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The late
eighteenth century was a contentious time as violent as the
Crusades and as fertile as the Renaissance. It was a time
when many things changed in the Western world. People began
to question everything, which lead to revolutions, explorations,
and discoveries. One of the key people during this time was
Great Britain's Joseph Priestly, a minister, philosopher,
and amateur scientist whose curiosity and polite renegade
spirit lead to the founding of the Unitarian Church, the invention
of soda water, the development of ecosystem science, and the
discovery of oxygen. Until Priestly came along, everyone drank
plain water, went to the Church of England, and didn't think
too much about what that breathing business was all about.
Steven
Johnson, author of the controversial Everything Bad Is
Good for You, is a very entertaining writer who takes
a multi-disciplined approach to scientific history via the
biography of the little-known Priestly. The book will easily
engage readers who may not be particularly interested in history
or science, yet it is not at all dumbed down.
Today,
it's difficult to imagine that a minister would be so involved
in scientific exploration and political thought, but that
just shows how much things have changed. Politics, science,
and religion were always hot-button topics, but being actively
involved in all was not the dichotomy it might be now. In
general, smart people tended to be polymaths like Priestly
and his friends Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, all
of whom dabbled in a variety of enterprises and were able
to make a splash in many of them. Johnson explains how this
was a product of both the time and the society in which these
men moved. Although from a working class family, Priestly
had, as a married minister, a lot of free time which he filled
with writing, researching, and hacking around with gadgets
while his wife ran the house and took care of the children.
According to Johnson, leisure time is imperative to invention.
Johnson
describes Priestly's life very cinematically. Priestly was
eventually exiled from Great Britain, literally chased by
angry mobs carrying torches, whereupon he moved to the United
States. He was greeted as a hero, being the first exiled scientist
to move to America for intellectual freedom. However, a little
while later he was almost arrested under John Adam's Alien
and Sedition acts.
Like
Johnson's previous books, The Invention of Air takes
a "long zoom" approach to history, meaning that individual
biography is not enough to explore when writing critically
about history. Johnson adeptly incorporates science, politics,
religion, sociology, along with contemporary ideas like social
networking and the proliferation of ideas into his book.
Ostensibly,
The Invention of Air is about Priestly, but it's also
about how social networking works to foster new ideas among
its participants. Priestly spent many evenings at a local
coffee house, conversing with a group of scientific thinkers
called "The Club of Honest Whigs," who counted among its members
Benjamin Franklin. Club members drank copious amounts of coffee
and freely exchanged radical ideas about religion, science,
and politics. Buoyed by their support, Priestly began working
on his history of science written for the layperson, and from
there his life began to expand exponentially.
Because
of his social network at the boisterous coffee house, Priestly
made connections that afforded him resources that may have
otherwise been closed to a minister from a small town, who
just recently arrived in London. Instead, he was given access
to scientific libraries and an introduction to his soon-to-be
mentor, Franklin. The coffee house's comparison to networks
like Facebook and MySpace is obvious, and Johnson, in his
interdisciplinary approach, explains the importance of "external
information networks" to the process of innovation.
The
Invention of Air can sometimes be a little dense—a
tremendous amount of information is packed into its 272 pages.
Johnson has a lot of backstory to get to since Priestly has
become an almost unknown figure in the history of science,but
readers interested in the history of modern scientific and
political thought could ask for no better guide than Johnson.
(April,
2009)
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