The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America [Paperback]

Steven Johnson has written an engaging book about Joseph Priestley, a true Renaissance Man who contributed mightily to the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th Century. Priestley was a remarkable individual who distinguished himself in several different fields: theology, chemistry, science, politics, philosophy, history and technology. He was also a prolific writer who had the good fortune of hobnobbing with the best and the brightest of his day: Franklin, Lavoisier, Jefferson, Canton and Adams, to name just a few.

Johnson does an exceptional job of telling Priestley's story, explaining his scientific discoveries, political philosophies, and theological insights, and putting them all in their proper context. But he goes one step further: he endeavors to explain why Priestley accomplished what he did. He doesn't just focus on Priestley's character traits and native intelligence (both of which were extraordinary); rather, he attributes much of the man's success to his environment, to his friends, to the evolution of technology, and, quite simply, to good fortune. At a time when we are inundated with trendy books that pander to the public's appetite for facile explanations of complex processes (e.g., "Blink," "Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious," etc.), it is refreshing to see someone acknowledge that scientific discoveries, sociological insights and great ideas more often than not take years to evolve and are the product of numerous variables, many of which remain a mystery.

Priestley's enthusiasm, openness and child-like fascination with the world around him are infectious. Though he was not without shortcomings and, on occasion, got things completely wrong, Priestley was an intellectual giant upon whose shoulders many great scientists, philosophers and discoverers will continue to stand well into the 21st Century. And Mr. Johnson has rendered a valuable service by re-telling Mr. Priestley's story from a fresh and enlightening perspective. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed this book even while I quickly came to distrust it. Although it wasn't one of my areas of specialization, I did some work on the history of science while in grad school and I even had a job transcribing the lectures of a prominent philosopher of the history of science. To supplement this I read a number of key books focusing on the history of the discipline.

The problem I have with this book is that it is misleading. To steal a phrase of Somerset Maugham (writing about himself), Joseph Priestley is a good scientist of the second rank. In virtually every account of the history of science or intellectual history he is regarded as a talented dilettante, a gifted amateur. He certainly played a role in the history of science, performing experiments that more important thinkers were able to utilize to further science, but Priestley himself frequently failed -- and Johnson does hint at this without emphasizing its significance -- to understand the full implications of the results of his experiments. He was extremely weak as a theoretician, which is why he is not accounted among the great scientists.

Why is this misleading? Well, historians of science do not regard Priestley as a key or even especially important figure. At no point does Johnson hint that this is the widespread assessment of Priestley's place. It is a tad misleading to state that his contemporaries had one opinion without proceeding to remark that their successors do not share that opinion. Johnson talks of Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley as the two leading chemists, but it is intensely deceptive to talk as if they were competitors for pride of place. Lavoisier is one of the great geniuses in the history of science. In fact, modern chemistry is usually credited with beginning with him.

Another example. Any credible account of the history of the theory of ecosystems is not going to begin or even include Joseph Priestley, but Johnson implies that the science began with him. This is a preposterous stretch.

In other words, the book is simply not reliable. It doesn't attempt to disclose the general opinion of Priestley's place in history by philosophers and historians of science. By leaving this all unsaid, he implies that Priestley was a much more important than in fact he was.

All of this is a tremendous disservice to Priestley, who while not a genius and not a scientist or thinker of the first rank, was unquestionably an immensely interesting and fascinating figure. The problem with the book is that it wants to go beyond this to portray Priestley as something that he was not. He definitely played a role in the growth of science. But he was not an Antoine Lavoisier.

Still, if one grasps this fundamental weakness in the book, it can be a fun and interesting lead. Much like another Englishman whose interests ran in all imaginable directions, the Rev. George Berkeley (who had a town adjacent to San Francisco named after him), he is an immensely likable individual. One is impressed by his passionate quest for knowledge, his generosity of spirit, his progressive attitudes, and his great goodheartedness. I'm not quite sure why Joseph Priestley as he actually was seemed inadequate to Johnson; I'm not sure why such a fundamentally sympathetic figure needed to be elevated to a pivotal figure in the history of science.

So I'm in a dilemma about this book. It is a fun and interesting read. And it does a good job of explaining why we should care about Joseph Priestley. Yet he outrageously exaggerates his place in thought. I had other problems with the book (some of his metaphors are stretched to the extreme), but this was the major one. It reminds me of various rock historians who try to make us believe that the Doors and Jim Morrison were the equal of the Beatles, the Who, and the Rolling Stones, whereas in fact they didn't even come up to the level of the Kinks.

I do completely agree with Johnson about one thing. The incredible narrowness of most supposedly educated people today is appalling. Johnson begins the book by quoting a former undergraduate classmate of mine, Mike Huckabee (who even in the couple of theology classes we had together at Ouachita Baptist University did not especially distinguished himself), who when running for president disdained the knowledge of science (actually, he was trying to avoid stating that he denied the validity of science). Modern science actually began among Christians who believed that the universe, as the creation of a rational God, had a logical, rational structure that his creatures, created in his image, could understand. Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes, for instance, were deeply religious and practicing Christians (Newton wrote far more on Christian prophecy, for instance, than he did on physics, while Descartes' entire project was to create a view of the world compatible with the Christian Platonism of Augustine rather than the Aristotelianism of Thomas) Aquinas. Both would have found Huckabee's irrationalism un-Christian. No doubt one of Huckabee's motives was to avoid alienating minimally educated individuals who would have found his no-nothingism grounds for disqualification in a presidential candidate. But it is also quite true that far too many people today do not strive to comprehend the world around them. I find Joseph Priestley's passion for knowledge to be both admirable and inspirational. But it doesn't elevate him to the level of the top rungs of science. He was not a Lavoisier. He was several rungs below a James Clerk Maxwell. And frankly I believe one of the disservices of the book was to make Priestley take on a role that does not befit him. As I said earlier, he was a good scientist of the second rank. He was, however, an absolutely outstanding human being.

I plowed through this light quasi-biography and couldn't understand why Johnson's effort never truly resonated until the very end. He makes some compelling connections across time and discipline but I found myself consistently wanting more: more detail, more evidence, more synthesis. I kept chalking my disappointments up to the notion that Johnson was purposely dumbing down the read to give it a broader audience - a mechanism employed at great peril but not without its merits. But I couldn't escape the sense that Johnson himself isn't quite sharp enough. He has big ideas, makes some fine observations, utilizes incisive methods (zooming out), and promotes the benefits of a broader, more integrated, less specialized approach to science but there is simply not enough substance to go around. Indeed, his writing is marginal and loaded with redundancies but the occasional historical tidbit (the Birmingham mob scene), and cross-disciplinary connection (revolution and the gulf stream) are sufficiently strong to keep one moving on through the book looking for more. Despite my misgivings, I really wanted to like this book but I found the tipping point on page 205. Johnson reveals he is not up to the task when he lumps intelligent design in with, "...so many of today's discoveries..." including stem cell research, neuroscience and the genomic revolution. It explains his unnecessary labeling of Jefferson as a Christian and exposing a religious bias at odds with his subject revealing an explanation for his inability to commit to it. Read it for what its worth not more.

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