Joseph Priestley Online

 I have to let everyone out there who is interested in scholarly research of Joseph Priestley know that I have discovered a website that has almost everything you might want to know about where to find out something about Joseph Priestley, whether it be a work written by Joseph Priestley or a work written about him.  And, wherever possible, a link to an online version of the reference is also given.  The site is named Joseph Priestley Online. and can be found at JosephPriestley.org.  The site has been organized by and is maintained by Andrew Burd-Harris.

This site is a work in progress. Obviously, as new works are written about Priestley, they will be added to the compilation, and for the occasional omission of a past work that is discovered, it will also be added.

Thank you for all your hard work, Andrew!

The House of Joseph Priestley

 The House of Joseph Priestley (reprinted from Science Magazine, November 27, 1919, p. 495)

The original house and laboratory of Dr. Joseph Priestley, the great chemist who discovered oxygen in 1774, and came twenty years later to America, which is located on the banks of the Susquehanna River, at Northumberland, Pa., was purchased recently by graduate students of the Pennsylvania State College, who plan to move it to the campus and make it a lasting memorial.

Upon learning that the Priestley homestead, which was built in 1794-1796, was to be put up at public auction, the Penn State chemists sent as their representative to the sale Dr. G. G. Pond, dean of the School of Natural Science at the college.  He was successful in making the purchase, and the historic mansion will be preserved.

Architects from the college will at once make the necessary surveys preparatory to the work of moving the Priestley house to the campus at State College. The house is of frame, and painting has kept the woodwork in a remarkable state of preservation, so that it may be possible to rebuild the greater part of the structure from the present lumber.  Immense pine timbers used in the framework are as good as new and the old-fashioned interior decorations -- arched doorways, fireplaces, and stairways -- are in such condition that they can be removed and replaced with comparative ease.

While the purchase of the house has been made by Dr. Pond for the Penn State chemistry alumni, who are scattered to all parts of the country, funds for its removal and erection on the college campus will be supplied by an as yet unnamed donor.  Actual work of removal will probably be started in the spring.  Northumberland is about sixty miles from State College, at the intersection of the north and west branches of the Susquehanna.

The reconstruction on the college campus will be along the old architectural lines, but modernized and adapted to some suitable use by the school of Natural Science, according to present plans.  The house is an old landmark in Northumberland county, and can be seen on the outskirts of the town from trains on the Pennsylvania Railroad passing Northumberland.  It is a two-story structure, with capacious attic space.  It is about 45 X  50 feet, with a projection at each end about 25 feet square.  One of those was the kitchen and the other the workshop, or laboratory, in which Priestley pursued his scientific study and experiments.

[Note:  The Priestley House was never moved from the original site in Northumberland county despite the best intentions of the alumni from Penn State.  However, the purchase did allow the Priestley House to be preserved-- Dr. Sliderule]

"As the circle of light expands, so does its circumference – the frontier between the light of knowledge and the darkness of the unknown."

I recently came across the quote in the title of this blog entry in an article dated January 7, 2021 by Kermit Pattison in BBC Science Focus Magazine entitled "Lucy and Ardi: The two fossils that changed human history." In the article the prefatory comment to the above quote is stated here in its entirety:

"New discoveries present us with a paradox: the more we learn, the more we confront what we don’t know. More than two centuries ago, the pioneering British chemist Joseph Priestley offered a wonderful metaphor for scientific progress: as the circle of light expands, so does its circumference – the frontier between the light of knowledge and the darkness of the unknown."

I did a double take on this comment. Where have I seen this before. I wrote a blog entry five and a half years ago about a quotation of J. B. Priestley that is oftentimes also attributed to Joseph Priestely, "The More Elaborate our Means of Communication, the Less we Communicate." This J.B. Priestley quote is oftentimes referred to as Priestley's paradox. Yet, the new quote I found by Joseph Priestley is being referred to as Priestley's paradox. But, in this instance we need to concentrate on Kermit Pattison's prefatory comment, "the more we learn, the more we confront what we don't know." Or alternatively, we could state this as,"The more we learn, the less we know," which echos the original J. B. Priestley paradox. Of note, Pattison's quote of Priestley does not cite the quote's source! A quick search on Google attributes the quote to Albert Einstein. However, in checking with Mr. Pattison, he reveals that the quote comes from Joseph Priestley's 1790 book “Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air.” The actual quote is here:

"No philosophical investigation can be said to be completed which leaves any thing unknown that we are prompted by it to wish we could know relating to it. But such is the necessary connexion of all things in the system of nature, that every discovery brings to our view many things of which we had no intimation before, the complete discovery of which we cannot help wishing for; and whenever these discoveries are completed, we may assure ourselves they will farther increase this kind of dissatisfaction.

