Customer Reviews

The Invention of Air

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

I plowed through this light quasi-biography and couldn't understand why Johnson's effort never truly resonated until the very end. He makes some compelling connections across time and discipline but I found myself consistently wanting more: more detail, more evidence, more synthesis. I kept chalking my disappointments up to the notion that Johnson was purposely dumbing down the read to give it a broader audience - a mechanism employed at great peril but not without its merits. But I couldn't escape the sense that Johnson himself isn't quite sharp enough. He has big ideas, makes some fine observations, utilizes incisive methods (zooming out), and promotes the benefits of a broader, more integrated, less specialized approach to science but there is simply not enough substance to go around. Indeed, his writing is marginal and loaded with redundancies but the occasional historical tidbit (the Birmingham mob scene), and cross-disciplinary connection (revolution and the gulf stream) are sufficiently strong to keep one moving on through the book looking for more. Despite my misgivings, I really wanted to like this book but I found the tipping point on page 205. Johnson reveals he is not up to the task when he lumps intelligent design in with, "...so many of today's discoveries..." including stem cell research, neuroscience and the genomic revolution. It explains his unnecessary labeling of Jefferson as a Christian and exposing a religious bias at odds with his subject revealing an explanation for his inability to commit to it. Read it for what its worth not more.

Steven Johnson starts his very readable biography of Joseph Priestley with a brief aside on the 2008 Republican Presidential debate, where a show of hands was requested regarding belief in evolution (the only highlight from my perspective was that Sen. Fred Thompson refused). While this sort of willful anti-intellectualism is dismaying, to me it is of a piece with the faux-intellectualism that characterizes the "settled" science of anthropogenic climate change. In both debates we have a political and a voting class that is at best only partially literate in science. We have ceded the debate to "the guys in the lab coats", as Johnson puts it, and are probably the worse for it.

Priestley, in contrast, made a mark in all three spheres of religion, politics, and of course science. Johnson's description of Priestley's meteoric rise in "natural philosophy", as science was then termed, is fascinating. The sheer exuberance with which he experimented, tinkered, theorized, and wrote beggars belief. He popularized science, and his "History and Present State of Electricity" was the "A Brief History of Time" of its day. With a seemingly inexhaustible supply of ideas, electricity and air, Priestley deduced the existence of oxygen, created carbonated water, and gained the first insights into the ecosystem that supports plant and animal life on the planet. For these he received the highest science prize of his day, but that was only a part of his accomplishments.

He was perhaps the most prominent dissenter from the Church of England at a time when dissent was considered treason. He looked to the French Revolution as the next inevitable step of ongoing human progress begun in the Enlightenment and the American Revolution. These twin dissents proved too much for his countrymen, and he was forced to relocate from England to Pennsylvania for the final phase of his public life.

In the fledgling United States he was the prototype of the expatriate scientist that has so enriched this country, but he was also more. He critiques of excessive mysticism in Christianity influenced many, most notably Thomas Jefferson, and his rebuttal to the Alien and Sedition Act was considered by many to be a most stirring defense of Republican government. In a fitting coda to is life, even in death his ideas were debated in the letters of Jefferson and Adams.

Johnson account of this remarkable life is informative and entertaining. He does appear to strain at the confines of the traditional biographical narrative arc, with digressions on the many other luminaries whose paths crossed Priestley's. Including Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson broadens the narrative at the expense of exploring Priestly himself more deeply, but I think this does allow a reader to place Priestley's historical contribution in the proper context. Digressions by Johnson on the role a caffeine in the Enlightenment, the correlation between energy stores and ideas, and a discussion of the degree paradigm shifts are the work of "great men" versus historical forces are a mixed bag. Some of this is beyond the scope of such a book and ads some unevenness.

Overall, a worthwhile and enjoyable history of a man who deserves far better than the single entry (Priestley: discoverer of oxygen) he received in my history book.

4 stars.

Steven Johnson's "The Invention of Air" is a brief but sprawling assemblage of anecdotes, observations and extrapolations - a diverse and jumbled layering of various interrelated ideas that will undoubtedly entertain and encourage more diverse thinkers but might disappoint those looking simply for a "good read."

