The Life and Timescapes of Joseph Priestley

Reprinted from Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, with permission. Joseph Priestley Created Revolutionary “Maps” of Time Then he became the most controversial man in England Alyson Foster HUMANITIES, Spring 2024, Volume 45, Number 2 HUMANITIES: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities

Although Priestley is best remembered for the discovery of the gas we now call oxygen, he published on an astonishingly wide array of subjects, including education, English grammar, theology, and political theory. -- Wikimedia, Ellen Sharples, Joseph Priestley, ca. 1797. It’s a testament to the wide-ranging and unconventional nature of Joseph Priestley’s mind that no one has settled on a term to sum up exactly what he was. The eighteenth-century British polymath has been described as, among other things, a historian, a chemist, an educator, a philosopher, a theologian, and a political radical who became, for a period of time, the most despised person in England. Priestley’s many contradictions—as a rationalist Unitarian millenarian, as a mild- mannered controversialist, as a thinker who was both ahead of his time and behind it—have provided endless fodder for the historians who have debated the precise nature of his legacy and his place among his fellow Enlightenment intellectuals. But his contributions—however they are categorized—have continued to live on in subtle and surprisingly enduring ways, more than two hundred years after his death, at the age of seventy, in rural Pennsylvania. Take, for example, A Chart of Biography, which is considered to be the first modern timeline. This unusual, and unusually beautiful, pedagogical tool, which was published by Priestley in 1765, while he was in his thirties and working as a tutor at an academy in Warrington, England, tends to get lost in the shuffle of Priestley’s morenotable achievements—his seminal 1761 textbook on language, The Rudiments of English Grammar, say, or his discovery of nine gases, including oxygen, 13 years later. But the chart, along with its companion, A New Chart of History, which Priestley published four years later, has become a curious subject of interest among data visualization aficionados who have analyzed its revolutionary design in academic papers and added it to Internet lists of notable infographics. Recently, both charts have become the focus of an NEH-supported digital humanities project, Chronographics: The Time Charts of Joseph Priestley, produced by scholars at the University of Oregon. Even those of us ignorant of (or uninterested in) infographics can look at the painstakingly detailed Chart of Biography for a moment or two and appreciate how it has become a source of fascination. The two-foot-by-three-foot, pastel-striped paper scroll—which contains the meticulously inscribed names of approximately 2,000 poets, artists, statesmen, and other famous historical figures dating back three millennia—is visually striking, combining a formal, somewhat ornate eighteenth-century aesthetic with the precise organization of a schematic. Every single one of the chart’s subjects is grouped vertically into one of six occupational categories, then plotted out chronologically along a horizonal line divided into ten-year increments. Despite the huge quantity of information it contains, it is extremely user-friendly. Any one of Priestley’s history students could run his eye across the chart and immediately gain a sense of the temporal lay of the land. Who came first: Copernicus or Newton? How many centuries separate Genghis Khan from Joan of Arc? Which artists were working during the reign of Henry VIII? The chart was a masterful blend of form and function, and Priestley knew it. “Please now to inspect the Chart, and as soon as you have found the names, you see at one glance, without the help of Arithmetic, or even of words, and in the most clear and perfect manner possible, the relation of these lives to one another in any period of the whole course of them,” he boasted. “To a revolutionary generation intent on inscribing itself in history,” the historians Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton wrote, “the Priestley chart seems to have had an almost talismanic appeal” Library Company of Philadelphia / University of Oregon.n The most significant design feature of Priestley’s chart—as historians point out—was the way in which he linked units of time to units of distance on the page, similar to the way a cartographer uses scale when creating a map. (The artist Pietro Lorenzetti lived two hundred years before Titian and thus is situated twice as far from Titian as Jan van Eyck, who predated Titian by about a century.) If this innovation is hard for contemporary viewers to