The Invention of Air

by Steven Johnson

  To find in America the same maxims of government, and the same proceedings, from which many of us fled from Europe, and to be reproached as disturbers of government there, and chiefly because we did what the court of England will never forgive in favour of liberty here, is, we own, a great disappointment to us, especially as we cannot now return. Had Dr. Price himself, the great friend of American liberty in England, or Dr. Wren, with both of whom I zealously acted in behalf of your prisoners, who must otherwise have starved, and in every other way in which we could safely serve your cause, because we thought it the cause of liberty and justice, against tyranny and oppression; I say, had either of these zealous, and active, and certainly disinterested, friends of America been now living, they would not have been more welcome here than myself; and they would have held up their hands with astonishment to see many of the old Tories, the avowed enemies of your revolution, in greater favour than themselves.

  As had been the case with the Birmingham Letter, the appeal to his Northumberland neighbors did little to quiet the more vitriolic of his critics. But many supporters of the Republican cause considered the Letters to be the most stirring and persuasive indictment of the Adams administration on record. Jefferson distributed copies to a dozen of his friends in Virginia, and wrote back to Priestley that the essays, along with Cooper’s, had been “the most precious gifts that can be made to us. . . . From the Porcupines of our country you will receive no thanks; but the great mass of our nation will edify & thank you.” He made no effort to conceal his visceral disgust with Adams, including a sly reference to the monarchical tendencies many saw in the current president: “How deeply have I been chagrined & mortified at the persecutions which fanaticism & monarchy have excited against you, even here!”

  THE TURBULENCE OF the Northumberland years would eventually subside. On March 3, 1801, Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as the third president of the United States. Several weeks later, inspired by news that Priestley had recovered from a serious illness, Jefferson sat down to write a letter to his friend in Northumberland. Rather than distance himself from the eclectic minister, he would embrace him, in what would prove to be one of the most important letters in the immense archive of Jefferson’s correspondence.

  The letter began with an extraordinary tribute to Priestley himself:

  It was not till yesterday I received information that you . . . had been very ill, but were on the recovery. I sincerely rejoice that you are so. Yours is one of the few lives precious to mankind, and for the continuance of which every thinking man is solicitous.

  After these opening salutations, Jefferson quickly shifted into an attack on the abuses of the previous administration and the furor of public opinion than had rained down on Priestley:

  What an effort my dear Sir of bigotry, in politics and religion, have we gone through! The barbarians really flattered themselves they should be able to bring back the times of Vandalism, when ignorance put everything into the hands of power and priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as innovations. They pretended to praise and encourage education, but it was to be the education of our ancestors. We were to look backwards, not forwards, for improvement; the President himself declaring in one of his answers to addresses that we were never to expect to go beyond them in real science. This was the real ground of all the attacks on you.

  “All advances in science were proscribed as innovations.” Jefferson is using the older, negative sense of the word “innovation” here: a new development that threatened the existing order in a detrimental way. (The change in the valence of the word over the next century is one measure of society’s shifting relationship to progress.) But that regressive age was now over, and Priestley—the most forward-thinking mind of his generation—could now consider himself fully at home:

  Our countrymen have recovered from the alarm into which art and industry had thrown them; science and honesty are replaced on their high ground, and you, my dear Sir, as their great apostle, are on its pinnacle. It is with heartfelt satisfaction that in the first moments of my public action, I can hail you with welcome to our land, tender to you the homage of its respect and esteem, cover you under the protection of those laws which were made for the wise and good like you, and disdain the legitimacy of that libel on legislation which under the form of a law was for some time placed among them.

  Perhaps inspired by the legendary optimism of Priestley himself, Jefferson then added some of the most stirringly hopeful words that he ever put to paper:

  As the storm is now subsiding, and the horizon becoming serene, it is pleasant to consider the phenomenon with attention. We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great extent of our Republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new. But the most pleasing novelty is, its so quietly subsiding over such an extent of surface to its true level again. The order and good sense displayed in this recovery from delusion, and in the momentous crisis which lately arose, really bespeak a strength of character in our nation which augurs well for the duration of our Republic, and I am much better satisfied now of its stability than I was before it was tried.

  This is politics seen through the eyes of an Enlightened rationalist. The American experiment was, literally, an experiment, like one of Priestley’s elaborate concoctions in the Fair Hill lab: a system of causes and effects, checks and balances, that could only be truly tested by running the experiment with live subjects. The political order was to be celebrated not because it had the force of law, or divine right, or a standing army behind it. Its strength came from its internal balance, or homeostasis, its ability to rein in and subdue efforts to destabilize it.