Johnson really seems to have at least four different tasks at hand with this work: articulating his Theory of History (which often takes center stage and stalls the particular history recounted here), celebrating more open and interdisciplinary approaches to building knowledge (implicit throughout), calling for greater respect and awareness of scientific methods and issues among our elected officials (a bit of a bracketing device for the book) - and telling the story of Joseph Priestley referenced by the book's title. It's an ambitious, worthwhile and thought-provoking undertaking (and one that serves as a good companion to Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers"), but ultimately I think the various objectives are not well-served by the meandering approach; Johnson jumps in and out of Priestley's story so frequently that it fails to flow and inevitably leads to key elements being relayed more than once in order to restore some momentum to the narrative.

The easy response to that objection is that the book is intended to emulate the dabblings of its protagonist, whose work was both multi-disciplinary and less-than-disciplined; indeed, Johnson more than once favorably mentions Priestley's bias to distribute early observations and half-formed hypotheses in order to get a larger conversation going, and few people would argue with the value of this approach to the many collaborations in which Priestley was engaged - so in that regard, "The Invention of Air" is a valuable contribution that would make Priestley proud. But the reality is that Johnson chose to publish this as a book (and not, for example, as a series of short blog entries, though elements of it have been tried out there), and the time and expense associated with such a medium affords an opportunity for the author - some might say even creates an obligation on behalf of the reader - to take more care in presenting the results of his research.

(A quick note for potential buyers: If you are familiar with Johnson's earlier work, you might consider this volume a small step back from the historical "Ghost Map" toward the half-personal, half-scientific "Mind Wide Open" and "Everything Bad is Good for You." If you are NOT familiar with his work and don't have a specific interest in this period of history, you might fare better starting with one of those and then returning here.)

A number of reviewers seem disappointed that this book is not a in-depth biography of Joseph Priestley, and it is not. Rather, it is a sketch of his eventful life intertwined with an embedded essay on the scientific method which is both intriguing of itself and helpful in understanding his place in the pantheon of formative "philosophers." Johnson is an excellent writer who demonstrates, if nothing else, that if Priestley wasn't very good at devising the answers to the conundrums he uncovered, he was very good indeed at asking the right questions. His relationships with Benjamin Franklin and other early American luminaries are alone worth the read, and, in all, the book is a brief and entertaining look at a very interesting man who made an outsized contribution to the science of his age. That's enough for me.

I love a good biography, especially one that is willing to provide enough context to make reasonable commentary on the present condition. This book is a great biography, and by encompassing history from 300M years ago to the present day (of the Long Now), it illuminates and critiques the present condition naturally.

What compelled me to read this book is the number of people who sought me out and said "you have to read this book--it talks about the open source software revolution two hundred years before open source software existed!" As President of the Open Source Initiative, I became curious why so many people were telling me this. Then answer is: it's true!

Steven Johnson does a great job with both the particulars and the general, making the story both exciting in its details and relevant in its impact and the way it informs understanding. His understanding of open source, and the way he finds the roots of open source in the discussions and collaborations between Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson are a welcome addition to the history of our movement.

I highly recommend this book to all who enjoy a good biography, a good telling of some history of science, and above all, to any who are interested in learning about how this revolutionary thinker, living in revolutionary times, sowed the seeds that would finally bear fruit in the software revolution of the 21st century.

Steven Johnson, author of the excellent "The Ghost Map", here takes on the life of Joseph Priestley. The best parts of this book are where he confines himself to the task at hand, and gives us details of that life. Priestley was a fascinating character, a brilliant chemist and one of the most influential scientists of his age. He was also a practicing clergyman, whose nonconformist views ultimately provoked such a storm in England that he had to flee to America with his family. He was friends with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; as a consequence of these friendships, he was to have substantial influence on the development of political thought in the fledgling democracy. Priestley wasn't brilliant all the time, of course - there was his notorious attachment to the phlogiston theory, as well as an unhealthy obsession with the Book of Revelation in the final years of his life. So the details of Priestley's life certainly provide more than adequate material for an interesting account.

Indeed, the book is at its most interesting when Johnson confines himself to filling in the biographical record. In particular, his account of the early work (discovery of what would later be termed Coulomb's Law, publication of the `History of Electricity', invention of soda water) and the two experiments which established Priestley's reputation (the work showing that plants synthesize oxygen, his later `discovery' of oxygen) is excellent.

