Inspirational Quotes by Joseph Priestley (English Clergyman, Scientist)

Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) was an English clergyman, political theorist, chemist, and author of 150 books, generally theological or educational. His major work was on the chemistry of gases, in which his most notable discovery was of oxygen (“dephlogisticated air”) in 1774.

Born in Fieldhead, Leeds, Priestley spent four years at a dissenting academy in Daventry and, in 1755, became minister at Needham Market and wrote The Scripture Doctrine of Remission. In 1758, he went to Nantwich, Cheshire, and in 1761 became a tutor at Warrington Academy, a pre-eminent dissenting academy. During visits to London, he met Benjamin Franklin, who supplied Priestley with books for his History of Electricity (1767.)

In 1767 Priestley became minister of a chapel at Mill Hill, Leeds, where he studied chemistry. Living next door to a brewery, he became interested in gases. By 1772, he had identified carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.

In 1774, Priestley transformed chemistry by isolating oxygen and seven other gases, proving that air was not a single substance but a combination of gases, each with its distinct characteristics. Priestley also demonstrated that oxygen was essential to animal life and that plants give it off in the sunlight. (The Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele also discovered oxygen independently but concurrently.)

In 1774, Priestley accompanied Lord Shelburne as a literary companion on a continental tour and published Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. However, he was branded an atheist at home regardless of his Disquisition Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777,) affirming hope of resurrection from revelation.

Priestley was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1772, to the St. Petersburg Academy in 1780, and became minister of a chapel in Birmingham. His History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ (1786) caused renewed controversy—in 1791, after he replied to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Priestley’s home was mobbed and destroyed. He then settled in Hackney, London, and in 1794 moved to the U.S.; he was well received there and died in Northumberland, Pennsylvania.

Royal Institute of Chemistry-London’s Frederick William Gibbs wrote Joseph Priestley: Adventurer in Science and Champion of Truth (1965.)

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