The Invention of Air

by Steven Johnson

  If the small group patronage model did not work quite as well in practice as it did in Priestley’s theory, given his less-than-stellar record of natural philosophy during his Fair Hill years, it was not that the intellectual ecosystem in Birmingham failed to support great scientific research. You couldn’t blame Priestley’s phlogiston problems on his patrons in the Lunar Society, after all. If the Birmingham scene had a deleterious effect on Priestley’s science, it was an indirect one, in that the new environment liberated Priestley’s political and theological radicalism, which drew him into a series of distracting new controversies. Priestley could well have done his finest natural philosophy in his new lab at Fair Hill, but, like Franklin before him, the “transitory” world of politics finally pulled him into its orbit.

  If you listen to Priestley’s private voice, in the letters to Franklin and Price and Canton that began in the late sixties, it’s clear that this radicalism was there all along. He simply didn’t have an independent economic platform stable enough to support a full-throated rendition of his beliefs, though the works he did publish still managed to offend their fair share of authorities, from the king on down. But the Lunar Men gave him cover, because they were each, in their different ways, as radical as Priestley, despite the fact that some of them were captains of industry. Not just because the Lunaticks were unusually tolerant to maverick ideas, but also because their economic and political interests aligned them with Priestley’s radicalism.

  Here once again we find the Carboniferous age altering the course of eighteenth-century British politics. The fact that the coal measures were centered in northern England shifted the nation’s economic balance of power away from the prosperous rural estates of Sussex, Essex, and Kent. The agrarian capitalism that thrived in those regions was itself a story of energy flows: the relatively balmy south of England was optimized for capturing energy directly from the sun, and so farming communities settled there in the Middle Ages, ultimately creating a thriving agrarian economy, particularly after the enclosures and improvements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries greatly increased the yield of the farm system. That temperate maritime climate owed its existence to the massive energy transfer of Franklin’s “gulph stream,” which keeps England far warmer than it should be given its distance from the equator. London, after all, lies in the same latitude as Newfoundland, where it regularly snows as late as May, and the average temperature in July peaks at 55 degrees. Without the Gulf Stream, England’s green and pleasant land would be covered by snowpack six months of the year.

  Those patterns of energy flow replicated themselves in the patterns of human settlement, with the population centers clustering in the sunnier and more fertile southern regions, starting in the Middle Ages. Naturally, political power also settled around these energy-rich environments; by Priestley’s time, 70 percent of the House of Commons represented boroughs south of the imaginary line between Bristol and London.

  The south possessed a natural environment that was better suited for extracting energy from live plants; the north for extracting energy from plants that had died 300 million years ago. But that Carboniferous energy was useless without the technology to pull it out of the ground and put it to work. Humans could live prosperously in the south with the older techniques of mass farming, but the stored energy of the north required the technologies of industrialization for it to be valuable.

  When those technologies arrived, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the social transformation they unleashed was swift and violent. Its lucrative metal trades fueled by nearby coal deposits in South Staffordshire and Warwickshire, Birmingham would double in size every thirty years through the 1700s, creating a new class of untitled magnates like Boulton and the Wilkinsons, and a newly urban laboring class toiling on the factory floors. The demographic changes were as dramatic as any England had experienced in her history as a nation, and yet the composition of Parliament remained constant, like a fossil in a swirling sandstorm. Birmingham, the fourth-largest city in the country, with nearly 70,000 residents, did not have a single representative in Parliament. This was the great politico-economic disconnect of eighteenth-century England: the map of Parliament was based on a map of England’s energy supply circa A.D. 1300. The nation was surging through the Industrial Revolution, but its political system was still trapped in its agrarian past.

