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Steven Johnson

The Invention of Air Hardcover – Bargain Price, December 26, 2008

by Steven Johnson (Author)

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Bestselling author Steven Johnson recounts—in dazzling, multidisciplinary fashion—the story of the brilliant man who embodied the relationship between science, religion, and politics for America’s Founding Fathers.

The Invention of Air is a book of world-changing ideas wrapped around a compelling narrative, a story of genius and violence and friendship in the midst of sweeping historical change that provokes us to recast our understanding of the Founding Fathers.

It is the story of Joseph Priestley—scientist and theologian, protégé of Benjamin Franklin, friend of Thomas Jefferson—an eighteenth-century radical thinker who played pivotal roles in the invention of ecosystem science, the discovery of oxygen, the founding of the Unitarian Church, and the intellectual development of the United States. And it is a story that only Steven Johnson, acclaimed juggler of disciplines and provocative ideas, can do justice to.

In the 1780s, Priestley had established himself in his native England as a brilliant scientist, a prominent minister, and an outspoken advocate of the American Revolution, who had sustained long correspondences with Franklin, Jefferson, and John Adams. Ultimately, his radicalism made his life politically uncomfortable, and he fled to the nascent United States. Here, he was able to build conceptual bridges linking the scientific, political, and religious impulses that governed his life. And through his close relationships with the Founding Fathers—Jefferson credited Priestley as the man who prevented him from abandoning Christianity—he exerted profound if little-known influence on the shape and course of our history.

As in his last bestselling work, The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson here uses a dramatic historical story to explore themes that have long engaged him: innovation and the way new ideas emerge and spread, and the environments that foster these breakthroughs. And as he did in Everything Bad Is Good for You, Johnson upsets some fundamental assumptions about the world we live in—namely, what it means when we invoke the Founding Fathers—and replaces them with a clear-eyed, eloquent assessment of where we stand today.

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Riverhead Hardcover
Publication date

December 26, 2008
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

6.26 x 1.08 x 9.32 inches
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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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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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From Bookmarks Magazine

Reviewers were, as usual, amazed by Steven Johnson's ability to recall not only great thinkers and scientific discoveries but also the world of ideas and technologies that sustained them. Many critics cited Priestley's experiments (such as seeing how long a mouse could live with and without plants in a jar) as fully engrossing. They also appreciated Johnson's willingness to read lessons for our time from that great conversation over politics, religion, and science that we have come to call the Enlightenment. Not all reviewers were so sure about Johnson's conclusions—either because they doubted his interpretation or felt that his argumentative reach exceeded his factual grasp. But even skeptics were fascinated by this book's stories of Priestley and his era.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

Review

[Johnson is] an infectiously exciting writer [and] The Invention of Air is delightful to read. But it aims high. It isn't a work of conventional history or biography, though it contains snippets of both, but more like a case study in the history of ideas that hints at a grander analytical theory. Johnson is a wide-ranging enthusiast with a catholic appetite for intriguing facts and a Marxian appetite for searching for structures that underlie social phenomena.
Salon

Like Priestley, Johnsonwho wrote the bestselling Everything Bad Is Good For Youis a polymath, and [its] exhilarating to follow his unpredictable trains of thought. To explain why some ideas upend the world, he draws upon many disciplines: chemistry, social history, geography, even ecosystem science.
Los Angeles Times

Steven Johnsons mind works in wondrous ways and readers have been the beneficiaries of his eclectic interests. Johnsons new book, The Invention of Air, marks a return to cultural history His free-ranging mind and irreverent wit entertain and prompt thought.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Steven Johnson argues that [this] key player has been all but forgotten An expat, a champion of reason, an original progressivePriestleys ideals were central to the American experiment. He rarely gets the credit, but he was arguably the United States original advocate for hope and change.
Newsweek

This is not a book about the discovery of oxygen but about the invention of air: how groups of scientists, natural philosophers, religious leaders and politicians served as cultural petri dishes in which ideas were discussed, experimented with, discarded or accepted [Johnson] gives long-overdue time and space to some of the more controversial aspects of [Priestleys] work Priestley may not have gotten full credit for his work on oxygen, but this new book gives plenty to the life of the man himself.
Dallas Morning News