  The inaugural letters made it clear how much each man owed the other: Priestley had shown Jefferson a way out of his religious impasse, providing the intellectual bedrock for Jefferson’s Christian faith; he had composed, at great peril to himself, the most rousing defense of Republican values during the Alien and Sedition controversy; in the coming years, Priestley would help Jefferson plan out the curriculum for the new university that would be a key part of Jefferson’s intellectual legacy, returning Priestley to his original passion for educational reform. Jefferson, in turn, had been Priestley’s great champion inside the Adams administration, and had now offered him, as chief executive, “the protection of those laws which were made for the wise and good.”

  Greatly moved by Jefferson’s letters, Priestley forwarded some of them to Lindsey, with the remark: “[For] the first time in my life (and I shall soon enter my 70th year) I find myself in any degree of favour with the governor of the country in which I have lived, and I hope I shall die in the same pleasing situation.” He had lost the companionship of Mary, and the camaraderie of the Honest Whigs and the Lunar Society. But he had, at long last, found a government under which he could live in peace.

  PRIESTLEY AND JEFFERSON corresponded regularly during the first few years of the new administration. Priestley published a few scattered scientific papers, some of them still carrying the torch for his phlogiston theory, and he would send them down to Monticello or Washington to ensure that “Politicks not make [Jefferson] forget what is due to Science.” Jefferson would urge Priestley to relocate to the milder climate of Virginia: “The choice you made of our country for your asylum was honorable to it; and I lament that for the sake of your happiness and health its most benign climates were not selected.” They traded thoughts on how to make the curriculum at the University of Virginia as innovative as possible, “looking forward, not backwards, for improvement,” as always.

  Even with his health fading, Priestley remained amazingly prolific to the very end, publishing four new volumes in his General History of the Christian Church in 1803. But by the beginning of 1804, his chronic battle with indigestion had made him suddenly much more feeble. “Much worse: incapable of business,” he wrote in his diary on February 2nd. Three days later, awa
re that the end was near, he asked each of his grandchildren to visit with him separately at his bedside. “I am going to sleep as well as you,” he said to them, “for death is only a good long sound sleep in the grave, and we shall meet again.” The next morning he spent dictating corrections to Cooper and his son Joseph, for a batch of new pamphlets they planned to publish. When they read back the changes, he nodded in assent: “That is right; I have now done.” Forty minutes later, he was dead.

  A few days before his death, Priestley had sent a letter to a friend with one last request. “Tell Mr. Jefferson,” he wrote, “that I think myself happy to have lived so long under his excellent administration; and that I have a prospect of dying in it. It is, I am confident, the best on the face of the earth, and yet I hope to rise to some thing more excellent.”

  PRIESTLEY WAS BURIED in a Quaker cemetery in Northumberland. Many eulogies and tributes followed the news of his demise, as it slowly spread around the world. The American Philosophical Society held a memorial service in Philadelphia. The parishioners of the New Meeting House in Birmingham, built over the ruins of the church destroyed in the riots more than a decade before, wore mourning clothes for two months. From the pulpit at Mill Hill Chapel in Leeds, Priestley’s successor called him a “burning and shining light.”

  Yet Priestley’s maverick beliefs and cross-disciplinary thinking would damage his reputation in the coming decades. He became a kind of sacrificial lamb for the parallel developments of specialization and professionalization that dominated nineteenth-century science. Serious science became the province of experts and specialists, not dabblers and amateurs. Pioneering research—according to the new consensus—required that the scientist isolate himself from the external worlds of politics or faith, and not seek connections to them. The first volley of that attack arrived a few days before Priestley’s death, in a brief, caustic item that appeared in the Times of London: “Dr. Priestley’s health is said to be in a declining state; his reputation has long been. He left England for America, in search of Liberty, and has been laughed at by the Americans for his folly. Such is the natural, and merited close of a man’s life, who, a Christian teacher and a philosopher, left the highways of religion and science, for the crooked paths of politics.” But the more substantive rendition arrived a few years later in the Edinburgh Review, part of a lengthy assessment of Priestley’s memoirs, which had been published, along with some hagiographic commentary, by Thomas Cooper in 1805. The review scolded Priestley for his adventures into politics, but it also mounted a direct assault on his scientific method:

  He had great merit in the contrivance of his apparatus, which was simple and neat, to a degree that has never been equalled. . . . The truth is, however, that he was always too much occupied with making experiments, to have leisure either to plan them beforehand with philosophical precision, or to combine their results afterwards into systematic conclusions. . . . [He] seems to have been entirely forgetful of Bacon’s invaluable precepts, that experiments should not be many, but decisive, and that they should be preceded by certain limited hypotheses or conjectures. . . . Without these precautions . . . to make experiments, however numerous or however pretty, was merely to grope in the dark, and could scarely ever lead to valuable or certain conclusions. The greater part of Dr. Priestley’s experiments are exactly of this description. There is about as much philosophy in them, as in sweeping the sky for comets.

