We never spoke about it, but I suspect that my father had a particular soft spot for Joseph Priestly.
As someone trained as a chemist, my father would have known of and respected Priestly who died on February 6, 1804. He’s pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 20-cent stamp issued in 1983 and shown here on a special envelope from 1991.
My father would have known the Priestly either discovered oxygen or was the first to report on that discovery. He also would have known that Priestly discovered several other gases including ammonia, carbon monoxide, three nitrogen oxides, silicon tetrafluoride, and sulfur dioxide. And he might have known that Priestly invented carbonated water, which makes a special hero in my household, where we drink a lot of fizzy water.
Given this work, it’s not surprising that Priestly – who also helped found the Unitarian Church in England and the US—is something of a patron saint for chemists, particularly the American Chemical Society (ACS), which was founded in 1876 by a group of chemists who had met two years earlier in what had been Priestly’s home in Northumberland, PA. In fact, ACS’ highest award is the Priestly Medal, which since 1922 has been given to people for distinguished service in the field of chemistry. (Seventeen of the 93 recipients are Nobel laureates.). ACS has also designated his home in Pennsylvania a National Historic Chemical Landmark and later bestowed a similar moniker on one of the homes in England where he lived before his often controversial views forced him to move to the US.
The Priestly stamp – along with a stamp picturing Copernicus and one issued in 1951 to mark ACS’ 75 anniversary – was used on a special envelope and cancellation from the 4th annual Chemical Congress of North America, which was also ACS 202nd national meeting. Held in 1991, I believe this was the last meeting my father attended as the editor of ChemTech, a magazine published by ACS, that he founded and edited from 1970 until around 1991. (The envelope was among the pile of unmounted, unorganized items that were part of my father’s stamp collection.)
While it might seem odd that oxygen had to be “discovered,” as the ACS website notes, Priestly’s work “helped dethrone an idea that dominated science for 23 uninterrupted centuries-the concept, articulated by the Greeks, that air, along with earth, fire and water, was one of the four elemental components of creation. In a series of experiments culminating in 1774 Priestley found that is a mixture, of gases. Among them was the colorless and highly reactive gas he called “dephlogisticated air,” a name quickly replaced by “oxygen,” a term coined by the Antoine Lavoisier, the French scientist who in many ways is the true father of modern chemistry.
“It is hard to overstate the importance of Priestley’s revelation,” the ACS website notes. “Scientists now recognize 92 naturally occurring elements-including nitrogen and oxygen, the main components of air.” But the main reason, I think my father would have had a special appreciation for Priestly doesn’t relate to chemistry. Rather, it’s the fact the Priestly was a man of varied interests and talents.
As a 2004 symposium of Priestly Medal winners was titled, he was “working at the frontiers of chemistry.” Moreover, his ideas had an impact, as shown by the titles of an exhibit and symposium also mounted—”Joseph Priestley, Radical Thinker,” and “Joseph Priestley, Universal Catalyst: A Bicentennial Celebration of His Life.” All this refers to the fact that Priestly, was a controversial religious, political and moral philosopher who publicly advocated toleration and equal rights for religious dissenters and was a founder of the Unitarian Church in England. In 1791, these views, as well as his support for the French Revolution, led a mob to burn down his house in England. And in 1794, they led him to flee to the United States.
In the seven years before he became disabled, he spurred the founding of the country’s first Unitarian church (in Philadelphia), aroused the enmity of President John Adams and other Federalists, and became close to Thomas Jefferson, who adapted many of Priestly’s ideas about education when he founded the University of Virginia. “In the fields of science, religion, and politics,” Jenny Graham wrote in an American Philosophical Society publication, “Priestley had aroused an admiration, and a corresponding antagonism, for his fearless questioning of established dogma, for his pursuit of the truth as he perceived it as a result of experimental investigation and enquiry, and for his willingness to propagate the principles to which he adhered in order to challenge orthodoxy.”
Priesley wasn’t always, right, by the way. He believed in the phlogiston theory that postulated the existence of a fire-like element called phlogiston contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion and dismissed the growing field of chemistry.
Still, I’m sure my father would have particularly loved the man who questioned established dogma and challenged orthodoxy. While my father didn’t discover oxygen or helped found a new branch of Christianity, he was active, curious and involved. ChemTech, the magazine he edited, supposedly was for chemical engineers and included many chemistry-related articles that I didn’t understand.
But it also included pieces on whatever else might have captured his fancy, from management to world affairs, including some pieces he lifted (without telling me) from the newsletter I had edited for the then-new Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
And, like Priestley, my father could be quite wrong. He was, for example, a strong proponent of Linus Pauling’s theory that vitamin C in massive doses could prevent or cure colds and other infections. Nevertheless it was a unique publication. Sometime in the 1980s, the magazine and my father won some sort of national award. I don’t have the details, but I recall that the presenter noted that he was not happy when he was told he would be presenting the award to a chemistry-related magazine. But then, he added, he started reading ChemTech and was immediately drawn in by all of its non-technical content. So in his own way, my father was a “universal catalyst,” in the tradition of (and perhaps inspired by) the Priestley’s life and work.
Be well, stay safe, fearlessly question established dogma and challenge orthodoxy, fight for justice, and work for peace.