When I first got this book I thought it was going to be another boring book about something inspirational and about finding my passion. However, it was completely the opposite. The Invention of Air is by Steven Johnson is a wonderful book about the history of the discovery of oxygen. I mean who in their right mind would enjoy a book about oxygen? Well, I must not be in my right mind because I really enjoyed this book.
This story is mainly about Joseph Priestley, the man who discovered oxygen, and the people who helped him along the way. The book begins almost at the end of his life. Priestley is on a ship going to America after being exiled from England because of his political and religious views. The book explains that Priestley encountered an environmental miracle. He was on the Northern Atlantic and his ship passed four waterspouts. These are kind of like water tornados and are just as deadly. It is said that one waterspout can destroy a ship in seconds and carry the pieces and what ever is in the water (fish, jellyfish, and other things) carry it in a cloud and dump it on the heads of people on near by land.
The story then flashbacks to Priestley when he was a young man and his first encounters to science. Priestley came to the Honest Whigs to right a book on the history of electricity. This is where he made many friends and some names are recognizable. For example, Ben Franklin was a huge part in Joseph Priestley's life. With the help of his friends Priestley was nudged into doing his experiments to put into his book. He then got the science bug, or that is what Steven Johnson called Priestley's passion. While doing his own experiments Priestley discovered he loved electricity but he also was curious about the different types of air. One day while mixing to vials of liquid, Priestley made an amazing discovery by accident. This discovery was what he called soda water. Today you might hear it as sparkling water or carbonated water.
This brings me to my main points of this blog post. So many of the things we take for granted today or that we learn in science class because so and so discovered it, was discovered by accident. If you actually think about it sparkling water was accidental, the discovery of oxygen was accidental, or velcro, or even the idea of gravity was discovered because some guy was under an apple tree and watched it fall. So many things that we now know was all a happy accident. One of my teachers did a book talk on the discovery HeLa cells. It was about a woman who had cervical cancer and they scrapped the walls of the cervix and found on the side with the cancer it had these cells. They also found that these cells were easy to keep alive outside the body and they would keep doubling in size. These cells were an accidental find but they have shaped medical research tremendously.
Okay, going back to the story. Priestley liked to experiment with animals by locking them in a jar and seeing how long it would take for them to die. To make his experiments more advanced he made what is called a pneumatic trough. Which really is a basin, or in the beginning his kitchen sink, with a shelf in it. Vials would sit upside down partly in the water so only a certain amount of air was in it. He then would take the mouse through the water, into the vial, and then the timer was set. It usually took about fifteen minutes. Priestley then tried a mint plant that he called the sprout. Expecting that the plant would die like the animal, he was surprised to see that the plant was just fine after days of being in the vial. This confused Priestley and he furthered his experiments. After many years he learned that plants were able to generate their own air. So he went on with other air experiments. An example of a different experiment is the one he did with spinach. He tested the air with the spinach with fire and it kind of combusted!
Finally, on March 8, 1775 Priestley used another mouse in an experiment. Before this he found that if a flame were in a vial alone it would eventually die out. He used a mouse and the flame used up all the air so the mouse died faster. This time Priestley put the mouse in the jar burnt mercury calx into the jar. Thinking it would use up the air this substance did the opposite. The mouse went thirty minutes before collapsing, instead of the usual fifteen minutes. When he took the seemingly dead mouse out and placed it by a fire. The mouse revived itself and then acted like nothing had happened. Trying to understand this new air Priestley did not know what to test it on. So he decided himself to take the chance of possibly death. However, the new air he breathed in gave him a light and easy feeling. He called this new air, "dephlogisticated air". What we call it today is oxygen.
Steven Johnson makes a possibly boring topic and makes it interesting. Through the way he explains the history, the reader is able to imagine what it actually was like when Priestley was doing his experiments and chemical reactions. I would highly suggest this book to anyone interested in innovation and experiments. I also believe that Priestley should be a man every child learns about at one point in their lifetime. I had no idea who this man was and after reading this book I am able to say that I know who discovered sparkling water and oxygen.
