The Invention of Air Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER ONE - The Electricians

  CHAPTER TWO - Rose and Nightshade

  CHAPTER THREE - Intermezzo: An Island of Coal

  CHAPTER FOUR - The Wild Gas

  CHAPTER FIVE - A Comet in the System

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ALSO BY STEVEN JOHNSON

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  How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate

  Emergence:

  The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

  Mind Wide Open:

  Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life

  Everything Bad Is Good for You:

  How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter

  The Ghost Map:

  The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed

  Science, Cities, and the Modern World

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York

  2008

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2008 by Steven Johnson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Johnson, Steven, date.

  The invention of air : a story of science, faith, revolution, and the birth of America / Steven Johnson.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68531-6

  1. Priestley, Joseph, 1733-1804. 2. Chemists—Great Britain—Biography.

  3. Scientists—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.

  QD22.P8J

  540.92—dc22

  [B]

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  For Jay

  The English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble at an air pump, or an electrical machine.

  —JOSEPH PRIESTLEY

  That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A few days before I started writing this book, a leading candidate for the presidency of the United States was asked on national television whether he believed in the theory of evolution. He shrugged off the question with a dismissive jab of humor. “It’s interesting that that question would even be asked of someone running for president,” he said. “I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book. I’m asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States.”

  It was a funny line, but the joke only worked in a specific intellectual context. For the statement to make sense, the speaker had to share one basic assumption with his audience: that “science” was some kind of specialized intellectual field, about which political leaders needn’t know anything to do their business. Imagine a candidate dismissing a question about his foreign policy experience by saying he was running for president and not writing a textbook on international affairs. The joke wouldn’t make sense, because we assume that foreign policy expertise is a central qualification for the chief executive. But science? That’s for the guys in lab coats.

  That line has stayed with me since, because the web of events at the center of this book suggests that its basic assumptions are fundamentally flawed. If there is an overarching moral to this story, it is that vital fields of intellectual achievement cannot be cordoned off from one another and relegated to the specialists, that politics can and should be usefully informed by the insights of science. The protagonists of this story lived in a climate where ideas flowed easily between the realms of politics, philosophy, religion, and science. The closest thing to a hero in this book—the chemist, theologian, and political theorist Joseph Priestley—spent his whole career in the space that connects those different fields. But the other figures central to this story—Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson—suggest one additional reading of the “eighth-grade science” remark. It was anti-intellectual, to be sure, but it was something even more incendiary in the context of a presidential race. It was positively un-American.

  In their legendary thirteen-year final correspondence, reflecting back on their collaborations and their feuds, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote 165 letters to each other. In that corpus, Benjamin Franklin is mentioned by name five times, while George Washington is mentioned three times. Their mutual nemesis Alexander Hamilton warrants only two references. By contrast, Priestley, an Englishman who spent only the last decade of his life in the United States, is mentioned fifty-two times. That statistic alone gives some sense of how important Priestley was to the founders, in part because he would play a defining role in the rift and ultimate reconciliation between Jefferson and Adams, and in part because his distinctive worldview had a profound impact on both men, just as it had on Franklin three decades before. Yet today, Priestley is barely more than a footnote in most popular accounts of the revolutionary generation. This book is an attempt to understand how Priestley became so central to the great minds of this period—in the fledgling United States, but also in England and France. It is not so much a biography as it is the biography of one man’s ideas, the links of association and influence that connect him to epic changes in science, belief, and society—as well as to some of the darkest episodes of mob violence and political repression in the history of Britain and the United States.

