Started: 10 Feb 2013
Finished: 23 Feb 2013
Pages: 357
Two men share the credit for the discovery of oxygen: Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoiser. And while in many ways it's hard to imagine two more different men, both won great honours and then suffered greatly as the 18th century wound its way to its turbulent end. The world on fire in the title is the world of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the fallout from the American Revolution, and only secondarily a world set on fire by the discovery of the sources of combustion.
This book is a joint biography of Priestley and Lavoiser, and draws many contrasts between them. Priestley was a brilliant experimentalist: Lavoiser a brilliant theorist. Priestley was a religious radical and one of the founders of Unitarianism. Lavoiser was an atheist. Priestley came from a lower middle class family, and lived and worked in Birmingham alongside the striving classes who owned, ran, and worked in factories. Lavoiser came from the upper middle classes, and used the money he earned as one of Louis the 16th's tax collectors to buy his way into the aristocracy. Priestley fled for his life from a conservative mob bent on upholding the rights of the King and the (Anglican) church. Lavoiser died during the Terror at the hands of a radical French Revolutionary mob.
Overall, an interesting read. The one disappointment was the debunking of a myth. Lavoiser did not agree to advance the cause of science by blinking post-guillotin to establish whether and how long consciousness persists after decapitation. Apparently, no contemporary records of this story exist. And given how the executions were organized it wouldn't have been practical for onlookers to observe his head closely at any rate. :-(
So sorry to hear about that myth debunked. Sounds like a great read. I will have to pick it up. I do make the standard amount - okay maybe more than standard - of physics versus chemistry jokes in my day to day work, so it would be fair of me to read this. Besides, what a fascinating subject.
ReplyDeleteIt is a good read. For the entire first half of the book I kept wishing for more chemical formulae so that I'd have some hope of following Priestley's discoveries by seeing the reactions that he was discovering/exploring. Then the plot thickens as you discover that the modern systematic naming scheme for chemicals was invented by Laviosier. No wonder it was so hard to make progress in chemistry! Priestley and his predecessors were using alchemical naming. It's not that obvious what's going on when red calcx becomes mercury under the influence of heat, producing "dephlogisticated air".
ReplyDeleteI can lend you the book if you like Jennifer. Harv picked it up from the remainder bin at Munro's years ago. I don't know how easy it would be to find.