The greater is the circle of light, the greater is the boundary of the darkness by which it is confined: but, notwithstanding this, the more light we get, the more thankful we ought to be; for by this means we have the greater range for satisfactory contemplation. In time, the bounds of light will be still farther extended; and from the infinity of the Divine nature and the Divine works, we may promise ourselves an endless progress in our investigation of them, a prospect truly sublime and glorious. The works of the greatest and most successful philosophers are, on this account, open to our complaints of their being imperfect."

Note that Mr. Pattison has taken the liberty of paraphrasing the original quote.

The Self Repairing Machine

In this modern age where we hear of advances in artificial intelligence, what is being done to build self repairing systems, systems that heal themselves.  Biological systems have been known for centuries to have some self healing capabilities, such as from cuts and broken bones, or even the flu.

Can this property of self repair be expanded to non-biological systems?

Early telecommunications and computer systems employed error detection and error correction data coding techniques, both in hardware and software to insure that data was not corrupted. These techniques are employed extensively in today's electronic systems.  If you are not familiar with these techniques you can read up on it here.
There have also been techniques developed to repair electronic circuits through redundancy.  A simple example would be to have three independent logic circuits and then compare the results, such that if two of the redundant logic circuits give one result and one is different, then choose the result with more votes.

But, what about mechanical components?  George Washington University has filed for a patent for for Self Repairing and Self Sustaining Autonomous Machines.

"Machines are subject to wear due to friction between moving parts.  The expensive heavy equipment, such as wind turbines and aircraft propellers, are expensive to shut down or repair. Researchers have patented a real-time sensor and nanotechnology-based system that detects the component surface damage in moving parts, such as gears, and repairs and sustains the moving parts of the machines automatically."

"The technology enables the machines that are long-lasting and self-sustaining to become self-repairing systems. The invention deploys a monitoring system of thin film automatic sensors to monitor physical metallurgical conditions of machine’s moving parts on their surfaces. The sensors transmit monitoring data using radio signals to a control site.  The system also comprises a mathematical model that identifies damage through anomaly pattern recognitions and generates distress signals that trigger repairing process.  The ultimate aim of the system is to reduce premature failures of machines such as expensive wind turbines and aircraft propellers, by eliminating labor cost and maintenance downtime significantly. This invention may have a profound effect on how machines are designed, built and maintained."

And a team of British scientists at the University of Bristol has been quietly developing a technology over the past three years that has produced aircraft wings that can fix themselves after being damaged, suggesting that self-healing technology will soon become commonplace.  Their research, that was presented at a Royal Society meeting in London, was billed as an important step in an emerging field which could soon produce self-healing nail polish and a cure for cracked mobile phone screens.  Speaking exclusively to The Independent its leader, Professor Duncan Wass, said he expected self-healing products to reach consumers in the “very near future”.

George Goodwin: Joseph Priestley, a towering figure in a special relationship with America’s founding father

The Joseph Priestley statue in Birstall.

[Editor's note:  The following article by George Goodwin appeared in the Yorkshire Post on Friday, 17 February, 2017. It is reprinted here, with permission,  Johnston Press plc. Registered in Scotland no. SC015382 Registered Office:Orchard Brae House, 30 Queensferry Road, Edinburgh EH4 2HS. All rights reserved.]

Well positioned in the Market Place of the West Yorkshire village of Birstall is a statue to Joseph Priestley. This 1912 memorial was funded by public subscription and the slightly larger-than-life bronze figure is a fine piece of sculpture by Frances Darlington, the Headingley-born and Harrogate-based sculptor who was trained at the Slade School of Art. 

