Place of Refuge

In the tiny town of Northumberland, Pennsylvania, along the Susquehanna River, sits the final home of one of the world's greatest scientists.

Joseph Priestley is not well-known today, certainly not as well-known as, say, Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. Yet his contributions to what we know about the scientific world are considerable, and had there been a Nobel Prize during his lifetime, most likely Priestley would have garnered one, if not more than one.

If you think not, consider his achievements. In 1774 he was the first person to distinguish oxygen from air, thus undoing the Greek notion of the four basic elements of matter that had existed for over two millennia. He isolated the gases that today are known as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon monoxide. He discovered that "fixed air" - what we call carbon dioxide - had special properties when injected in water, thus inventing carbonation. He also discovered nitrous oxide, or laughing gas.

Priestley was also the first person to document the process of photosynthesis in plants and to outline the process of respiration, the cycle by which plants give off oxygen and breathe in carbon dioxide. Oh, and if all this were not enough, Priestley also discovered that India rubber was useful in eliminating graphite markings, thus effectively inventing the eraser.

All this from a man who originally set out to be a minister.

Yes, Joseph Priestley was quite a man. Not an American, as it turns out, except by adoption. Like so many others, eventually he settled here, without benefit of citizenship, because of the intellectual and religious freedom America had to offer.

Priestley was born near Leeds, in Great Britain, in 1733. He was largely self-taught, eventually coming to master ten languages, and spent several years pursuing a career in the clergy. After meeting Benjamin Franklin, however, Priestley began experimenting with electricity, thus developing an avocation that became a scientific career. He was elected a fellow of Britain's Royal Society in 1766. For his work in isolating oxygen, he was also elected to the French Academy of Sciences and worked with another brilliant scientist of his day, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier.

As with many intellectuals, however, Priestley's personal philosophies got him into trouble. It was bad enough that he came out in favor of both the American and French Revolutions. What really galled his fellow countrymen, however, was the fact that Priestley was a Unitarian. This meant that he believed in God, which was fine, but he believed that God had only one personage, that of God the Father, not that of the Son or the Holy Ghost, which in Anglican Britain was a major no-no. Instead of keeping such thoughts to himself, however, he preached them and, worse, wrote about them, eventually coming up with a treatise on why he believed the doctrine of the Trinity was unscriptural. That was heterodoxy, and he ended up getting kicked out of the Royal Society. In addition, the meetinghouse where he preached his dissenting theology was burned by an angry mob. An ignoble way to treat a brilliant scientist, to be sure, but in the scheme of things, he fared considerably better than his contemporary Lavoisier, whose own political views brought him to a tumbrel cart that led straight to the guillotine.

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