fully appreciate, it’s probably because Priestley’s representation of time has become a convention that’s used everywhere in visual design and seems so obvious it’s now taken for granted. To Priestley’s contemporaries, though, who were accustomed to cumbersome Eusebian-style chronological tables or the visually striking but often obscure “stream charts” created by the era’s chronographers, Priestley’s method of capturing time on the page revealed something revelatory and new—a way of seeing historical patterns and connections that would have otherwise remained hidden. “To many readers,” wrote Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton in their book, Cartographies of Time, Priestley’s Chart of Biography offered a never-before-seen “picture of time itself.” ​​​​​​Priestley wrote that individuals included in his Chart of Biography were selected according to “renown and not merit; acquired fame, and not deserved reputation.” —Detail from Joseph Priestley’s 1765 A Chart of Biography, Library Company of Philadelphia / University of Oregon It was no wonder, then, that eighteenth-century readers found themselves drawn to it. A Chart of Biography sold well in both England and the United States, accruing many fans along the way. Along with the New Chart of History, it would go on to be printed in at least 19 editions and spawn numerous imitations, including one by Priestley’s future friend Thomas Jefferson, who developed his own “time chart” of market seasons in Washington, and the historian David Ramsay, who acknowledged Priestley’s influence in his Historical and Biographical Chart of the United States. The time charts marked Priestley’s first major commercial success and played a key role in establishing his reputation as a serious intellectual, earning him an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh, and helping him secure a fellowship nomination to the Royal Society of London. As much as anything he published, and he published a staggering amount—somewhere between 150 and 200 books, articles, papers, and pamphlets—Priestley’s time charts encapsulate his uniqueness as a thinker. Of his many intellectual gifts, his gift for synthesis—for knitting together the seemingly disparate things that caught his attention—might have been his greatest. On any given subject, his biographer Robert Schofield observed, Priestley had “contemporaries who were more profound and analytic,” but he “made systematic and operational what had been fragmentary, frequently impractical, and unused before him.” The charts, which he energetically promoted, also serve as a perfect example of the man’s seemingly compulsive need to share the knowledge he acquired with others. “The proper employment of men of letters,” he once wrote, “is either making new discoveries, in order to extend the bounds of human knowledge; or facilitating the communication of the discoveries which have been made already, in order to make an acquaintance with science more general among mankind.” In this regard, he wholeheartedly practiced what he preached. After Benjamin Franklin’s 1751 book on electricity piqued his interested in the subject, Priestley finagled an introduction to the book’s famous author, then proceeded to research and publish his own 700-page tome on the subject—a “history of the discoveries in electricity,” complete with his own experiments for interested readers. When the book’s plates required an illustrator, and he was unable to find a satisfactory one, he taught himself perspective drawing, then published a 1770 tutorial for aspiring artists titled A Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective. (Fun fact: Priestley is often credited with discovering the erasing properties of rubber, as well as with naming the substance, which was perfectly suited for “rubbing” away errant pencil marks.) A bit of dabbling in the subject of optics followed, along with a history of the field, published in 1772. That same year, after explaining to friends over dinner one night how he could “sweeten” water by using a pig’s bladder to infuse it with carbon dioxide, he produced the 34-page illustrated pamphlet “Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air.” “To make this process more generally known,” he wrote in its preface, “and that more frequent trials may be made of water thus medicated, at land as well as at sea, I have been induced to make the present publication.” Priestley’s “Pyrmont water”—or what’s commonly known today as carbonated water—was an instant hit in England and France and contributed to his receiving the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1773. Bolstered by the mistaken belief that the water contained antiscorbutic properties, Britain’s Royal College of Physicians instructed Captain