  One of the things that makes the story of Priestley and his peers so fascinating to us now is that they were active participants in revolutions in multiple fields: in politics, chemistry, physics, education, and religion. And so part of my intent with this book is to grapple with the question of why these revolutions happen when they do, and why some rare individuals end up having a hand in many of them simultaneously. My assumption is that this
question cannot be answered on a single scale of experience, that a purely biographical approach, centered on the individual life of the Great Man and his fellow travelers, will not do it justice; nor will a collectivist account that explains intellectual change in terms of broad social movements. My approach, instead, is to cross multiple scales and disciplines—just as Priestley and his fellow travelers did in their own careers. So this is a history book about the Enlightenment and the American Revolution that travels from the carbon cycle of the planet itself, to the chemistry of gunpowder, to the emergence of the coffeehouse in European culture, to the emotional dynamics of two friends compelled by history to betray each other. To answer the question of why some ideas change the world, you have to borrow tools from chemistry, social history, media theory, ecosystem science, geology. That connective sensibility runs against the grain of our specialized intellectual culture, but it would have been second nature to Priestley, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and their peers. Those are our roots. This book is an attempt to return to them.

  JOSEPH PRIESTLEY

  Prologue

  The Vortex

  May 1794

  The North Atlantic

  THE FIRST SIGN OF A WATERSPOUT FORMING is a dark stain on the surface of the sea, like a circle of black ink. Within a matter of minutes, if atmospheric conditions are right, a spiral of light and dark streaks begins to spin around the circle. Soon a ring of spray rises up into the air, water molecules propelled aloft by the accelerating winds at its periphery. And then the spout surges to life, a whirling line drawn from sea to sky, sustained by rotational winds that have been measured at up to 150 miles per hour.

  Unlike land-based tornados, waterspouts often form in fair weather: a vortex of wind, capable of destroying small vessels, that appears, literally, out of the blue. While it is not nearly as dangerous as a traditional tornado, the waterspout was long a figure of fear and wonder in mariner tales of life on the open sea. In the first century B.C., Lucretius described “a kind of column [that] lets down from the sky into the sea, around which the waters boil, stirred up by the heavy blast of the winds, and if any ships are caught in that tumult, they are tossed about and come into great peril.” Sailors would pour vinegar into the sea and pound on drums to frighten off the spirits that they imagined lurking in the spout. They had good reason to be mystified by these apparitions. The upward pull of the vortex is strong enough to suck fish, frogs, or jellyfish out of the water and carry them into the clouds, sometimes depositing them miles from their original location. Scientists now believe that apocryphal-sounding stories of fish and frogs raining from the sky were actually cases where waterspouts gulped up a menagerie of creatures straight out of the water, and then deposited them on the heads of bewildered humans when the spout crossed over onto land and dissipated.

  A waterspout sighting is a meteorological rarity, even in the tropical waters where spouts are most often seen. Ships in the colder waters of the North Atlantic, particularly during early spring, almost never encounter them. So it was more than a little surprising that, on one extraordinary day in the spring of 1794, the hundred-odd passengers en route to New York aboard the merchant ship Samson caught sight of four distinct waterspouts simultaneously drifting their way across the sea.

  Most passengers onboard the Samson would have viewed the looming spouts not as statistical anomalies but as sinister omens, if not outright threats. No doubt some passengers aboard the Samson ran belowdecks in fear at the first sighting, while others stared in wonder at the four spouts. But we can say with some confidence that one passenger aboard the Samson rushed to the deck at the first hint of a waterspout sighting, and stood transfixed, observing the spray patterns and cloud formations. It is easy to imagine him borrowing the captain’s telescope and peering into the vortex, estimating wind velocity, perhaps jotting down notes as he watched. He would have known that the lively scientific debate over spouts—started in part by his old friend Benjamin Franklin—revolved around whether spouts descended from clouds, as tornados do, or whether they propelled themselves upward from the ocean surface. The idea of witnessing four waterspouts on a North Atlantic voyage would not have been a sign of foreboding or an imminent threat for him. It would have been a stroke of extraordinary good luck.

  This was Joseph Priestley, formerly of Hackney, England, en route to his new home in America. At sixty-one years old, he was among the most accomplished men of his generation, rivaled only by Franklin in the diversity of his interests and influence. He had won the Copley Medal (the Nobel Prize of its day) for his experiments on various gases in his late thirties, and published close to five hundred books and pamphlets on science, politics, and religion since 1761. An ordained minister, he had helped found the dissenting Christian sect of Unitarianism. He counted among his closest friends the great minds of the Enlightenment and the early Industrial Revolution: Franklin, Richard Price, Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Erasmus Darwin.