The lettering on the statue’s square base of grey granite notes that Priestley was born at Fieldhead, Birstall, in 1733, and describes him as the ‘discoverer of oxygen’. It is a fine monument to Birstall’s most famous son and it is true that he was the first to isolate oxygen, along with six other gases. This discovery was of fundamental consequence, yet to limit Priestley’s importance to that one achievement would be to similarly summarise Benjamin Franklin as merely the inventor of the lightning conductor. 

It is an apt comparison, because the two men were major figures of the British Enlightenment. They were great scientists, both winning the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, the 18th century equivalent of the Nobel Prize. They also became very close friends and this year marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of Priestley’s The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments. 

It was while undertaking his research for the book that Priestley was introduced to Franklin, the greatest living authority on electricity. Franklin lived in London from 1757 right up to March 1775, with the exception of just a short 18-month break back in his home town of Philadelphia. He was ostensibly here as a political representative of the Assembly of Pennsylvania, but was also celebrated as a natural philosopher at a time when the politically dominant British aristocracy were in the grip of a scientific craze. Franklin was not only the most famous American in Britain, with David Hume calling him “America’s first great man of letters”, but was esteemed across Europe, with Immanuel Kant describing him as “the Prometheus of Modern Times”. 

Between 1767 and 1773 Priestley was the dissenting church minister at Mill Hill Chapel in Leeds, and another statue of him still overlooks the chapel from City Square. During this time, the friendship between Priestley and Franklin was strengthened by their regular exchange of letters ranging across science, philosophy and politics. In 1771, Franklin went on holiday in the North of England with a group of fellow spirits that included the double Copley Medal winner John Canton and the Dutch-born discoverer of photosynthesis, Jan Ingenhousz, and he naturally spent time with Priestley. 

Franklin saw even more of Priestley from 1773, when the latter wintered in London. The two men enjoyed a very special relationship of shared enquiry, and it was with that time in mind that Priestley later wrote: “it is probable that no person now living was better acquainted with Dr Franklin”. 

Franklin had Priestley for a companion just a day before he was forced to sail to America to escape arrest by the repressive ministers in Lord North’s British government. 

Priestley well knew that Franklin was not the ‘agent provocateur’ of that government’s imagination, but had tried to settle the dispute between Britain and its colonies. Far from seeking separation, Franklin had long advocated a British empire across North America. As Priestley wrote of Franklin: “So great an admirer was he at that time of the British Constitution, that he said he saw no inconvenience from its being extended over a great part of the globe.” 

It was not the Americans’ rejection of the British constitution, but their very belief that the British were forcibly seeking an unconstitutional extension of London’s executive power that led to the colonies’ eventual rebellion. 

Priestley and Franklin continued to correspond, if circumspectly, during the conflict and once again more openly at its conclusion. Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, died in Pennsylvania in 1790. 

The third of the well-known statues of Priestley is in Birmingham, where he and his wife moved in 1780 when he became a Unitarian church minister. The years there would end unhappily as Priestley’s support for the initial, reforming, stages of the French Revolution, combined with his longstanding campaign for the removal of the century-old disenfranchisement of religious dissenters, made him a marked man at a time of political uncertainty and social unrest. 

During three days of rioting in July 1791, a mob, with the acquiescence of the local authorities, destroyed the Unitarians’ Old Meeting House and Priestley’s own home, laboratory, library and papers. Priestley fled, and within three years he had moved to Pennsylvania. 

However, during a period of international crisis, President John Adams introduced the Aliens and Sedition Acts and Priestley feared deportation. It was not until after the inauguration of his friend Thomas Jefferson in 1801 that Priestley was able to write to the new President “that it is now only that I can say I see nothing to fear from the hand of power”. It was in America that Priestley ultimately found tolerance and toleration, and it was there, in 1804, that he died. 

The 18th century was a period when scientific enquiry and experimentation was able to flourish. Yet, in times of political change and uncertainty, philosophical speculation in the area of politics and religion could be met with fear-fed violent intolerance. 

Considering our own uncertain and often intolerant times, and recalling the shocking event of last June that led to so many floral tributes being placed at the foot of Priestley’s statue in Birstall, we should – on both sides of the Atlantic – take inspiration from this courageous and dignified man. Priestley fought for an open, respectful and well-considered freedom of expression. His is an example to follow in this age of instant communication and immediate comment. 