James Cook to test out the carbonation process on his upcoming second sea voyage. Regardless of whether Cook actually carried out the experiment—sources conflict on this point—it was doomed to failure. Priestley’s fizzy Pyrmont water had no more vitamin C in it than uncarbonated flat water, and so it was equally useless when it came to preventing scurvy. But it was an unconventional, and thus fitting, way to mark Priestley’s foray into yet another scientific discipline. Schofield noted wryly: “This is the work for which Priestley became known to the world as a chemist; a description of how to make ‘soda water,’ wrongly assumed to have medicinal value.” Priestley turns up in another intriguing footnote related to Cook’s famous 1772 voyage—which is that he was, briefly, offered the opportunity to join the expedition as one of the ship’s astronomers. The invitation, which was extended to Priestley in a letter from the legendary botanist Joseph Banks, is the kind of tantalizing “what if” that counterfactual history is made from. Who knows what other subjects Priestley would have set his sights on if he’d had the opportunity to travel the globe? Electricity was just one of many natural phenomena that fascinated Priestley. This electrical machine he designed “for amateur experimentalists” appeared in a 1768 book written to educate the public about the subject. —Wikimedia / Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images A few weeks after receiving Banks’s invitation, the offer was rescinded. The reason was never fully made clear, but Priestley had a theory. “Mr. Banks,” he would write in a memoir that was published two years after his death, “informed me that I had been objected to by some clergymen . . . on account of my religious principles.” This may or may not have actually been the case. (Schofield contends that Banks jumped the gun, inviting Priestley to join the expedition without being authorized to do so.) But Priestley’s assumption was an understandable one. He was a nonconformist minister and a member of England’s Protestant Dissenter minority, one that opposed state involvement in religious issues, refused to subscribe to the Anglican church’s doctrine, and, as result, faced discrimination. (Dissenters like Priestley were, for instance, prohibited from matriculating at the University of Oxford or Cambridge until the nineteenth century.) And Priestley’s heterodox religious views were a matter of public record. He was, by that point, a seasoned veteran of the era’s pamphlet wars, having embroiled himself in controversy with his 1768 A Free Address to Protestant Dissenters on the Subject of the Lord’s Supper before going on, two years later, to attack major aspects of Calvinist doctrine in An Appeal to the Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity. Over the next two decades, his notoriety would only grow as he published a series of “brilliantly controversial works,” wrote the historian David Wykes, which “advanc[ed] ideas that caught up and convinced many of his readers and a generation of young ministers” but which also unleashed “a storm of anger.” Orthodox readers were not particularly keen to hear Priestley analyze the logical flaws he had discovered in the doctrine of atonement or to hear him out as he explained the ways in which their beliefs regarding the Holy Trinity were “inconsistent with reason and common sense.” In 1785, three years after it was published, his book An History of the Corruptions of Christianity was banned in Holland. Far from silencing him, the barrage of angry responses goaded Priestley into picking up his pen and producing more pamphlets filled with more arguments. “He entered each controversy with a cheerful conviction that he was right, while most of his opponents were convinced, from the outset, that he was willfully and maliciously wrong,” Schofield wrote. “He was able, then, to contrast his sweet reasonableness to their personal rancor while responding, in kind to irony and sarcasm.” Priestley’s religious provocations, combined with a potent mix of unpopular political views—his support for the American and French revolutions, his criticism of the slave trade, his commitment to religious liberty for Dissenters, his agitation for parliamentary reform—only served to cement his reputation, first as a radical, and then as a dangerous menace. By 1790, his enemies had come to see the soft-spoken minister as “the devil incarnate,” wrote Wykes. It was a comparison that Priestley, perhaps unwisely, did not shy away from. “If he really took me to be that malicious Being, above described,” he wrote gleefully of one of his foes, “he should not have trodden upon my cloven foot, or have kicked me so near my tail, without remembering that I had horns, and he had