The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America [Hardcover]

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.

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) is the focal point of this book. He isn't. However, he is one of several focal points whose life and work serve as a linchpin to the other focal points, notably the colonial leadership (e.g. Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson), theological, scientific, and political issues, and tumultuous events preceding and then following the war for independence. Steven Johnson is also intrigued by why some ideas succeed and others don't. Also, "why these revolutions happen when they do, and why some rare individuals end up having a hand in many of them simultaneously."

This last comment suggests an element of serendipity in human affairs, one that Johnson also discusses brilliantly in another of his books, The Ghost Map. Priestley played a central and prominent role (albeit an underappreciated one since then) during the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, simultaneously. As Johnson notes on Page 147, "Scientific innovation tends to be imagined as something that exists outside the public sphere of politics, or the sacred space of faith...But for Priestly, these three domains [i.e. science, religion, and politics] were not separate compartments, but rather a kind of continuum, with new developments in each domain reinforcing and intensifying the others." For me, those comments capture the essence of what motivated Priestly. They also help to explain the nature and extent of his appeal and influence during an era in which there was no shortage of human talent and skill.

The title of this book should not be interpreted literally. Rather, it refers to a process of rigorous scientific inquiry over time during which men such as Franklin and Priestley began to formulate ("invent") concepts to increase human understanding of natural forces. Note Johnson's lengthy discussion of waterspouts in the Prologue, "The Vortex." In fact, Johnson observes, "One of Priestley's greatest scientific discoveries involved the cycle of energy flowing through all life on Earth, the origin of the very air he was breathing there on the deck [of the ship transporting him from England to America] as he watched his thermometer line bob in the waters of the Atlantic. Together, all those forces converged on him, as the Samson struggled against the current bearing west to the New World..."

As we proceed into an uncertain future, Steven Johnson asserts, we must rely on old institutions and remain hostage to what James O'Toole characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom" because that would betray "the core and, connected values that Priestly shared with the American founders." Today, "we now see the web of relationships far more clearly than Priestly or Franklin or Jefferson could" and thus can take full advantage of opportunities in a world "still ripe for radical change." There is indeed cause for hope.

Quite a nice read, but a bit verbose and anecdotal.
Would have enjoyed less background detail, and more technical detail about the methods used (for example) to fractionate the air and isolate the constituents, particularly with respect to the functionality of the rudimentary equipment of the day.
Almost completely missing is any insight into the mind of Priestly, (as could be gleaned from the copious notes of his experiments,) to show HOW he was thinking, and what lead him to the construction of the various pieces of apparatus.
(See... "The Man who Changed Everything..." as a good example of the biographer deducing from diaries and other literature how new concepts (like the esoteric undreamt-of fields of electromagnetism) were teased into reality by another genius, James Clark Maxwell.)

Next time I hope for a little less hot-air and a bit more compressed-air, in what could be a fascinating story set in the early-morning of Modern Science.