Steven Johnson's latest book, The Invention of Air, is a wide-ranging, learned, engrossing biography of the polymath pioneering scientist, Joseph Priestley Johnson uses the life of Priestley to illuminate a theory of history that holds that great people are neither an inevitable product of their times, nor luminous, supernatural geniuses -- rather, they are the product of an ecosystem of influences, technologies, climate, and energy (literally -- the story of stored energy in coal, saltpetre, and plant-bound carbon are vital to the story). He pulls this off deftly, with a series of insightful, beautifully realized anaecdotes from the life of Priestley and his contemporaries -- his allies and his many enemies -- that make the idea of history being shaped by webs and networks seem absolutely true.
Boingboing

[Johnson] refracts just about every beam of Enlightenment thought through the prism of Priestley.
Seattle Weekly

We rarely hear of [Joseph Priestley] today, but it wasn't always thus: the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams includes 52 mentions of Priestley, versus just three of George Washington. With The Invention of Air, Steven Johnson brilliantly explains why For all of Priestleys many achievements, laid out so delightfully in Johnsons account, its his work with plants and the oxygen cycle that rightfully gained him immortality Engrossing.
Oregonian

In The Invention of Air Steven Johnson gives a biography not just of a man, but a time in which the spigot of ideas was gradually being cranked wide open. It's a fun (and quite short) read for anyone interested in the intersection of science, politics, and religion. It's also an interesting look at how societies react -- for good and ill -- to periods of rapid change.
Daily Kos

A breath of fresh air Johnson paints Priestley not as a man of the past but precisely the sort of figure the world needs more than ever: A searcher who shared his discoveries openly and willingly, crossed disciplinary boundaries with impunity and insight, who conceived of the world as a large laboratory We live in troubling times, filled with signs of a great economic apocalypse, politicized science on topics from birth control to climate change and religious zealots who kill innocents rather than live peacefully with them. This is exactly the moment to learn from Priestley, who survived riots, threats of prosecution and other hardships and yet never doubted that the world was headed naturally toward and increase in liberty and understanding.
New York Post

Intelligent Steven Johnson, who has a fine reputation for discerning trends and for his iconoclastic appreciation of popular culture, chooses his topics well. As a reminder of the underlying sanity and common sense of this countrya 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.
Publishers Weekly (Signature Review)

Arresting account of the career of Joseph Priestley Johnson employs his customary digressiveness to great effect Another rich, readable examination of the intersections where culture and science meet from a scrupulous historian who never offers easy answer to troubling, perhaps intractable questions.
Kirkus

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) was a veritable Renaissance man, whose interests and skills ranged from science to religion to politics. Science writer Johnson (The Ghost Map) weaves together all of these themes and how they played out in his life, in early America, and among the Founding Fathers. He tells the story [of Priestley] in a reader-friendly manner that also encourages readers to think about how these themes apply in todays world.
Library Journal

About the Author

Steven Johnson is the author of the national bestsellers Everything Bad Is Good for You and Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, as well as Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software and Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0045EPCPA
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Hardcover; 1st edition (December 26, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.26 x 1.08 x 9.32 inches

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Steven Johnson

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Steven Johnson is the best-selling author of seven books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. His writings have influenced everything from the way political campaigns use the Internet, to cutting-edge ideas in urban planning, to the battle against 21st-century terrorism. In 2010, he was chosen by Prospect magazine as one of the Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future.

His latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, was a finalist for the 800CEORead award for best business book of 2010, and was ranked as one of the year’s best books by The Economist. His book The Ghost Map was one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2006 according to Entertainment Weekly. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Steven has also co-created three influential web sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby-Award-winning community site, Plastic.com, and most recently the hyperlocal media site outside.in, which was acquired by AOL in 2011. He serves on the advisory boards of a number of Internet-related companies, including Meetup.com, Betaworks, and Nerve.

