User:Anthony.Sebastian/JP

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Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), an English scientist who discovered the component gas of the atmosphere subsequently named oxygen by the French chemist, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), whose learning of Priestley experiments critically influenced the future course of Lavoisier's career as a chemist that led to a revolution in the principles of chemistry, the beginnings of modern chemistry—a new understanding of chemical science that contributed importantly in enabling the Englishman, John Dalton (1766-1844), to formulate a chemical atomic theory, the bedrock of modern chemistry.

Notes

Included among the Notes below are annotations to some of the references.

Bibliography

• F.W. Gibbs. (1965) Joseph Priestley: Adventurer in Science and Champion of Truth.
  • A biography of Joseph Priestley, his life, work, and the worlds of science, religion, politics, education in which he lived. Presents detailed descriptions of Priestley's most important experiments studying the properties and chemistry of gases.
  • From book jacket: ”Frederick William Gibbs is a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Chemistry and Honorary Lecturer in the History of Technology at University College, London… a Foundation Member of the British Society for the History of Science, a Corresponding Member of the International Academy of the History of Science and a 'Member of the Association for Science Education."

• Robert E. Schofield. (1997) The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1733 to 1773. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-0-271-01662-7. | Google Books preview.
  • From Preface: "This work was begun some thirty years ago as a labor of love and intense interest, when I first discovered there was no definitive biography of Joseph Priestley, one of the most distinguished polymaths of eighteenth-century England. It soon became painfully clear just why this was the case: Priestley was simply too many persons for any one easily to comprehend them all into a single study. Yet, in the long run, thoroughly to understand Priestley and his age, it must sometime be necessary to join those varied manifesta­tions of his life into a study that might begin to integrate and illuminate the extraordinary career of this exemplar of British Enlightenment. Prop­erly done, the subject of middle-class, Dissenting, intellectual achievements in eighteenth-century England would also be illuminated, as had not previ­ously been done."

• Robert E. Schofield. (2009) The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1733 to 1804. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 9780271024592.| Google Books preview.
  • From Preface: "Nunc dimittis! A project begun some forty years ago is now completed. And if it is not the definitive biography (whatever that might be) of Joseph Priestley that I had originally intended, it is, in at least one sense, a complete one. So far as I have been able to do so, I have consulted and described every published writing of Joseph Priestley and attempted to place every bit of it in its historical context. I suggest that this is unique...This is an intellectual biography, not a psychological personality study or a sociological history of middle-class Britain in the eighteenth century...Priestley was a man of the Enlightenment; he seems always to have maintained a decent reticence and did not display his emotions to public scrutiny. Only rarely, in correspondence or publications, did he express his feelings. Even his Memoirs dwell more on his friends, his benefactors, and his work than on himself. But intellectually is also how I see him. Priestley is important because of his ideas, and it is ideas that I chiefly describe and discuss."