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.
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