Dr. Joseph Priestley, Discoverer of Oxygen,
Died at Northumberland February 6, 1804
Dr. Joseph Priestley was born near Leeds in Yorkshire, England, March 13, 1733. He died at Northumberland, Pennsylvania, February 6, 1804.
Joseph was the youngest of nine children. His father and grandfather were prosperous cloth makers, employing, for that age, a large force of workmen. From his parents, who were strict Calvinists, Joseph inherited a deeply religious nature. He attended the school of the neighborhood and at eleven had read most of the Latin authors, and in a few years had made considerable progress in Greek and Hebrew, with some knowledge of Chaldee, Syrian and Arabic.
He began to experiment at the age of eleven, when he selected spiders and insects and placed them in bottles to ascertain how long they could live without fresh air.
A few years later he made “electrifying machines,” and a kite of fine silk, six feet wide, which he could take apart and carry in his pocket. The string was composed of thirty-six threads and a wire, similar to that used by Dr. Franklin, in Philadelphia, to “bring electric fire from the clouds.”
At nineteen, Priestley was sent to Daventry, where he embraced the heterodox side of almost every question, as he afterwards wrote of his three years at Daventry: “In my time the academy was in a state peculiarly favorable to the serious pursuits of truth, and the students were about equally divided upon every question of much importance, such as ‘Liberty and Necessity,’ the ‘Sleep of the Soul’ and all the articles of theological orthodoxy and heresy.”
After leaving Daventry, he preached for three years to a dissenting congregation at Needham. In 1761 he was a professor at Warrington Academy. While here he published several of his books and made such experiments in electricity and “fixed air,” that the results began to be noised abroad. He married, while at Warrington, a daughter of a wealthy iron manufacturer, a Mr. Wilkinson.
In one of his visits to London he met Benjamin Franklin. He became a member of a famous club which met at the London Coffee House, and here he interested Franklin in his experiments, and they became the closest friends. Both became members of the Royal Society and both in turn received its highest honor, the Copley medal. Each obtained from Edinburgh University the degree LL. D. Oxford conferred a like degree upon Franklin, while for a space of a century it ignored his heretical friend.