Priestley, John

The 19th century is considered the century of the beginnings of the application of chemistry to the study of soil. However, foundations for these advances had been laid with the discoveries of the previous century. Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, Joseph Priestley, and John Dalton are well-known scientists whose discoveries paved the way for the developments in agricultural chemistry in the 19th century [1,2],... 

In England, around the same time, John Dalton studied the masses of compounds as they reacted to produce products. After Dalton read about the similar work of other scientists, such as Lavoisier and the British scientist Joseph Priestley, he contacted Gay-Lussac. He described his results and hypotheses to Gay-Lussac. In 1808, both men published their theories. After examining the theories of Dalton and Gay-Lussac, an Italian scientist named Amedeo Avogadro formulated a hypothesis that combined their theories. 

At this time Priestley had no notion of the real nature of this air. He was steeped in the fire principle of John Becher, a German scientist who in 1669 explained burning as due to some inflammable principle possessed by all substances that could burn. This he called phlogiston from the Greek to set on fire. When a substance burned, explained Becher, its phlogiston was given off in the form of a flame. Becher believed... 

Fig. 2.14 Fred Basolo (1920-2007) was the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University in Evanston in the US. He worked for his Ph.D. with one of the founders of coordination chemistry in the US, John C. Bailar, and received a doctorate from the University of Illinois in 1943. After working on then-classified projects for the war effort, he joined the chemistry department at Northwestern in 1946, where he was a force to be reckoned with for more than 60 years. Together with Ralph Pearson, he was one of the pioneers in the field of inorganic reaction mechanisms and one of the first studying the kinetics of substitution reactions of metal carbonyls. He coauthored two text books Mechanisms of Inorganic Reactions (with R. G. Pearson) and Coordination Chemistry (with R. C. Johnson). Fred was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1979, was the President of the American Chemical Society in 1983, and received the Priestley Medal, the highest award of the ACS, in 2001 (photo by courtesy from Professor Jim Ibers, Northwestern University)...

John S. Haldane, J. G. Priestley, Respiration, Yale UP, New Haven 1935 Joseph Halow, Siegerjustiz in Dachau, Druffel, Leoni 1993... 

In John G. McEvoy British Journal of the History of Science Electricity, Knowledge, and the Nature of Progress in Priestley s Thought... 

J. Priestley, Experiments and Observations Relating to Various Branches of Natural Philosophy, with a Continuation of the Observations on Air II (Birmingham J. John son, 1781), p. 388 Schofield, EnlightenedJoseph Priestley, pp. 153-4. 

Priestley to Watt, 29 April 1783, in J. P. Muirhead (ed.), Correspondence of the LateJames Watt on his Discovery of the Theory ofthe Composition of Water (London John Murray, 1846), pp. 25-6. 

Hippocratic writers (I) as well as Aristotle (2) assumed that since adults would die without breathing, presumably the fetus also breathed. The precise nature of what actually was breathed was not determined until the discovery of oxygen by Scheele and independently by Priestley in the early 1770s. While the placenta apparently has been known since ancient times, it was not until the work of Harvey (3, 4) that the independence of the fetal and maternal circulations was established. Further convincing experimental evidence for this independence was presented by William and John Hunter (5). 

However, Woodhouse was not doctrinaire, continued to harhor some uncertainties about the new chemistry emanating from France, and was solicitous of the aging Priestley. In a letter answering an attack by Dr. John Maclean, professor at Princeton University, one paragraph reads ... 

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