none.” Had he known what was coming, he might not have found it so amusing. One evening in the following July, Priestley received a warning that a large number of protestors had attacked a group of diners attending a Bastille Day celebration at the Birmingham Hotel. From there, the mob—which had grown significantly larger—moved on to destroy the Unitarian meeting house where Priestley presided as minister, ripping out the pews and setting them on fire. And, it seemed, they were now on their way to the Priestley residence. There was no time for Priestley and his wife to do anything but flee, and then watch as a crowd converged on their house and proceeded, with some difficulty, to burn it to the ground. “It being a remarkably calm, and clear moon-light,” Priestley recalled later: We could see to a considerable distance, and being upon a rising ground, we distinctly heard all that passed at the house, every shout of the mob, and almost every stroke of the instruments they had provided for breaking the doors and the furniture. For they could not get any fire, though one of them was heard to offer two guineas for a lighted candle; my son, whom we had left behind us, having taken the precaution to put out all the fires in the house, and others of my friends got all the neighbours to do the same. I afterwards heard that much pains was taken, but without effect, to get fire from my large electrical machine, which stood in the library. The attack on Priestley was personal—but it also wasn’t. Over the next several days, widespread terror and looting would engulf Birmingham as rioters clashed with local constables, targeting and destroying some two dozen homes, businesses, and churches belonging to prominent Dissenters and supporters of the French Revolution before authorities finally called in military dragoons to restore order. In the end, the violent events of July 1791 would come to be known as the Priestley riots, after their most high-profile victim, and the man who symbolized everything his “Church and King” enemies despised. On one of Priestley’s sweeping timelines, a few days of riots would not merit even a speck of ink. As a historian, Priestley was well aware of this fact. More than two decades earlier, long before his home and nearly all his worldly possessions were destroyed, he had studied the rise and fall of empires, mapped out across his New Chart of History, and attempted to counsel his readers about the lessons he had found there. “What a number of revolutions are marked upon it!” he wrote: What torrents of human blood has the restless ambition of mortals shed, and in what complicated distress has the discontent of powerful individuals involved a great part of their species! Let us deplore this depravity of human passions . . . but let not the dark strokes which disfigure the fair face of an historical chart affect our faith in the great and comfortable doctrine of an over-ruling Providence. In the weeks and months following the riots, this sense of perspective would be put to the test. The mob had destroyed not only Priestley’s home, his valuable collection of manuscripts, and his beloved, expensive lab equipment (worth around $115,000 in today’s dollars), but also whatever illusions he might once have harbored about his own safety. Far from cooling the depraved human passions against him, the historian Wykes wrote, the events in Birmingham had turned him into “a national figure of hate.” Priestley (shown here in a 1791 cartoon) invited controversy with his unconventional political and religious views, including his support for the French Revolution. Targeted by a mob in Birmingham and pilloried in the press, he was forced to flee England in the summer of 1794. —Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo Priestley was satirized in caricatures, burned in effigies with his fellow radical, Thomas Paine. His adult sons were forced to flee the country. The prosecutions of fellow Dissenters that followed over the next few years were particularly frightening. “It shews that no man who is obnoxious,” he fretted in a 1793 letter, “however innocent, is safe.” And so, the following spring, at the age of sixty-one, he became a political refugee, following his sons Joseph and Harry across the Atlantic, where he was met with a hero’s welcome in the United States, eventually settling down with his family in the small town of Northumberland, one hundred forty miles northwest of Philadelphia, to assume the quiet life of a farmer. But farming didn’t suit Priestley and neither did quiet. Over the next several years, Priestley found himself back in political hot water, clashing this time with his friend John Adams and the Federalists, in danger, at one point, of being deported from the very country that had just