  For the emerging magnates of the Lunar Society, then, life in Birmingham was a sort of smaller-scale rendition of the colonies’ taxation without representation. They were creating immense wealth and technological supremacy without a single Parliamentary seat. That economic and geographic situation instilled a deep-seated opposition to the archaic structures of the British establishment. Most of the Lunar Men were religious Dissenters as well, and thus doubly ostracized by the Parliamentary system. Recall Priestley’s line about the “English hierarchy” with its potentially “unsound constitution.” If they had reason to “tremble at an air pump,” they had even more to fear from a steam engine.

  Herein lies the unique value proposition the Lunar Men saw in Joseph Priestley: as a scientist, he could improve the efficiency of their steam engines and ironworks; and as a famously prolific political engagé, he could fight for the reform that those booming factories had made necessary. Birmingham lay at a rare historical nexus: rapidly accumulating wealth that was simultaneously dedicated to overthrowing the status quo. No wonder, then, that Priestley’s published voice grew bolder during his Birmingham years. He was riding the crest of a great dialectical wave: a massive swell of new capital headed toward the shore, intent on destroying all the ancient structures in its path.

  Priestley would spend eleven years at Fair Hill, almost exactly the same duration he spent at Leeds and Calne, and in a sense, the two periods run parallel to each other. For Priestley had a second “streak” during his tenure in Birmingham in the 1780s publishing some of that turbulent decade’s most influential and incendiary tracts of political and theological writing, shaping events and minds in England, America, and France. Here again the long zoom approach turns out to be essential to understanding how this second streak came into being: Priestley’s own private intellectual commons, where ideas from different disciplines were allowed to mingle and procreate; the information networks of the Lunar Society, with its comparable diversity of expertise and interest; the economics of small-group patronage, which was itself made possible by the capital accumulations of early industrialization; the Parliamentary conflicts that were ultimately shaped by energy deposits that had originally been captured from the sun before the age of dinosaurs. So when we try to answer the question of what drove Priestley up the mountain of radicalism during his sojourn in Fair Hill, we can answer the question in part by using the traditional methods of explanation: we can trace his intellectual lineage, and perform close readings of his published work and correspondence; we can describe the political pressures and conflicts of the time and explain how Priestley engaged with them. But the long view is just as essential; the wealth that the Carboniferous made possible literally paid his bills during that period; and the clash between the two energy systems—the coal deposits and the Gulf Stream—created a political climate that cultivated and nourished his radical views in crucial ways.

  There is one key distinction between Priestley’s two streaks, however. Priestley’s hot hand in the 1770s ended with the whimper of his falling out with Shelburne. But his Fair Hill years ended with an inferno.

  THE FINAL CRISIS that sent Priestley into exile was prefaced by three main controversies during the 1780s, like a series of ominous tremors leading up to a devastating earthquake. The first was the publication, in 1782, of his History of the Corruptions of Christianity. Originally envisioned as a supplement to the fourth edition of Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, Priestley’s catalogue of all the supernatural garnish that had been layered over the original edifice of Christianity grew so extensive that he ended up publishing it as a stand-alone
two-volume work. The Corruptions was a kind of historical deconstruction of the modern Church, isolating every instance of magic and mysticism—starting, of course, with the divinity of Jesus Christ, and the existence of a Holy Ghost—and tracing each back to the distortions of Greek and Latin theologians starting in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., around the time of the Council of Nicea. The Corruptions opens with a meticulous assault on the Trinity, which takes up the first quarter of the book, then widens into a long litany of smaller abuses, the false mysticisms of the Eucharist, predestination, the immateriality of the soul, the Last Supper. The chapter on saints and angels strikes a typical note of disdain for contemporary beliefs, explaining not only the errors of the modern view, but the evolutionary path that led to those errors:

  The idolatry of the Christian church began with the deification and proper worship of Jesus Christ, but it was far from ending with it. For, from similar causes, Christians were soon led to pay an undue respect to men of eminent worth and sanctity, which at length terminated in as proper a worship of them, as that which the heathens had paid to their heroes and demi-gods, addressing prayer to them, in the same manner as to the Supreme Being himself. The same undue veneration led them also to a superstitious respect for their relics, the places where they had lived, their pictures and images.

