Joseph Priestley (459)

Joseph Priestley (13 March 1733–6 February 1804) was an educator, minister, scientist, writer, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1785. Born to a clothmaker and his wife, Priestley spent much of his early childhood with his grandparents, before his aunt adopted him after the death of his mother in 1739. He likely studied at Batley Grammar school, learning Latin and Greek. He later learned Hebrew and taught himself French, German, and Italian in anticipation of entering the mercantile profession with an uncle in Lisbon. Due to illness, this career path never materialized. Priestley instead followed his aunt’s wishes to become a dissenting minister, enrolling in the dissenter’s academy in Daventry in 1751. During his time there, he adopted more liberal views on religion than those of his upbringing, finally rejecting the doctrine of the trinity, leading to his alienation in his first ministerial post in Suffolk (1755-1758). He still wrote prolifically: weekly sermons as well as a religious treatise where he established an important method of biblical analysis, published in 1761, after Priestley found a more welcoming community in a chapel at Nantwich, Cheshire (1758). There he opened an extremely successful school where he established his innovative approach to curriculum, which landed him a tutoring position in Warrington (1761). He published two influential treatises on English grammar (1761,1762), restructured the institution’s curriculum to best suit the student’s needs, and published two visual study aids which remained popular in the anglophone world for decades to come.

Those works won him an honorary LL.D. degree from the University of Edinburgh (1764), and the following year he began writing his history of electricity, becoming friends with some of the foremost scientists of the day in the process, including Benjamin Franklin. With their support, Priestley became a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1766, and he published his The History and Present State of Electricity, With Original Experiments the following year. Becoming quite the popular figure, Priestley received an invitation to serve as minister at the Mill Hill Chapel in Leeds. He accepted and led an extremely supportive congregation and community who enabled him to organize the library there, teach religious classes, kindle his life-long passion for religious and polemical publications, and found the first English journal for speculative theology, Theological Repository (1769-1771), which cast Priestley into the grizzly world of religious discourse. During this time, he also began publicly advocating for liberal political causes, namely a universal education system. All the while, he found time to submit multiple papers on electricity to the Royal Society. Shifting his focus to chemistry, his 1772 Instructions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air, though failing in its intention to treat scurvy, did lay the groundwork for the invention of the carbonated beverage. His fame grew: he became the Earl of Shelbourne’s personal librarian and tutor (1772), won the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (1773), isolated and thereby discovered oxygen (1774), and eight other gasses as well (1774-1786). In 1780, he split with Shelbourne and moved his growing family to Birmingham, where he resumed his religious writing and instruction. He controversially published an attack on state sponsored religion and threw his support behind both the American and French Revolutions, which brought him much ire from the public. This rage apexed in 1791, when Priestley and his associate’s new Constitutional Society planned a dinner commemorating the fall of the Bastille (1789), precipitating violent riots that razed multiple member’s homes, including Priestley’s. Escaping with his family to Hackney, Priestley began working there as a minister and teaching at New College.

However, his days of safety in England were numbered: the National Convention in France decorated him with French Citizenship in 1792, and Britain declared war on France the following year. For the safety of himself and his family, the Priestley’s sailed to America in 1774, and ultimately settled in Northumberland in central Pennsylvania to found a dissenting church, which came to naught. Though an ocean away from the critics in England, Priestley still had not found complete safety. With the Adams regime came the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), which singled out outspoken politically radical recent-immigrants like himself. He narrowly avoided deportation until the ascent of friend Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Few congregations in the United States were interested in his preaching or his beliefs, which enabled him to dedicate the remainder of his time entirely to his writing, now protected and much admired by the new President. In 1803 his health began to decline and he died peacefully in his home in Northumberland. (ANB, DNB)