  The great French naturalist, Georges Cuvier, penned a more generous eulogy that nonetheless pointed to the same failings, along with Priestley’s stubborn refusal to abandon phlogiston: “He was the father of modern chemistry,” Cuvier famously wrote, “who never acknowledged his daughter.” Many formal accounts of Enlightenment science composed in the nineteenth century struggled to make sense of Priestley’s eccentric career. The entry on Priestley in the Dictionary of National Biography described his research as “often superficial.”

  Over time, though, the tide of opinion began to turn, led in part by the rise of environmental science in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1922, the American Chemical Society established the Priestley Medal for “distinguished service in the field of chemistry.” Statues and plaques in Leeds, Birmingham, and Northumberland now mark the important milestones in his life. (Though no memorial records the location of the London Coffeehouse, the site of so much Enlightenment-era inspiration.) The lab at Bowood house where he isolated oxygen became one of the first chemical landmarks named by the American Chemical Society in the early 1990s.

  More important, though, the values that Priestley brought to his intellectual explorations have never been more essential than they are today. The necessity of open information networks—like ones he cultivated with the Honest Whigs and the Lunar Society, and with the popular tone of his scientific publications—has become a defining creed of the Internet age. That is in part because the flow of information differs from the flow of energy in one crucial respect: there is a finite supply of energy, which means that tapping it is invariably a zero-sum game. (Burning Carboniferous fuel in steam engines during the eighteenth century leaves less in the ground for the twenty-first.) But the spread of information does not come with the same cost, particularly in the age of global networks. An idea that flows through a society does not grow less useful as it circulates; most of the time, the opposite occurs: the idea improves, as its circulation attracts the “attention of the Ingenious,” as Franklin put it. Jefferson saw the same phenomenon, and interpreted it as yet another part of nature’s rational system: “That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe,” he wrote in an 1813 letter discussing a patent dispute, “for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

  That new openness has helped nurture the kind of multidisciplinary thinking that was the hallmark of Priestley’s intellect. Fields like information theory, ecosystem science, and evolutionary theory rank among the most influential and generative scientific fields of the past fifty years, spawning debates that have unavoidable consequences for the spheres of politics and of faith (even if the presidential candidates usually try to avoid them). Priestley would have grasped immediately how so many of today’s discoveries are bound up in social and political affairs: global warming, stem-cell research, intelligent design, neuroscience, atomic energy, the genomic revolution, not to mention the massive social disruptions introduced by computer science in the form of the Internet. Building a coherent theory of the modern world without a thorough understanding of that science would have struck Priestley as a scandal of the first order.

  To be sure, the rising peaks of scientific progress means that specialization is an unavoidable reality: the facts are so much more complex than they were in Priestley’s day, thanks to two centuries of empirical research. Amateur chemists are not likely to discover new elements in their home laboratories anymore, which is itself a sign of progress. And Priestley’s critics from the nineteenth century had a legitimate point about the limits of his method: it took Lavoisier’s more systematic approach to define the new paradigm of modern chemistry. But to stop there is to miss the distinct kind of contribution that Priestley brought to the many fields he explored. That roving, untutored, connective intelligence was not particularly suited for defining the bylaws of a new scientific paradigm. But it was exceptionally well suited for exploding the old conventions, for pushing the field into its revolutionary mode. Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain. Every important revolution needs both kinds of minds to complete itself. Priestley himself grasped this quality in his work more clearly than either his critics or
his disciples: “It may be my fate to be a kind of comet, or flaming meteor in science,” he wrote in 1775, “in the regions of which (like enough to a meteor) I made my appearance very lately, and very unexpectedly; and therefore, like a meteor, it may be my destiny to move very swiftly, burn away with great heat and violence, and become as suddenly extinct.”

  NEARLY A DECADE after his death, that comet would sweep across the American sky one last time, and in doing so transform one of the great conversations in the history of political thought: the Jefferson-Adams letters. The falling out between the two ex-presidents had been so severe that the men lost all contact with each other for a decade, save one fitful and tense exchange in 1804, when Jefferson briefly corresponded with Abigail Adams. In early 1812, however, at the urging of their mutual friend Benjamin Rush, Adams and Jefferson began corresponding again, with Adams sending off the first amiable letter. It was the beginning of a conversation that would last another fourteen years, two aging patriarchs debating the meaning and future prospects of the grand American experiment that they themselves had engineered. It lasted all the way to that most implausible of endings: both men dying on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.