offered him asylum. (Adams blamed Priestley’s Letters to the Inhabitants of Northumberland for contributing to his 1800 electoral defeat to Jefferson.) In his adopted homeland, Priestley returned to his scientific work with renewed zeal, but that, too, proved to be controversial, as he produced paper after paper attacking the experiments of his fellow chemists, who had moved on from Priestley’s outdated theory of “dephlogisticated air” to follow the more quantitative approach of scientists like Antoine Lavoisier. In doing so, Schofield observed, Priestley was “perversely fighting the new chemistry based on his discoveries” in a way that would come to exasperate even his admirers. In a eulogy written for the Académie Nationale des Sciences, the zoologist Georges Cuvier would famously proclaim Priestley to be “the father of modern chemistry [who] never acknowledged his daughter.” The century-old theory Priestley relied upon during his pneumatic experiments—which postulated that all flammable substances contained an element called phlogiston that was released into the surrounding air during combustion—proved to be wrong in the end. But the work he conducted in the final decade of his life was not a wasted effort, says Schofield. By relentlessly hounding his critics, by probing for the weak spots in their arguments, he had “forced the tightening of their experimental evidence,” and compelled them to up their scientific game. Surely that fact would have offered him some satisfaction. He understood that the pursuit of knowledge was not a solitary one. Even the most famous individuals, the ones whose accomplishments fill the pages of books, the ones whose names adorn charts of history, he once wrote, “enjoy . . . the labours and discoveries of others” before they “go off the stage,” leaving their work behind, to be advanced by those who follow them. Priestley labored as long as possible, through deteriorating health and advancing old age, continuing to conduct experiments until he was unable to leave his bed. On February 6, 1804, he called his assistant to his side with one final request for help on revisions to an unfinished manuscript that required his attention. He worked until he had assured himself that he had finished what was needed. “That is right,” he said. “I have now done.” Minutes later, he was gone. About the author Alyson Foster is an associate editor of Humanities magazine. Funding information In 2020, NEH awarded a Digital Humanities grant in the amount of $99,985, to Daniel Blake Rosenberg of the University of Oregon and Anthony Grafton of Princeton University to develop The Time Charts of Joseph Priestley, a digital, interactive reconstruction of Joseph Priestley’s influential infographics, A Chart of Biography and A New Chart of History. In 1994, a Public Programs grant ($45,166) supported the planning of an interpretation of the laboratory, library, and landscape at Joseph Priestley’s former home in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. NEH grants have funded numerous projects on the work and influence of major Enlightenment thinkers, including Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Immanuel Kant, as well as lesser-known figures such as the abolitionist Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Italian Jesuit priest Francesco Emanuele Cangiamila. Republication statement This article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit: “Originally published as “The Life and Timescapes of Joseph Priestley” in the Spring 2024 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Please notify us at publications@neh.gov if you are republishing it or have any questions. Sources Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton; A Description of a Chart of Biography by Joseph Priestley; A Description of a New Chart of History by Joseph Priestley; Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air by Joseph Priestley; The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1733 to 1773 by Robert E. Schofield; Familiar Letters, Addressed to the Inhabitants of Birmingham by Joseph Priestley; A General View of the Arguments for the Unity of God by Joseph Priestley; “Joseph Priestley, Natural Philosopher” by Robert E. Schofield, Bulletin for the History of Chemistry, vol. 30, no. 2, 2005; Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian, edited by Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes; “The Priestley Riots of 1791,” by R. B. Rose, Past & Present, November 1960, no. 18; Science, Medicine and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), edited by R.G.W. Anderson and Christopher Lawrence; The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley by Joseph Priestley. Article appears in HUMANITIES Spring 2024 Volume 45 Issue 2

