Joseph Priestley, Natural Philosopher

Abstract

In this two hundredth anniversary year of his death, we are met to celebrate the life and career of Joseph Priestley—and most of us celebrate the wrong man, for the wrong reasons. We celebrate the pneumatic chemist who, in a flurry of random experiments made over a period of five years, isolated and partially identified nine new gases, including oxygen—and the man who spent roughly five times as long perversely fighting the new chemistry based on his own discoveries. This man, as Georges Cuvier was to put it in the eloge written for the Academie Nationale des Sciences, was a father of modern chemistry but refused to recognize his own daughter (1).

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