  Priestley had no patience for the millions of Christians—in England and elsewhere—who deified the saints. They were indistinguishable from “those who bowed down to wood and stone, in the times of Paganism.”

  Despite those repudiations, Priestley took great care in The Corruptions to present the book as a defense of the Christian faith, restoring it to the original values of Jesus himself, and the “primitive” fathers who worshiped a single god and had no room for supernatural explanations of life on Earth. “If I have succeeded in this investigation,” he explained in the preface, “this historical method will be found to be one of the most satisfactory modes of argumentation, in order to prove that what I object to is really a corruption of genuine Christianity, and no part of the original scheme.” The Corruptions took the historical approach of Priestley’s first great book, on electricity, and played the tape backward: instead of a historical narrative of ever-increasing knowledge, it was a tale of ever-increasing obfuscation and error. To climb the mountain of Christian understanding, you had to go back to the very origins of the story.

  For some of Priestley’s peers, a work like The Corruptions presented a strange conundrum: how could it not occur to a radical materialist like Priestley that the very concept of God itself—whether it be Unitary, or Trinitarian, or Pagan—was the ultimate instance of supernatural thinking, the core distortion at the heart of most of the world’s religions? (When he met with Lavoisier and other philosophes in Paris in 1774, they were startled to find that such an accomplished scientist was also a man of faith.) In The Corruptions, Priestley spends dozens of pages marshaling evidence showing how fifth-century theologians concocted the idea that God and Jesus were one, breaking from the original narrative that God had merely created Jesus to be a human messenger of his Word. But to someone existing outside the belief structure of Christianity—and even more, someone existing outside all organized religions—the two narratives would both seem to be in dire need of empirical evidence. If you don’t believe in God, it’s just as implausible to suggest that Jesus was a man created by God as it is to say that Jesus was God.

  The concept of the nonexistence of the Christian God seems to have been a thought that Priestley was incapable of fully confronting. To a true atheist, the nonexistence of God defines the very edges of Priestley’s intellectual map, the point beyond which he was unwilling to venture, the theological equivalent of phlogiston. But for a contemporary person of faith, the story reads differently: a religious man forced to alter and reinvent his beliefs—and challenge the orthodoxies of the day—in the light of science and history, who was nonetheless determined to keep the core alive. Priestley was a heretic of the first order who nonetheless possessed an unshakable faith. He seems to have been baffled by his intellectual peers who had made the leap into atheism. Priestley found it “lamentable” that a man of Ben Franklin’s “good character and great influence should be an unbeliever in Christianity.” But he attributed Franklin’s non-belief to a lack of proper study. He wrote in his memoirs: “To me, [Franklin] acknowledged that he had not given so much attention as [he] ought to have done to the evidences of Christianity, and desired me to recommend to him a few treatises on the subject.” Priestley loaded him up with some Hartley and a few volumes from his own Institutes, “but the American war breaking out soon after, I do not believe that he ever found himself sufficiently at leisure for the discussion.”

  But if Priestley failed to bring Franklin back among the faithful, he would have much better luck with another founding father with strong deist tendencies: Thomas Jefferson. Ironically, it was The Corruptions itself—a work devoted to dismantling so many of the central values of modern Christianity—that finally gave Jefferson enough philosophical support to call himself a Christian again.

