William Johnson (58)

William Johnson (c. 1726–29 December 1768) was a schoolmaster and a lecturer on electricity as well as a member of the American Society, elected in 1767. Born into a Quaker family in Ulster, he visited Philadelphia in 1752 and settled there permanently in 1754 following a brief return trip to Ireland. The next year he took a position teaching at a Philadelphia Friends school and became a member of the Union Library Company; he was also proposed for membership to the Young Junto at this time but appears not to have been elected. By 1763 he had begun a career as an itinerant lecturer on electricity, visiting cities like Boston, Providence, New York, New Brunswick, Baltimore, Williamsburg, and Charleston, among others. His presentations included experiments that had been conducted a decade earlier by APS member Ebenezer Kinnersley, with whom Johnson debated the properties of electricity and who published some of Johnson’s lectures alongside his own theories in 1764. Johnson eventually relocated to South Carolina, where he continued to offer lectures and demonstrations on electricity as well as magnetism. He also opened a school, where he taught reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and mechanics. Following his death, Johnson’s widow donated his collection of natural history books to the American Philosophical Society; however, the collection does not survive. (PI)