A Quantum Leap in Computing Etymology

Computational devices have been employed by humans for thousands of years to aid in a variety of activities. The invention of the abacus likely occurred in Sumeria around 2700 to 2300 B.C.E., which used a base 60 system, but the oldest known example of an abacus is the Salamis Tablet from Greece (300 B.C.E.) [Samoly, K., History of the Abacus, Ohio Journal of School Mathematics, N. 65, Spring, 2012, p. 58]. We have evidence of geared computational devices such as the Antikythera Mechanism dating to about 87 B.C.E. [Price, Derek de Solla, Gears from the Greeks. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society N.S. 64, no. 7. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1974]. 

However, a review of the Third Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) [Oxford English Dictionary, August 2024, [www.oed.com/dictionary/computer-n?tab=meaning_and_use#861811 1] states that the word ‘computer’ was first recorded as used in the year 1613 by Richard Braithwaite with the meaning “One who computes; a calculator, reckoner; spec. a person employed to make calculations in an observatory, in surveying, etc.” [Bold Italics added for emphasis]. 

According to the same OED entry [ibid.] the first use of the word ‘computer’ to refer to a device to perform computations, as opposed to a person, was in 1869 in a novel by M. Harland, in Pemie's Temptation. In this work, Harland refers to a "patent computer". The use of the word 'patent' as an adjective in this context, clearly, has the meaning “easily recognizable; obvious” and was not referring to a mechanical device. This is similar to the use of the term “patently false” with the meaning of “obviously false”. Therefore, the term ‘patent computer’ was being used with the meaning of “a person exhibiting the characteristics of a professional computer” (i.e., a person). Hence, this use of the word “computer” in 1869 was not referring to a machine at all! 

Furthermore, there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone else picked up on this sense of the word as a ‘mechanical computational device’ until William Cox did in the 1890s, more than twenty years later. Of course, the OED [ibid.] also references an appearance of the word ‘computer’ on 22 January 1897, in Engineering [Note: A London, UK Publicaton] 104/2, quoting, “This was a computer made by Mr. W. Cox. He described it as of the nature of a circular slide rule.” Thus, according to the OED, William Cox was the neologist who used the term ‘computer’ when referring to a device that performed computation on that date. 

However, the evidence is now clear that the OED was also incorrect by at least five years here.  As far as we now know, William Cox named his circular computing devices ‘computers’ in 1892 for his “Electric Wire Computer” [in The Electrical Engineer, Aug. 10, 1892, p. 139], and we also know that he registered his company “Cox Computer Company” in New Jersey, US in 1893, specifically for manufacturing and selling devices that perform computations of various types in a similar manner. 

Of note, in 1891 he describes these devices as “calculators,” so, it is safe to assume that the first year of use of the term 'computer' by Cox was in 1892. Hence, we conclude that William Cox is the pioneer of the term ‘computer’ in referring to a device that performs computations, and that he did so as early as 1892.

We additionally note that in 1895, “The Cox Computer Company has recently been organized for the purpose of manufacturing and introducing the various forms of mechanical computers designed by Mr. William Cox of Stapleton, N.Y., where the company will have its headquarters until removal to New York City. [Note: This refers to the registration of the company in New York State as a foreign entity two years after his registration in New Jersey.] The scale upon which operations will be conducted and the number of new applications that will be made, such as power transmissions of belting, gears, etc. is said by the parties to warrant a material reduction in price and choice of style and material. A circular has been issued announcing these innovations.” [Progressive Age, Vol. 13, no. 23, Dec. 2, 1895, p. 583, Progressive Publishing, New York. google.com/books/edition/Gas_Age/dPI9AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1 &dq=%22progressive+age%22+computer+1895&pg=PA583&printsec =frontcover]. 

Cox’s groundbreaking innovations have had a profound and lasting impact on technology. While Cox was not the first to make a device that computed mathematical functions, nor the first to try to come up with a term to describe a device that does mathematical computation, his terminology is the one that has endured to this day. 

Other examples of attempted naming of such devices during the 19th Century were: 

•  In 1822 and again in 1837 Charles Babbage devised, first, the Difference Engine, and then the Analytical Engine. 
•  In 1857 Orlando L. Castle and Thomas Hill developed devices they called an Arithmometer. 
•  From the 1850s to the 1870s there were many inventions called Computing or Calculating Machines by Parmalee, Smith, Alexander, Rowland, Davies, Mendenhall, Groesbeck, Grant, Robjack, Spaulding, and Baldwin, to mention a few. 
•  In 1880 Herman Hollerith devised the Tabulator which was eventually used to perform the 1890 census and evolved after the turn of the century into the IBM Corp. 
•  In 1884 the French engineer Philbert Maurice d'Ocagne (1862–1928) devised a graphical calculating device that was called either a nomograph, alignment chart, or abac. These devices were two-dimensional diagrams designed to allow the approximate graphical computation of a mathematical function. 
•  In 1887 Dorr Felt, filed a patent for the Comptometer, the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator. The success of the Comptometer caused others to call their computational devices “comptometers”, much like the term "Xerox" is used for a copier. 
•  In 1892, Walter Hart published a book "The Equationor or the Universal Calculator" within which he describes a circular slide rule to perform computations. 

