Joseph Priestley

All the lives have been carefully revised and considerable additions made.

While in order to render the present book a more complete compendium of the great men of that period, an appendix has been added containing the memoirs of Black, Court, Ivory, and Priestley, who unfortunately were, from different reasons, unable to be included in the group in the engraving.

With the exception of the notices of Trevithick, Tennant, Maudsley, Francis Ronalds, and one or two more, these memoirs necessarily contain little information which has not been previously published in some shape or other.

The authorities from which the present particulars have been taken are given at the end of each memoir, and the writer claims no further merit than that of having compiled and arranged the works of others, whose language in most cases it would indeed be presumption in him to alter, further than was necessary to present to the public in a clear, brief, and it is hoped, readable form the doings of men who must ever be held in the grateful remembrance of their country.

Thus it was found that a pound of gold being heated to 150 degrees and added to a pound of water at 50 degrees, the temperature of both became not 100 degrees, the mean between the two, but 55 degrees, the gold losing 95 degrees and the water gaining 5 degrees, because the capacity of water for heat is 19 times that of gold.

So twice as much heat is required to raise water to any given point of sensible heat as to raise mercury, the volumes of the two fluids compared being equal.

The true doctrine of combustion, calcination of metals, and respiration of animals, which Lavoisier deduced from the experiments of Priestley and Scheel upon oxygen gas and of Cavendish on hydrogen gas, was founded mainly upon the doctrines of latent and specific heat.

And it was thus the singular felicity of Black to have furnished both the pillars upon which modern chemistry reposes.

When he talked, people listened.

One of the people listening at the time was a school teacher and Unitarian minister named Joseph Priestley, who had spent the past several years teaching at a dissenting academy in Warrington, far from London's scientific societies.

In December of 1765, though, Priestley traveled to London and talked his way into a meeting of a club called the Honest Whigs, where Franklin is a regular attendee.

Priestley has a specific pitch at this meeting, Nobody has ever written a proper history of the study of electricity, and he wants to be the one to do it.

Scientists who came after him knew exactly who he was.

Joseph Black, Henry Cavendish, Joseph Priestley, Lavoisier, Humphrey Davy, major names.

And in Britain, his scientific reputation was once described as second only to Newton.

Let's have that again.

It, right? I mean, am I-

So there's this, there's this brilliant 18th century essay by Jan Ingenhousz, who's, like, the real discoverer of photosynthesis is said to be Priestley, Joseph Priestley.

But Ingenhousz was, like, the next person, um, to make significant insights into how photosynthesis works.

And so he published this terrific essay called, um, um, uh, o- on the Nature of Vegetable Matter.

Was he also referring to the overall? That's an interesting and a nuanced question.

"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man." This is an alteration of a much larger statement that was written in a letter by Jefferson to English theologian Joseph Priestley.

He was speaking personally to Priestley in a letter, and he was criticizing systems that perverted Christian philosophy, which he also referred to as sublime and benevolent.

Now, we know Jefferson was a deist.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Memoirs of the Distinguished Men of Science of Great Britain, Living in the Years 1807 and 8 By William Walker, Jr. Joseph Priestley, Doctor of Laws Born March 24, 1773 Died February 26, 1804 Joseph Priestley was the son of a cloth dresser at Birstall Fieldhead, near Leeds.

His family appeared to have been in humble circumstances, and he was taken off their hands after the death of his mother by his paternal aunt, who sent him to a free school at Batley.

There he learnt something of Greek, Latin, and a little Hebrew.

It may be guessed too that here, as at Monticello, he made his usual observations, noting in his diary the temperature, jotting down in the garden book which he kept for 30 years an item or two about the planting of vegetables and recording, as he continued to do for eight years, the earliest and latest appearance of each comestible in the Washington market.

Perhaps he made a few notes about the seeds of the assembling Cucurbita vermiosa and squash Cucurbita malopipo, which he proposed to send to his friend Philip Matzi with directions for planting, or even wrote a letter full of reflections upon bigotry in politics and religion to Dr. Joseph Priestley, whom he hoped soon to have as his guest in the President's house.

Toward noon Mr. Jefferson stepped out of the house and walked over to the Capitol, a tall, rather loose-jointed figure with swinging strides symbolizing, one is tempted to think, the angularity of the American character.

A tall, large-boned farmer, an unfriendly English observer called him.

We also discovered oxygen.

So between the 1770s and the 1780s, Carl Wilhelm Schiele in Sweden and Joseph Priestley in England and Antoine Levesoir in France independently discovered the element we call oxygen, began to understand how it worked in the human body.

Early researchers were really confused about the exchange of gases.

I mean, imagine trying to wrap your head around this in the mid-1770s.