down during the massive spike in oxygen levels that occurred in the Carboniferous Era, thanks to the very process of plant respiration that Priestley had discovered.
How were Priestley's scientific discoveries tied to his religious writings and his political beliefs? Why was it so natural for him to move freely among science, religion, and politics and to make connections among them?
Simply put, the modern specialization and professionalization of knowledge—one of the defining developments of the 19th-century—simply hadn't happened yet. One of the things that I find so moving and intriguing about Priestley is that he was, in a sense, part of a dying breed: the amateur, the dabbler, the polymath who had his fingers in a dozen different fields. It's much harder to pull that sort of thing off today, in part because the fields have grown so much more complex, and in part because we have institutions that have solidified around each distinct field, prohibiting the kind of cross-breeding that Priestley and his peers reveled in.
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