George Goodwin is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the author of Benjamin Franklin in London: 
The British Life of America’s Founding Father. 

[Editor's note:  For those Americans unfamiliar with the reference in the last paragraph of the article to the "event of last June that led to so many floral tributes being placed at the foot of Priestley's statue in Birstall," Goodwin is referring to the assassination of Jo Cox, a Member of the British Parliament,  who was assassinated while she spoke at the foot of the Priestley statue in Birstall on June 16, 2016 by a right wing extremist who opposed her position against Brexit.

For a link to the original post, please click here.

We have included here a photo from the original unveiling of the Priestley Memorial Nov 19, 1912,

at Birstall, Leeds, Yorkshire.]

Little Known Facts About Fruit and Vegetable Stickers

Most fruit and vegetables bought in a supermarket nowadays have a label attached to them much like the one in the picture of the Gala Apple above.  We know why the label is there -- to allow the checkout clerk get the PLU code from it so that you will be charged the right amount for the produce you are buying.

Let's make this very clear.  This is mostly for the convenience of the store and not you that the label is there.  They don't have to train their staff in fruit and vegetable recognition, especially with products that look almost identical like organic vs. non-organic cucumbers.  I suppose this ultimately might benefit us by them not charging us for a more expensive product or by reducing the store overhead and ultimately bringing the product to the consumer for a lower price.

The downside to the label is that you should remove it before eating the produce, but sometimes the label is difficult to remove and may blemish the produce while attempting to remove it.  I also happen to find a bowl full of apples less attractive if they each have their PLU labels still attached. You don't want to remove them because you might remove some of the apple skin and promote the immediate decomposition of the fruit and the unsightliness too.

The code on the label can tell us a lot about the produce.  First, the same code is used in all stores for the same product.  This is because it is the producer that puts the label on the product and not the store.  So, you can tell if the fruit or vegetable is the same at two different stores if they have the same label PLU code.  You can tell if the produce is organic or not (prefix 9 + 4 digits for organic).  You can also tell if the produce is genetically modified (prefix 8 + 4 digits).

The FDA requires that both the label and the glue be food grade and they are not supposed to harm you. Some sources claim that the label must be made of "edible paper" and can be eaten, but it is not recommended.   However, I have found sources that claim that the label can be made of plastic, and that should be somewhat disconcerting to us.

My personal experience diverts somewhat from the FDA mandates.  I used to dispose of the fruit and vegetable labels with the rest of my compostable waste.  However, I have found that the labels DO NOT DECOMPOSE.  This has lead me to believe that many labels, may, in fact, be made of some type of plastic.  So the question is whether something that is indigestible is edible, or more importantly whether it should be eaten at all.  Clearly, we should exclude inedible materials like, glass, rocks, metal, and plastics.  I would probably not want to eat clothing either.  Then there are the plant and animal products that we should most likely not eat either, like bones, leather, hair, corn cobs, fruit pits, nut husks, etc.

Are there produce label inspectors at the FDA, or is this purely on the honor system that these labels are being used?  Is there a downside for the manufactures to use real edible paper labels?

The Curative “Sacred” Waters

Bookplate, Joseph Priestley, "Rushing Water", c. 1780

Another article by guest contributor Chandra Emani*

The faithful in many countries swear by them. Many a land has its share of what are known as “sacred” rivers. A drink of the water in them have mystically cured dreaded diseases.  But the story I have for you today is about one such river I grew up on. The River Ganges or Ganga Nadhi as it is known in India. Travel to India today and people revere the sacred waters known as Gangajal (“jal” in Hindi means “water”). Gangajal, I was told by my elders, gives you peace when you drink it and many a mythological story talk about drinking the waters literally bringing back the dead and cure many a disease. Being the skeptical biologist, I took this as a general eternal love people have for the waters of their land from which spring civilizations and culture. Everything changed when one fine day I was preparing to teach my recombinant DNA technology class at our university. The topic was of bacteriophages, the microbial forms I have been using in my research for the past decade. As always, I was collecting the scientific history to introduce the concepts and the story of the discovery of bacteriophage blew me away. And it involved the sacred waters of Ganga.

