Joseph Priestley was born on March 13, 1733, at Fieldhead in the north of England and died on February 6, 1804, in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, then on the frontier of post-revolutionary America. In between, he lived a life of extraordinary variety and in many ways constituted an 18th-century, one-man, Anglo-American Union, counting among his friends, acquaintances, and foes Burke, Johnson, Franklin, Paine, Wedgwood, Eramus Darwin, King George III and Presidents Washington, Adams, and Jefferson.

Priestley was trained for the dissenting ministry and always held this to be his principal vocation. He wrote voluminously, mainly on theology, but also on history, criticism, grammar, politics, education, even perspective. Science, largely an occupation of his leisure hours, he justified because it lent weight to his “attempts to defend Christianity.”

Priestley’s first foray into chemistry came about because he lived next door to a brewery. His pamphlet “Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air” was reprinted in 1945 by the American bottlers of carbonated beverages who saw in it the beginning of their industry. Later he was first to isolate many of the common gases including oxygen, which, as a lifelong believer in the theory of phlogiston, he called dephlogisticated air. Astonishingly, he discovered some of the essentials of photosynthesis before he isolated oxygen.

Priestley was a prominent anti-Establishment figure both in religion and politics, and in 1791 his Birmingham house was torched in the government-subsidized Church and King riots. In 1794 he sought refuge in the young United States, but even here he was to remain a controversial figure until the election to the presidency of his friend and admirer, Thomas Jefferson, who in his first letter from the White House wrote “Yours is one of the few lives precious to mankind.” He died peacefully a few minutes after finishing corrections on the proof of his last publication.

References
DSB, Vol. XI, pp. 139-147.
F. W. Gibbs, Joseph Priestley: Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967.

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