  It is not known when Jefferson first read The Corruptions. The edition in his famously comprehensive library—the seed of the modern Library of Congress—dates from 1793, and it seems likely that Jefferson read the book somewhere in that period, during his short-lived retirement back to the cerebral life of Monticello after serving as Washington’s secretary of state. (Given Jefferson’s exhaustion with the increasingly petty and partisan bickering of the new nation’s leadership, reading a 300-page treatise on radical theological history would likely have been pure escapism for him.) What we know for certain is that the book made an indelible impression on Jefferson. Twenty years later, he would write to John Adams: “I have read [Priestley’s] Corruptions of Christianity, and Early Opinions of Jesus, over and over again; and I rest on them . . . as the basis of my own faith. These writings have never been answered.” Shortly after assuming office as president in 1801, Jefferson wrote a much scrutinized letter to Benjamin Rush, defending his Christian beliefs against the many attacks he suffered during the contest with John Adams: “I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing himself every human excellence and believing he never claimed any other.” He prefaced this momentous declaration with a direct reference to Priestley: “To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.” When he constructed the legendary Jefferson Bible—a mash-up of original scripture, in which Jefferson selectively edited out all the references to Jesus’ divinity and other supernatural elements—he was following a blueprint that Priestley had first drawn up in 1782.

  Why did The Corruptions have such a profound effect on Jefferson? In one crucial sense, the book helped him find a way out of a bind he had struggled with for years. Alone with Franklin, Jefferson was the founder who most clearly embodied the Age of Reason, and while he never reached Franklin’s level of accomplishment as a practicing scientist, he had a great passion for natural philosophy. (And for natural history, as evidenced by rich botanical and geological studies in the only book he ever published, Notes on the State of Virginia.) For most of his adult life, he had struggled to reconcile that faith in reason with a faith in the Christian God—or indeed in any organized religion. (“I am a sect by myself, as far as I know,” he wrote.) His deistic tendencies were well known, and deployed against him throughout his public life, particularly in the campaign against Adams in 1800-01. (The pamphleteers also accused him of fathering children with one of his slaves, a charge that we now know was true—yet another reminder that political mudslinging is as old as the Union itself.) Jefferson’s Enlightenment sensibilities made it difficult for him to keep his Christian faith alive, but the political realities of the day made it equally difficult for him to renounce Christ altogether. Priestley’s Corruptions showed him the way out. Christianity was not the prob
lem; it was the warped, counterfeit version that had evolved over the centuries that he could not subscribe to. Thanks to Priestley, he could be a Christian again in good faith—indeed, his Christianity would be purer, more elemental, than that of believers who clung to the supernatural trappings of modern sects.

  The Corruptions resonated so strongly with Jefferson for another, more poetic, reason. The narrative structure of Priestley’s story—an original state of purity and grace and moral cohesion, subsequently contaminated by schemers, charlatans, and elites—had a recurring presence in Jefferson’s worldview, most notably in what he called the “ancient Whig principles” of the original Anglo-Saxon culture: “a long-lost time and place,” as the historian Joseph Ellis describes it, “where men had lived together in perfect harmony without coercive laws or predatory rulers,” viciously warped by generations of kings, priests, and urban financiers into the loathsome form of eighteenth-century England. Just as Monticello—and the agrarian lifestyle in general—offered Jefferson a way back to that promised land, Priestley’s Corruptions pointed the way to an equivalently pristine origin point where he could “rest his faith” without compromise. No doubt Jefferson admired Priestley’s scholarship and his nimble close readings. But The Corruptions also made such an indelible impression for a simpler reason: it was the kind of story that Jefferson liked to hear.

  IN THE BRITAIN of 1782, however, the story of Priestley’s Corruptions did not fall on such sympathetic ears. Unsurprisingly to everyone but perhaps Priestley himself, The Corruptions stirred up an intense backlash after its publication, led by the Archdeacon Samuel Horsley, who denounced the work as an “extraordinary attempt . . . to unsettle the faith, and break up the constitution, of every ecclesiastical establishment.” Horsley, who shared Priestley’s passion for science, had nothing but contempt for dissenters, and he took the publication of The Corruptions as an opportunity to challenge Priestley’s general reputation, dismissing his Copley Medal as the result of a few “lucky” discoveries and extracting a long list of mangled quotations and circular arguments from Priestley’s oeuvre. Priestley soon got drawn into this “rude attack”—as he called it—and the melee continued for several years.