The Invention of Air (Hardcover)

~ Steven Johnson (Author)
Key Phrases: mint experiment, wild gas, dephlogisticated air, Fair Hill, The Wild Gas, Lunar Society (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

SignatureReviewed by Simon Winchester This is an intelligent retelling of a rather well-known story, that of Joseph Priestley, the Yorkshire dissenting theologian and chemist, and then went on to emigrate to America and advised the creators of the new republic—Thomas Jefferson, most notably—on how best to run their country. Steven Johnson, who has a fine reputation for discerning trends and for his iconoclastic appreciation of popular culture, chooses his topics well. His most recent book, The Ghost Map, looked at the story—also very familiar—of the London cholera epidemic of 1854, and of the heroic epidemiologist, John Snow, who discovered the ailment's origins and path of transmission. It was a good story, but essentially a simple one. With Priestley, Johnson has now taken on a subject that is every bit as complex and multifaceted as any of the Quentin Tarantino films he so admires. Priestley was a scientist, true, and his meditations on the exhalations of gases from mint leaves and the curiosities of phlogiston and fixed air, his discoveries of sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, ammonia gas—and oxygen, most importantly—and his relationship with his French rival Lavoisier have been the stuff of schoolroom chemistry lessons for more than two centuries. But it is his politically liberal and spiritually dissenting views that underpin the story that Johnson chooses to tell—views that led in 1794 to Priestley, whose house in Birmingham had been sacked by rioters, emigrating to America, thereby becoming the first great scientist-exile, seeking safe harbour in America after being persecuted for his religious and political beliefs at home. Albert Einstein, Otto Frisch, Edward Teller, Xiao Qiang—they would all follow in Priestley's footsteps. Johnson unearths an interesting and illuminating statistic: in the 165 letters that passed between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the name Benjamin Franklin is mentioned five times, George Washington three times, Alexander Hamilton twice—and Joseph Priestley, a foreign immigrant, is cited no fewer than 52 times. The influence of the man—he was a fervent supporter of the French Revolution, a tolerant stoic and a rationalist utterly opposed to religious fundamentalism—was quite astonishing, and Steven Johnson makes a brave and generally successful attempt to summarize and parse the degree to which this influence infected the founding principles of the American nation. As a reminder of the underlying sanity and common sense of this country—a reminder perhaps much needed after the excesses of a displeasing presidential election campaign—The Invention of Air succeeds like a shot of the purest oxygen. Illus. (Jan. 2)Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman, is working on a biography of the Atlantic Ocean.
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From The New Yorker

The author of Everything Bad Is Good for You provides an entertaining account of the eighteenth-century scientist and radical Joseph Priestley's monumental discovery that plants restore "something fundamental"—what we now know as oxygen—to the air. Johnson also offers a clear-sighted and intelligent exploration of the conditions that are propitious to scientific innovation, such as the availability of coffee and the unfettered circulation of information through social networks. The members of the networks that Priestley belonged to, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, provide Johnson with some of his strongest material. But he sometimes overstates the relationship between politics and science, particularly when he strains to make the case that Priestley, after fleeing England in 1794, became a pivotal figure in the formation of the American republic.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; 1 edition (December 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594488525
• ISBN-13: 978-1594488528
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #64,990 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Erudite Assessment of the Life, Times and Ideas of One Man, December 26, 2008

By	Eric F. Facer "E. Facer" (Centreville, VA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Steven Johnson has written an engaging book about Joseph Priestley, a true Renaissance Man who contributed mightily to the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th Century. Priestley was a remarkable individual who distinguished himself in several different fields: theology, chemistry, science, politics, philosophy, history and technology. He was also a prolific writer who had the good fortune of hobnobbing with the best and the brightest of his day: Franklin, Lavoisier, Jefferson, Canton and Adams, to name just a few.

Johnson does an exceptional job of telling Priestley's story, explaining his scientific discoveries, political philosophies, and theological insights, and putting them all in their proper context. But he goes one step further: he endeavors to explain why Priestley accomplished what he did. He doesn't just focus on Priestley's character traits and native intelligence (both of which were extraordinary); rather, he attributes much of the man's success to his environment, to his friends, to the evolution of technology, and, quite simply, to good fortune. At a time when we are inundated with trendy books that pander to the public's appetite for facile explanations of complex processes (e.g., "Blink," "Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious," etc.), it is refreshing to see someone acknowledge that scientific discoveries, sociological insights and great ideas more often than not take years to evolve and are the product of numerous variables, many of which remain a mystery.

Priestley's enthusiasm, openness and child-like fascination with the world around him are infectious. Though he was not without shortcomings and, on occasion, got things completely wrong, Priestley was an intellectual giant upon whose shoulders many great scientists, philosophers and discoverers will continue to stand well into the 21st Century. And Mr. Johnson has rendered a valuable service by re-telling Mr. Priestley's story from a fresh and enlightening perspective. Highly recommended.

48 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Thinking Man Called Gunpowder Joe, January 2, 2009

By	Katie Osborne (Portland, Oregon and the sunny Caribbean) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

Joseph Priestly's discovery of Oxygen and the fact that the Earth's air is made up of different gasses was as revolutionary as the American and French Revolutions, two causes he supported. He was a minister and a man of ideas when he first wandered into the London Coffee House, where a group who called themselves the "Honest Whigs" met and gabbed. One famous member of the group was Ben Franklin who would become a lifelong friend of Priestly's.

It was while drinking coffee with these men that Priestly grew interested in Science, but he also held deep beliefs in civil liberties, religion and a host of other subjects, some very unpopular. For example he didn't believe in the divinity of Christ. And it was his unpopular support of those two revolutions that earned him the nickname Gunpowder Joe.