Unfortunately, Johnson then seems to lose his moorings a bit. Understandably, he wants to put Priestley's scientific contributions in historical perspective. But this leads him to include lengthy swaths of what can only be called bloviation - ponderous musings about paradigm shifts, regrettable metaphors about the nature of scientific progress down the ages, and sentences like these:

Seeing human history as a series of intensifying energy flows is one way around the classic opposition between the Great Men and Collectivist visions of history.
What is the internal chemistry of a mob? Tellingly, mob behavior inevitably gravitates toward displays of intense energy transfer: the collective strength of a hundred enraged men pulling a building apart and unleashing the destructive, oxidizing force of combustion.

These chemistry metaphors are superficially appealing, but they don't hold up under scrutiny. More rigorous editing would have helped.

For a prolonged stretch in its middle third, the book ceases to be mainly about Priestley, degenerating instead into a kind of "look at me, I'm Steven Johnson, see how clever I am" morass. This is unfortunate, because Johnson's views on the nature of scientific progress are neither particularly original or illuminating.

Fortunately, things get back on track (more or less) for the remaining third of the book, describing the rising tide of violence that forced the Priestleys to flee to America and the scientist's final years in Pennsylvania.

Despite the misgivings expressed above, I really enjoyed this book, and have no hesitation in recommending it. But I do hope that Steven Johnson gets himself a better editor on his next project.

In the modern day science, politics and religion often keep one another at arms length. Indeed, even the scientists keep colleagues who focus on different sciences at a distance. However, this was not always the case.

Steven Johnson paints a picture of the world during the enlightenment. A time when friends in a coffeehouse were equally excited by Newton's postulations, Locke's treatises and the happenings in the American colonies. This is a world in which new ideas and even new disciplines could be born out of the mind and experiments of an amateur scientist operating out of a makeshift laboratory in his own home.

The protagonist of this story, if there can be said to be a protagonist, is Joseph Priestly, a man who played prominently in the lives and thoughts of the founding fathers of America, even if few modern Americans can do so much as recognize his name.

Priestly was a revolutionary in all senses of the word. He was a minister who was religiously radical. He was a scientist who would run as many tests as he could as often as he could and just wanted to see if he could get a result that would inspire him. He was also a man who held Benjamin Franklin in the highest esteem and came to support the revolution of Franklin's native land.

Out of his labors came fruit that would include the birth of the Unitarian movement, the idea of ecosystems, the notion of pure oxygen (although this idea would have to be fine-tuned), many of the ideas that would influence Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and even the production of seltzer water.

Priestly was a man who was living in the heart of the Enlightenment. One gets the idea that he could have subsisted on the sheer will and insight of the era alone. He was able to wed the driving forces in all of the arenas of his world into his life and we are all the richer for his undertakings.

Johnson captivates the reader and switches between a long view of history (sometimes offering causes that were millions of years old to explain events of the era) and a more proximate view of what was transpiring. He posits that it was the gulf stream that powered the lifestyles that shaped Priestly's career in the south of Britain and the coal produced by the plants of the Carboniferous Era that powered the industry that would finance Priestly's career in the north of Britain. In both cases, Priestly's investigations would be delving into the phenomena that powered his research. It might have been cyclical and self-referencing, but it was a not a vicious cycle. It was the most virtuous of cycles and it has powered thinkers until today.

The book makes for a tremendous read. If you are interested in the history of science, read this book. If you are fascinated by the driving forces behind the personalities involved in the American revolution, read this book. If you are curious about Enlightenment England, read this book. If you want to know more about religious radicalism and the movements it produced in the 18th and early 19th centuries, read this book.

It is an intoxicating, enrapturing and compelling book from start to finish and DEFINITELY worth a look.

I picked up this book thinking it might be an interesting read - and was delighted to find it was more than that. To tell the truth, I didn't remember anything about Joseph Priestly from what I was taugh at school - which was probably nothing more than a footnote. But I did know the name, having recently rewatched the documentary series "Connections" by James Burke. Even then, Priestly was just more of a segue into what Volta was doing with his own experiments with gases and his electric glass pistol. Reading about Priestly in connection with his activities with "The Club of Honest Whigs" reminded me a lot what I've heard about the early days of the PC computers - specifically the "Homebrew Computer Club". I recall watching the "Triumph of the Nerds" documentary series and I see a lot of commonality between the two times.

I wished the history classes I been subject to as a student had access to books like this one - instead of the standard dry fact filled textbooks. If they had maybe I would have paid more attention.