It is rare, I think, for a popular science novel to feel charming as well as informative, but Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air reads less like a strict biography than a fireside chat with someone who knows an enormous assortment of fascinating facts on the history of science and has the wit to draw them all together with an overarching theory about scientific discovery and the importance of context. Although he is not afraid to delve into the scientific and political details that made up Joseph Priestley’s life, Johnson has written a book that is not only the story of a scientist, political advisor, and religious thinker, but also a meditation on scientific method, the importance of sharing discoveries, and the interconnectedness of all things.

It is one aspect of Priestley’s nature, his willingness to share and enjoyment of discussion, that comes across most clearly in the beginning of the book. We meet Joseph Priestley as he is making what may be the most important acquaintance of his life, Benjamin Franklin.  Franklin, among a host of others, will be the subject of Priestley’s “The History and Present State of Electricity”, a book that was destined to become a textbook that was (in one of many bits worthy of both exclaiming over and immediately sharing with the person next to you) in widespread use for nearly a century and even had a popular science version (also written by Priestley) destined for the general public. This experience neatly sums up much of Priestley’s character, his love of science and inquiry, his equal love of discussing science and inquiry with other experts in the field, and his talent and joy at being one of the people able to share the discoveries with others.

The letters that fly back and forth between Franklin and Priestley (or Priestley and anyone else) are full of theorizing that throws the considerable intellect of all of the correspondents at questions ranging from biology to physics to chemistry to the very beginnings of ecology and the interconnectedness of all life. Priestley even writes:

We may, perhaps, learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport.

That this sort of scientific furore was going on at the same time in Priestley’s life as his involvement in the creation of Unitarianism, and later punctuated his flight from England to the Americas in response to being branded a heretic, only makes his discoveries all the more intriguing. He may have been a bit off in his concept of oxygen, but Priestley was beginning to grasp the nature of the invention of air, not of what it was, but of how it came to be:

A long parade of events follow: Dinosaurs go extinct, mammals rise, continents separate, Homo Sapiens evolves, language appears, agriculture blooms. And then Joseph Priestley sits in a room in Leeds and watches a plant grow in a glass, and grasps — for the first time in recorded history, as far as we know — the original breakthrough that made aerobic life possible in the first place.

It is this sort of moment that the book so adeptly captures.  Whether it is Priestley in his lab in Leeds trying to figure out why a candle will continue to burn, or telling the story of his discovery of the process of making soda water (a tale he told so often and so widely that he inadvertently made it common knowledge and was never able to make any sort of income from it), Johnson illuminates a time when a host of amazingly intelligent scientists threw everything they had at the questions of the day, and then shared the discoveries they found.

Late in his life, after fleeing his home, helping found a new nation, and producing (yet another) set of books that became standard scientific texts, Priestley received a letter from Jefferson, written soon after Jefferson’s election as president.  In it, Jefferson affirmed the pursuits to which Priestley had devoted his life:

Our countrymen have recovered from the alarm into which art and industry had thrown them; science and honesty are replaced on their high ground, and you, my dear Sir, as their great apostle, are on its pinnacle …

The Invention of Air does not, really, even feel like a history. It is more like a treatise on how science (or any intellectual inquiry) could be conducted: with optimism, openness, and enthusiasm–and Priestley as one of its truest examples.

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