Steven is a contributing editor to Wired magazine and is the 2009 Hearst New Media Professional-in-Residence at The Journalism School, Columbia University. He won the Newhouse School fourth annual Mirror Awards for his TIME magazine cover article titled "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live." Steven has also written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and many other periodicals. He has appeared on many high-profile television programs, including The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He lectures widely on technological, scientific, and cultural issues. He blogs at stevenberlinjohnson.com and is @stevenbjohnson on Twitter. He lives in Marin County, California with his wife and three sons.

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Clay GarnerTop Contributor: Philosophy

Priestley Invents Air and Reinvents Christianity

Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2014

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The preface explains the goal is to explain the key role of Priestly in the formation of America. In the fourteen year correspondence of Adams and Jefferson, Washington is mentioned three times and Priestly fifty-two times. Why? This book explains.

Covers Priestly's connection to Benjamin Franklin and the 'Honest Whigs' in London. In his twenties, Priestly came to these scientists to ask permission to write a book on the history of electricity. He did. It became a book of seven hundred pages used as the basic text for a hundred years. Developed close friendship with Franklin, Erasmus Darwin, etc.

Became a leading scientist in Europe. Royal Society, French Royal Society, American Philosophical Society, etc. Nevertheless, his primary work was as a clergyman. Eventually his penchant for analysis impelled him the write a detailed history of Christianity.

Priestly wrote on 1774, "this rapid process of knowledge will, I doubt not, being the means, under God, of extirpating error and prejudice, and a putting an end to all undue and usurped Authority in the business of religion, as well as of science."

In 1782 he published "A History of the Corruptions of Christianity":

"The Corruptions was a kind of historical deconstruction of the modern church. Starting, of coarse, with divinity of Jesus Christ. . . and tracing each back to the distortions of Greek and Latin theologians starting the fourth and fifth century A.D. about the time of the Council of Nicaea. The corruptions opens with a meticulous assault on the Trinity, which takes up the first quarter of the book, and then widens into a long litany of smaller abuses, the false mysticism of the Eucharist, predestination, the immateriality of the soul, the last supper."

Priestly explained his method 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 of the corruption of genuine Christianity and no part of the original scheme."

Servetus, Newton and Whiston used the same method and reached the same conclusions.

(Page 172) "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 nevertheless determined to keep the core alive. Priestly was a heretic the first order who nonetheless possessed an unshakable faith. . . Ironically, it was "The Corruptions" itself - a work devoted to dismantling so many central values of modern Christianity - that finally gave Jefferson enough philosophical support to call himself a Christian again."

(Page 174) Jefferson wrote to 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."

Most today have never considered Preistly's conclusions.

(Page 175) To Jefferson "christianity was not the problem; it was the warped, counterfeit version that had evolved over the centuries that he could not subscribe to. Thanks to Priestly, he could be a Christian again in good faith - indeed, his Christianity would be pure, more elemental then that of believers who clung to the supernatural trappings of modern sects."

Interesting that Servetus wrote in the 1500's "On the Errors of the Trinity" to help Moslems convert to Christianity.

Priestly also spoke out in favor of the French Revolution. These two radical ideas led to the Birmingham riots. His home and laboratory were burned to the ground. Dozen others houses and some churches also. Priestly went in to hiding. Emigrated to Pennsylvania. First became friends with Adams and then very close to Jefferson. Converted Jefferson from deism to Unitarianism.

Johnson uses Priestly's faith in future progress to contrast today's faith in self-destruction. However, Preistly's faith was a result of decades of keen Bible study and analysis. Today's faith, or loss of faith, is the result of the keen misery from human reason.

8 people found this helpful

Helpful

Spellbinding and Mind Bending - LOVED IT!

Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2010

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Wow! I mean Wow! What a mind-bender. Here are a few tidbits (any emphasis is mine):

Necessity, may be the mother of invention, but most of the great inventors were blessed with something else: leisure time. p. 53

By why would you study nothingness when there was such a vast supply of stuff to explain? There wasn't a problem in the nothingness that needed explaining. A cycle of negative reinforcement arose: the lack of a clear problem kept the questions at bay, and the lack of questions left the problems as invisible as the air itself. P. 73

Lunaticks - a group of intellectual allies with different fields of expertise, sharing insight and inspiration supporting one another emotionally and, at times, financially - and they were uniquely suited for a maverick, cross-disciplinary thinker like Priestley. P. 160.

What's interesting about Priestley is not that he had a hunch, but rather that he had the intelligence and the leisure time to let that hunch lurk in the background for thirty years, growing and evolving and connecting with each new milestone in Priestley's career - know that epiphanies are a myth of popular science, ideas don't just fallout of the sky, or leap out of our subconscious. But we don't yet recognize how slow in developing most good ideas are, how they often need to remain dormant as intuitive hunches for decades before they flower. Chance favors the prepared mind, and Priestley had been preparing for thirty years. We talk about great ideas using the language of flashes and instant revelation, but most great ideas happen on the scale of generations, not seconds. (Think of the almost glacial pace that characterized Darwin's "discovery" of natural selection.) Most great ideas grow the way Priestley's did, starting with some childhood obsession, struggling through an extended adolescence of random collisions and false starts, and finally blooming decades after they first took root. P. 79

Hope that whets your literary whistle...trust me - there's much more in this book that simply the excerpts represented above. I loved it! You will too.

4 people found this helpful

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M. Hillmann

The triumph of ideas and progress over fatalism

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 14, 2009

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Do you subscribe to the Great Men or the Collectivist vision of history? You can tell the history of the world through the lives of individuals and part of the explanation is no doubt true. But you can tell the story with the individuals in the supporting role.

In 1765, Joseph Priestley, an iconoclast teacher from Warrington, comes to London to the Coffee House meetings of the Honest Whigs, and Benjamin Franklin in particular. Benjamin Franklin in 1740 had described the basic model of electricity with positive and negative charges interacting in a predictable way. Priestley's first great scientific achievement was to write the History and Present State of Electricity followed by his role in identifying oxygen and a number of other elements. He was the first to observe plants ability to absorb carbon dioxide "foul air" and synthesise oxygen "good air". He established himself as a leading World scientist.

But this was an era of opportunity for open minded polymaths. Priestly found the circle of the Honest Whigs and then the Lunar Society in Birmingham - groups of eminent men who were pushing back the frontiers not just of science but appreciating its implications on religion and on the social order i.e. politics. In France Lavoisier was leading a French scientific revolution.

The French Revolution was gathering pace and the American War of Independence was about to happen. Franklin went back to America and became influential. Priestley published the History of Corruption of Christianity, he became a key figure in the founding of the Unitarian church that eventually led to him being hounded out of Britain - the Quakers were seen as undermining religious belief. He went at quite a late stage in life to the USA, and with his for his close friendship with Franklin and with John Adams and Jefferson - the second and third US Presidents - he was a major power in the intellectual basis upon which the US is based.

Stephen Johnson has an ability to draw big conclusions about how ideas arise among groups of people , exemplified by the Honest Whigs and the Lunar and the Lunar Society, about how innovation and the ways e a new ideas emerge and spread.

The book fills you with optimism of the triumph of ideas and progress over fatalism.

7 people found this helpful

Mrs Sarah Killingback

An interesting read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 1, 2017

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There was slightly less narration of Priestley's scientific life than I was expecting, however his experiments and contributions to chemistry are detailed elsewhere.
This book covers Priestley's relationships with several of the founding fathers of the United States, their discussions about religion, the French Revolution and the future. It is well-written and just the right length.

charles

Too much air

Reviewed in Canada on December 1, 2021

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This book describes a most interesting time in the history of science and politics. Makes one want to go tinker on some new ga
dget or inventipn in the basement. My only complaint is that there is too much "filler" sometimes. But a must read nonetheless.

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The Invention of Air Hardcover – Bargain Price, December 26, 2008

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