Yet, the term to describe automated devices that perform computations is ‘computer’, the term coined by Cox. This fact, in no way, detracts from the contributions of other early computer pioneers, including Turing and von Neumann. 

It is curious to note that in the mammoth undertaking by Herman Goldstine in his book “The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann” [Goldstine, Herman, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, Princeton University Press, 1972, 378pp.] there is only a passing, one-line reference to William Oughtred for inventing the slide rule on page 4, and no mention, whatsoever, of William Cox, who coined the term ‘computer’ itself! So, to all those interested in the history of computers, while you might have thought that it had been 127 years since the computer was invented, you can be rest assured that, as of today, the computer is really five years older -- 132 years! A quantum leap, indeed!

February 6, 2024 Marks 220 Years Since the Death of Joseph Priestley

We last visited the gravesite of Joseph Priestley in Northumberland, PA, on February 6, 2004, on the commemoration of the 200 years since his death.
If you're interested to see the post on the event click here.

The John Proctor Sundial of 1644

Photograph Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum In May 1907, the Essex Institute of Salem, Massachusetts reported that they had received a sundial as a gift from Abel Proctor, formerly belonging to one of his ancestors, John Proctor, the witchcraft victim (Salem Witchcraft Trials, 1692).   This is an example of one of the earliest known American sundials.

John Proctor lived with his wife Elizabeth in what is now Peabody,  Massachusetts. They were respected farmers and keepers of a  tavern. Mary Warren, one of the "afflicted girls" of Salem Village  was a servant in the Proctor household. Early in 1692, Proctor  had been an outspoken critic of the witchcraft proceedings and  of the antics of the Village girls. He and his wife were accused of  witchcraft and sent to prison. Both were convicted of witchcraft,  and John was hanged on August 19. Elizabeth, who was found to  be pregnant, was spared execution and outlived the 1692 hysteria.  The story of the Proctors was later made famous by Arthur Miller in  his play "The Crucible." The "Proctor" sundial is 12 inches to the side, and the gnomon  reaches 6 inches above the dial at its highest point.  It is inscribed  with the date "1644". In 1995 I decided to make a reproduction of this sundial with some  notable changes.  First, since I had every intention of using the  sundial and I wanted to use it in a vertical position, I reversed the  order of the numerals, with progressing time going from the right  side counterclockwise to the left.  Next, I decided to make a more  elaborate gnomon.  The final change that I made was I adjusted the  spacing of the hour marks for the latitude where it was intended to  be used.  I also did not puncture the surface for the mounting rivets.  The image below is the reproduction Proctor Sun Dial that I made.  It is in my garden.

Sahasra Purna Chandrodayam and Other Celebrations of the 80th Year

In Sandskrit sahasra means 1000, purna means full, and chandrodayam means dawn of moon.  Sahasra Purna Chandrodayam is a special occasion and celebration organized for an elderly member of the family who has witnessed 1000 full moon days during their lifetime. This is a Hindu custom in India. The 1000th full moon of a person's life occurs when they are approximately 80 years and 9 months old.  The celebration is meant to provide mental and physical strength to a person in their old age and to encourage them to pursue spiritual liberation from all problems in this life.

I hope to celebrate my Sahasra Purna Chandrodayam on December 21, 2024. This particular date also happens to be the date of the Winter Solstice.  The day when the sun rises the least in the sky during the year. I will be also, therefore, celebrating my 80th Winter Solstice.

In Japan, Sanju, a person's 80th birthday, is so called because the character “san” (傘) contains the characters for eight (八) and ten (十). Both sanju and beiju (88) are celebrated by wearing gold, giving thanks, and wishing for more happy years for the person. I have already celebrated Sanju.