Priestly left London for Birmingham where he formed a friendship with a group of thinkers who met every month on the full moon. These were the Lunar Men and they called themselves Lunaticks and they financed Priestly's scientific experiments.

Priestly eventually left England for America and Pennsylvania, where he continued his lifelong support of civil liberties. He corresponded often with Thomas Jefferson and disagreed with President Adams over his Alien and Sedition's Act. Priestly was a major thinker of his day and made an indelible stamp on American History, Science and Religion and this book makes the man and his times come to life.

Mr. Johnson has turned out a very readable book, one that took me three long nights to get through. I am a fast reader, but I found myself stopping several times during the narrative to think. Imagine that, sitting and thinking. It's been over two centuries since Gunpowder Joe breathed the air he defined, since those days when thinking and discussing things thought about were so important. I wonder what he'd make of the twenty-four hour news cycle, cable news, spin and spin doctors. It seems there's not much room for thought anymore. Who has the time? Maybe we should make some.

Reviewed by Captain Katie Osborne

108 of 136 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but should only be used with caution, January 7, 2009

By	Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

I enjoyed this book even while I quickly came to distrust it. Although it wasn't one of my areas of specialization, I did some work on the history of science while in grad school and I even had a job transcribing the lectures of a prominent philosopher of the history of science. To supplement this I read a number of key books focusing on the history of the discipline.

The problem I have with this book is that it is misleading. To steal a phrase of Somerset Maugham (writing about himself), Joseph Priestley is a good scientist of the second rank. In virtually every account of the history of science or intellectual history he is regarded as a talented dilettante, a gifted amateur. He certainly played a role in the history of science, performing experiments that more important thinkers were able to utilize to further science, but Priestley himself frequently failed -- and Johnson does hint at this without emphasizing its significance -- to understand the full implications of the results of his experiments. He was extremely weak as a theoretician, which is why he is not accounted among the great scientists.

Why is this misleading? Well, historians of science do not regard Priestley as a key or even especially important figure. At no point does Johnson hint that this is the widespread assessment of Priestley's place. It is a tad misleading to state that his contemporaries had one opinion without proceeding to remark that their successors do not share that opinion. Johnson talks of Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley as the two leading chemists, but it is intensely deceptive to talk as if they were competitors for pride of place. Lavoisier is one of the great geniuses in the history of science. In fact, modern chemistry is usually credited with beginning with him.

Another example. Any credible account of the history of the theory of ecosystems is not going to begin or even include Joseph Priestley, but Johnson implies that the science began with him. This is a preposterous stretch.

In other words, the book is simply not reliable. It doesn't attempt to disclose the general opinion of Priestley's place in history by philosophers and historians of science. By leaving this all unsaid, he implies that Priestley was a much more important than in fact he was.

All of this is a tremendous disservice to Priestley, who while not a genius and not a scientist or thinker of the first rank, was unquestionably an immensely interesting and fascinating figure. The problem with the book is that it wants to go beyond this to portray Priestley as something that he was not. He definitely played a role in the growth of science. But he was not an Antoine Lavoisier.

Still, if one grasps this fundamental weakness in the book, it can be a fun and interesting lead. Much like another Englishman whose interests ran in all imaginable directions, the Rev. George Berkeley (who had a town adjacent to San Francisco named after him), he is an immensely likable individual. One is impressed by his passionate quest for knowledge, his generosity of spirit, his progressive attitudes, and his great goodheartedness. I'm not quite sure why Joseph Priestley as he actually was seemed inadequate to Johnson; I'm not sure why such a fundamentally sympathetic figure needed to be elevated to a pivotal figure in the history of science.

So I'm in a dilemma about this book. It is a fun and interesting read. And it does a good job of explaining why we should care about Joseph Priestley. Yet he outrageously exaggerates his place in thought. I had other problems with the book (some of his metaphors are stretched to the extreme), but this was the major one. It reminds me of various rock historians who try to make us believe that the Doors and Jim Morrison were the equal of the Beatles, the Who, and the Rolling Stones, whereas in fact they didn't even come up to the level of the Kinks.

I do completely agree with Johnson about one thing. The incredible narrowness of most supposedly educated people today is appalling. Johnson begins the book by quoting a former undergraduate classmate of mine, Mike Huckabee (who even in the couple of theology classes we had together at Ouachita Baptist University did not especially distinguished himself), who when running for president disdained the knowledge of science (actually, he was trying to avoid stating that he denied the validity of science). Modern science actually began among Christians who believed that the universe, as the creation of a rational God, had a logical, rational structure that his creatures, created in his image, could understand. Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes, for instance, were deeply religious and practicing Christians (Newton wrote far more on Christian prophecy, for instance, than he did on physics, while Descartes' entire project was to create a view of the world compatible with the Christian Platonism of Augustine rather than the Aristotelianism of Thomas) Aquinas. Both would have found Huckabee's irrationalism un-Christian. No doubt one of Huckabee's motives was to avoid alienating minimally educated individuals who would have found his no-nothingism grounds for disqualification in a presidential candidate. But it is also quite true that far too many people today do not strive to comprehend the world around them. I find Joseph Priestley's passion for knowledge to be both admirable and inspirational. But it doesn't elevate him to the level of the top rungs of science. He was not a Lavoisier. He was several rungs below a James Clerk Maxwell. And frankly I believe one of the disservices of the book was to make Priestley take on a role that does not befit him. As I said earlier, he was a good scientist of the second rank. He was, however, an absolutely outstanding human being.