In 1896, when British still ruled India, a bacteriologist stationed in Delhi, Ernest Hanbury Hankin, wrote a paper for the Pasteur Institute Journal where he reported that the waters from the rivers Ganga and Yamuna (this river incidentally passes by the Taj Mahal) could cure cholera.  What he wrote in the paper was widely discussed at Oxford and Cambridge. Hankin’s remarkable observation was that even after boiling the waters, or passing them through porcelain filters, the waters from these rivers still retained a mysterious biological source that dissolved bacteria in the lab and stemmed the spread of cholera in the land. People who swore by the curative properties of the rivers unearthed recorded documents that showed that the Ganga water once reportedly cured leprosy, a fact that Hankin now recorded in his paper as completely believable. Hankin was not taken seriously simply because he was on the wrong side of science politics. He was a “vivisector” who “escaped to India”. Vivisection was the use of dissecting live animals for research, a practice scorned by the scientific elite of the times and Hankin was on the wrong side of the debate. So, his remarkable discovery languished in journals. A generation later, in 1915, another British bacteriologist Frederick Twort at the Brown institute in London rediscovered the mysterious bacterial killer. He was working on developing a smallpox vaccine from a bacteria found in the skin of calves and when he plated those bacteria in the lab, he observed that among the bacterial growth lawns in the plate, certain transparent glassy areas were seen clearly showing something killing and dissolving the bacteria. Across the ocean, French-Canadian microbiologist Felix D’Herelle independently discovered the same kind of mysterious biological source that “ate” bacteria according to him this time in a culture of dysentery bacteria. D’Herelle confirmed that the mysterious substance was in fact a virus and named it bacteriophage (“phage” in Greek means “eater”). The phenomenon was named “Twort-D’Herelle effect.” Both scientists acknowledged the record of the erstwhile Dr. Hankin and confirmed that what was found in the rivers Ganga and Yamuna was in fact the bacteriophage.  D’Herelle also recorded the remarkable case of a man affected with dysentery being cured by bacteriophages. The science behind the curative sacredness of Gangajal was complete.

In 1920s and 1930s, both the Soviet Republic of Georgia and United States widely used bacteriophages to treat bacterial infections especially in the army. This was called Phage therapy.
It did not catch on as medical trials were documented as inconclusive simply because of improper scientific methodology such as not including proper controls and also the lack of understanding the scientific concepts behind phage action. The subsequent years also saw the rise of antibiotics that were easy to make, store and prescribe and the phage therapy lost out. In the 1960s, phage biology was revived by a scientific trio of Max Delbruck, Alfred Hershey and Salvador Luria (Luria’s first research student was incidentally the legendary Jim Watson who discovered DNA). The scientists were working on phages at the legendary Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, the ground zero for DNA and molecular biological revolution. When they were working to unravel the molecular elements involved in bacteria, they chanced on bacterial cultures that suddenly showed mutations, the sudden changes seen in genes and DNA as if somebody accidentally broke a test tube while culturing the bacteria. After a long day at the lab, Luria was at a cafeteria when he saw players at a slot machine when a eureka moment chanced on him looking at the sudden wins of the slot machine players. The subsequent years saw the trio work out all the scientific basis of how phages work, the account of which Luria fondly recorded in his autobiography One Slot Machine, A Broken Test Tube. The mystery workings of phages is now complete, the feat that earned Luria, Delbruck and Hershey the Nobel Prize in 1969. In recent times, June 2009 saw clinical trials to use bacteriophage cocktails to treat infected venous leg ulcers in humans. Another clinical trial in the same year in Europe saw phage therapy on chronic ear infections. Several other trials are underway to see the efficacy of phage therapy on infected burns, antibiotic resistance and cystic fibrosis.

As for me, I will forever remember the day when I found out that the curative healing powers of Ganga and Yamuna did have a scientific basis, and the rivers were the first to witness a revolutionary discovery that led to a Nobel Prize and now throw open doors to medical revolutions. I now fully understand why they say “the best way to learn is to teach.”
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*Chandra Emani is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Western Kentucky University-Owensboro. Apart from teaching introductory and advanced courses in molecular biology and Genetics and researching on utilizing plants to make useful products such as biofuels and anti-cancerous pharmaceuticals, he enjoys explaining science in simple words to his daughter and son. He can be reached at chandrakanth.emani@wku.edu.