HMS Rose

The Frigate HMS ROSE reproduction (courtesy of Fine Model Ships)

In 1969, shortly after our honeymoon in Mexico, my wife and I traveled with our 1967 Volvo from Central Illinois to Nova Scotia, Canada, on an extended vacation.  We had our 1949 Grumman aluminum canoe mounted on the car's roof rack and traveled the full extent of Nova Scotia from the Cape Bretton Highlands Provincial Park in the North, through most of the coastal ocean communities on the Southeastern side of the peninsula, through Halifax, where the Commonwealth Games were being celebrated, and then further Southeast through Lunenburg and out to Oak Island, and then over to the Port-Royal National Historic Site on the Bay of Fundy and many other places in between.

It was while we were in Lunenburg that we first encountered the construction of the reproduction of the Frigate HMS Rose at the Smith and Rhuland shipyard located there.  The original HMS Rose was a 20 gun frigate of the British Navy, built in Hull, England in 1757. She served in the Channel, the Caribbean, and in North America.  Her activities in suppressing smuggling in the colony of Rhode Island provoked the formation of what became the Continental Navy, the precursor of the modern United States Navy. She was based at the North American station in the West Indies and then used by the British in the American Revolutionary War. She was scuttled in the harbor of Savannah, Georgia in 1779.

The replica of the HMS Rose we saw under construction in 1969 was built based upon the original British Admiralty plans with some modifications to make her handle better, and she launched from Lunenberg in 1970. She was used for display and sail training until about 1984. Thereafter, she was sold and her homeport was moved to Captain's Cove in Bridgeport, CT, in anticipation of her use in the Operation Tall Ships as part of the 1976 United States Bicentennial Celebration, and displayed as a museum ship and used for sail training. I encountered her again at her Captain's Cove berth and toured her for the first time shortly after she arrived at Captain's Cove.  In 2001 she was purchased by 20th Century Fox Studios and sailed to San Diego, CA, where she was refitted as a reproduction of the HMS Surprise and was used to make two movies: “Master and Commander: Far Side of the World” starring Russell Crowe, and "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides"

In 2007, she was sold to the San Diego Maritime Museum and reconstructed and used for sailing.

The 250th Anniversary of the discovery of Oxygen

 

Dr. Sliderule at Joseph Priestley's Laboratory at Bowood House,

the site of the isolation of the gas element Oxygen by Priestley

on August 1, 1774

On August 1, 2024, we will celebrate a momentous event in the history of science, the 250th Anniversary of the isolation of the element Oxygen.

Joseph Priestley was in the laboratory he had constructed at Bowood House in Wiltshire, England on August 1, 1774.  He was the librarian and tutor for the Earl of Shelburne. Priestley, a Unitarian Minister and polymath was already well known for his scientific and other scholarly work in many diverse disciplines.

 
However, Priestley’s most important and lasting contribution to science is based upon the discovery he made on this date at this location when he obtained a colorless gas by heating red mercuric oxide. He found that a candle would burn and that a mouse would thrive in this gas in a closed container.  He called it “dephlogisticated air,” based upon the belief that ordinary air became saturated with phlogiston once it could no longer support combustion and life.  The phlogiston theory was originally postulated by the German chemist, Georg Ernst Stahl (22 October 1659 – 24 May 1734), and has subsequently been discredited.

The following October, Priestley accompanied his patron, Lord Shelburne, on a tour through Belgium, Holland, Germany, and France, when in Paris Priestley informed the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier how he obtained the new “air.” This meeting between the two scientists was highly significant for the future of chemistry. Lavoisier immediately repeated Priestley’s experiments and, between 1775 and 1780, conducted intensive investigations from which he derived the elementary nature of oxygen, recognized it as the “active” principle in the atmosphere, interpreted its role in combustion and respiration, and gave it its name. Lavoisier’s pronouncements of the activity of oxygen revolutionized chemistry.

To see a video on this subject see this link.