  But while Priestley’s luminous career had established an extensive base of admirers in the newly formed United States, he had booked passage on the Samson thanks to another, more dubious, honor. He had become the most hated man in all of Britain.

  TRANSATLANTIC VOYAGES in the late eighteenth century were perilous affairs, even when the vessel avoided the substantial risk of being “lost at sea.” One of the most ghastly accounts of sea travel from that period—Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Journey to Pennsylvania—described the scene onboard the ship Osgood as it made its way from Rotterdam to Philadelphia in the summer of 1750:

  But during the voyage there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of seasickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and the like. . . . Add to this want of provisions, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, anxiety, want, afflictions and lamentations, together with other trouble, as . . . the lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off the body. . . . The water which is served out on the ships is often very black, thick and full of worms, so that one cannot drink it without loathing, even with the greatest thirst. . . . Towards the end [of the Osgood’s voyage] we were compelled to eat the ship’s biscuit which had been spoiled long ago, though in a whole biscuit there was scarcely a piece the size of a dollar that had not been full of red worms and spider’s nests.

  It was not exactly the Queen Mary, to say the least. A nice clean shipwreck might have started to seem appealing after a few days dining on black wormwater and spider’s eggs. On the Samson, the drunken captain and his first mate argued so violently with each other that the water casks were neglected and caused much “suffering” among the steerage passengers, according to Priestley’s somewhat ambiguous account. Mary Priestley, Joseph’s wife, labored through three weeks of constant seasickness in the heavy seas that the Samson met upon leaving England.

  To embark on such a journey at the age of sixty-one took a particular mix of fearlessness and optimism. Priestley had both qualities in abundance. Nearly every extended description of the man eventually winds its way to some comment about his relentlessly sunny outlook. He was almost pathologically incapable of believing the threats that arrayed themselves against him. Here is Priestley giving his account of the voyage of the Samson, in a letter written to a friend upon landing in New York:

  We had many things to amuse us on the passage; as the sight of some fine mountains of ice; water-spouts, which [are] very uncommon in those seas; flying fishes, porpoises, whales, and sharks, of which we caught one; luminous sea-water, &c.

  The storm that nearly sunk the ship merits two brief sentences, amid all the amusements:

  We had very stormy weather, and one gust of wind as sudden and violent as, perhaps, was ever known. If it had not been for the passengers, many of the sails had been lost.

  Mary Priestley was less sanguine about the storm (“It was a very awful night”) and struggled to strike a similar note of enthusiasm i
n her description of the passing diversions of the voyage:

  Our voyage at times was very unpleasant, from the roughness of the weather; but as variety is charming, we had all that could well be experienced on board, but shipwreck and famine.

  It’s not hard to hear a hint of gritted teeth or gentle satire in that “variety is charming” line, as though she’s mimicking a discourse from her beloved “Dr. P” on the latest sighting of “luminous sea-water” or some other fascination—a speech she had heard a few too many times during those three weeks of seasickness.

  But however severe the peril that confronted them in setting sail for America, in that spring of 1794, Mary and Joseph Priestley had little choice but to book passage on the Samson. The open rage and violence that had rained down on them made the decision to flee inevitable. Priestley had spent weeks shuttling from safe house to safe house, as the newspapers and pamphleteers and cartoonists called for his head. His persecution had caused many to compare him to Socrates. (Before Priestley’s departure, then vice president John Adams wrote in a letter to Priestley, “Inquisitions and Despotisms are not alone in persecuting Philosophers. The people themselves, we see, are capable of persecuting a Priestley, as another people formerly persecuted a Socrates.”) In contemporary terms, Priestley had become the Salman Rushdie of Georgian England: a world-famous intellectual whose political and theological musings had planted a bull’s-eye on his back. America was the logical way out.