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. 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 horizontal line divided into ten-year
increments. Despite the huge quantity of information it contains, it is
extremely user-friendly.
Anyone 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.
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 interest 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. 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 were 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 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. 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.”
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 appeared in HUMANITIES Spring 2024 Volume 45 Issue 2
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