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Opening comments
The Encyclopedia Britannica Online introduces Joseph Priestly as:
(born March 13, 1733, Birstall Fieldhead, near Leeds, Yorkshire [now West Yorkshire], England—died February 6, 1804, Northumberland, Pennsylvania, U.S.), English clergyman, political theorist, and physical scientist whose work contributed to advances in liberal political and religious thought and in experimental chemistry. He is best remembered for his contribution to the chemistry of gases. [1]
The Priestley Society adds:
He is most famous for his discovery of oxygen on the 1st of August 1774. A lot of every day substances are also attributable to Priestley's work. Without Priestley we wouldn't have Carbonated Drinks and might not have the eraser (Indian gum). We wouldn't have hydrochloric acid, nitrous oxide (laughing gas), carbon monoxide or even sulphur dioxide. Priestley also did experiments with electricity and his associates included Benjamin Franklin and even Thomas Jefferson. He even encouraged James Watt towards chemical research.[2]
Thomas Henry Huxley, to an assembly gathered to raise a statue to Priestly, exhibits more passion:
But I am sure that I speak not only for myself, but for all this assemblage, when I say that our purpose to-day is to do honour, not to Priestley, the Unitarian divine, but to Priestley, the fearless defender of rational freedom in thought and in action: to Priestley, the philosophic thinker; to that Priestley who held a foremost place among "the swift runners who hand over the lamp of life," [1: "Quasi cursores, vitai lampada tradunt."--LUCR. _De Rerum Nat_. ii. 78.] and transmit from one generation to another the fire kindled, in the childhood of the world, at the Promethean altar of Science.[3]
ref
- ↑ Joseph Priestly. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011.
- ↑ Joseph Priestley. Priestley Society.
- ↑ An essay by Thomas Henry Huxley. Read Book Online.
biblio
- Joseph Priestly. (1809) Memoirs of the Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley, to the year 1795. Reprinted from the American ed., by the several Unitarian Societies in England: and sold by J. Johnson, 1809. | Google Books Preview and Free Google eBook.