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    The Invention of Air
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    The Invention of Air
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    The Invention of Air
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Invention of Air

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    Narrated by Mark Deakins

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Bestselling author Steven Johnson recounts-in dazzling, multidisciplinary fashion-the story of the brilliant man who embodied the relationship between science, religion, and politics for America's Founding Fathers.

    The Invention of Air is a book of world-changing ideas wrapped around a compelling narrative, a story of genius and violence and friendship in the midst of sweeping historical change that provokes us to recast our understanding of the Founding Fathers.

    It is the story of Joseph Priestley-scientist and theologian, protégé of Benjamin Franklin, friend of Thomas Jefferson-an eighteenth-century radical thinker who played pivotal roles in the invention of ecosystem science, the discovery of oxygen, the founding of the Unitarian Church, and the intellectual development of the United States. And it is a story that only Steven Johnson, acclaimed juggler of disciplines and provocative ideas, can do justice to.

    In the 1780s, Priestley had established himself in his native England as a brilliant scientist, a prominent minister, and an outspoken advocate of the American Revolution, who had sustained long correspondences with Franklin, Jefferson, and John Adams. Ultimately, his radicalism made his life politically uncomfortable, and he fled to the nascent United States. Here, he was able to build conceptual bridges linking the scientific, political, and religious impulses that governed his life. And through his close relationships with the Founding Fathers-Jefferson credited Priestley as the man who prevented him from abandoning Christianity-he exerted profound if little-known influence on the shape and course of our history.

    As in his last bestselling work, The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson here uses a dramatic historical story to explore themes that have long engaged him: innovation and the way new ideas emerge and spread, and the environments that foster these breakthroughs. And as he did in Everything Bad Is Good for You, Johnson upsets some fundamental assumptions about the world we live in-namely, what it means when we invoke the Founding Fathers-and replaces them with a clear-eyed, eloquent assessment of where we stand today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateDec 26, 2008
    ISBN9781440679377
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The Invention of Air

    4/5

    17 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Well-written and concise biography of Jacob Priestly. I also learned a lot about his good friend Benjamin Franklin while reading of Jacob's life. I had not realized that Priestly's work was the primary impetus for the paradigm shift in techniques of scientific investigation and the popularization of science. Steven Johnson presents revealing insights into the nature of scientific research and its influence upon and by politics and religion.
    • 4/5
      Science isn’t my strong suit, but every once in awhile, I dive into its murky waters. The invention of Air centers on Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the British scientist who isolated oxygen and is known as one of the fathers of chemistry. A contemporary of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Priestley ended his days in rural Pennsylvania after being hounded from Britain for his “radical” views. The author argues Priestley was a major contributor to America political thought at a time when our country was in its infancy. Science and religion seem to be constantly in conflict today, wedges that drive Americans apart. An individual’s scientific beliefs often are based more on religious or political leanings than on the study of science. Higher education is scorned by highly educated politicians who kvetch that the very foundation of education – critical thinking based on reason – is antithetical to religious belief. In Priestley’s day, it wasn’t uncommon for clergymen (like Priestley himself) to be engaged in scientific pursuits … and to be engaged politically. After all, they were well educated and had the leisure time to pursue such interests. They weren’t out in the field dawn to dusk working to feed, clothe and house themselves. And politicians had intellectual lives, not being consumed for their entire life with pursuit of political office. I read the author’s Ghost Map, a multi-faceted tale of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, for my non-fiction readers’ group. It was, like The Invention of Air, an amazing book … taking a slice of history, looking at it from all angles, slicing it and dicing it to examine its constituent parts, then putting it all back together so it makes sense to a non-expert reader. I admire the kind of brain that creates a book like that, and makes it readable.
    • 5/5
      A very enjoyable book. It was hard not to be drawn in by the introduction: “Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote 165 letters to each other. In that corpus, Benjamin Franklin is mentioned by name five times, while George Washington is mentioned three times. Their mutual nemesis Alexander Hamilton warrants only two references. By contrast, [Joseph] Priestley, an Englishman who spent only the last decade of his life in the United States, is mentioned fifty-two times.” The book then follows the trail of Priestly from his early interest in the electricians, to his discovery of oxygen and carbon cycle, to his heretical writings and flight to America. A cultural history rather than science, Steven Johnson is interested not just in these events but also in how ideas develop and spread – for example contrasting the coffee-house culture emerging in England with the consequences of Priestley’s relative isolation with the slow mail he received in rural Pennsylvania. Not to mention a short detour into 300 million BC – which is cleverly linked to the story with the discussion of the consequences of a highly oxygenated atmosphere for animal and plant life, how that period ended, and the role that the legacy it bequeathed – coal – had on England and Priestley in the 18th century.Overall, The Invention of Air is relatively light on the science – lighter than Lavosier in the Year One, to take a book that trods similar ground as an example, which itself was relatively light. And occasionally it is slightly annoying with either overreaching or being overly excited about simplicity. But overall it was quite a unique book.
    • 4/5
      The book details the scientific journey of Joseph Priestley as he hangs out with the scientific elite of the late 18th Century. Priestley discovers oxygen in this period of his life. His life takes some interesting turns through his involvement in politics and religion leading to his emigration from England to America. Unfortunately, the book does not seem as interesting in that latter portion. All-in-all, the book was fun to read and worth reading.
    • 2/5
      A sort of biography of Joseph Priestley, an 18th-century English scientist/theologian who was also involved in politics, and a frequent correspondent with several key Founding Fathers. Priestley was important to the beginning of modern chemistry, though he kept a belief in phlogiston to the end of his life. I found the story a little disappointing, because Johnson kept wanting to go beyond biography—which is fine—to really global theories, which his story did not sustain. E.g., he argued that the explosion of scientific achievement in England and France was all about the release of stored energy (peat, coal, etc.) which allowed the creation of leisure. Not that I don’t find that a respectable thesis, but stitching it into a biography leaves not enough time for either global theory or biography. Johnson’s lack of interest in Priestley’s religious thinking was particularly noticeable: though Johnson argues that Priestley represents a person no longer possible to moderns—someone at the center of scientific, religious, and political innovation at the same time—he spends essentially no time explaining what was religiously innovative about Priestley’s thinking or how it differed from that of his main opponents in the field.
    • 3/5
      I was looking through the other reviews on here, trying to gather my thoughts, and I found one I really agreed with - this could have been a great book, if only it were about 100 pages shorter. A good editor would have really helped. Johnson was trying to do too much with this book. He wanted to write a biography of Joseph Priestley, he wanted to persuade us about how important Priestley was, he wanted to talk about science and scientific thought and how discoveries are made, he wanted to talk about politics, about religion, about American history. And then there was the stuff in there that I didn't understand at all, something about paradigms and some diagrams that had nothing AT ALL to do with the actual subject of the book. What was going on here? Didn't this get edited, ever? Yes, I understand that he thinks Priestley was some kind of genius who wrote about all kinds of things, science and religion and politics, but I didn't feel that I really understood him. He just jumped onto the scene in London and threw himself into intellectual life. What about some deeper analysis of who he was? I didn't hate this book. It was a quick read. But it wasn't what I expected at all. 2.5 stars.
    • 4/5
      The book starts out strong as it details the scientific journey of Joseph Priestley as he hangs out with the scientific elite (like Benjamin Franklin) of the late 18th Century. Priestley discovers oxygen in this period of his life. His life takes some interesting turns through his involvement in politics and religion leading to his emigration from England to America. Unfortunately, the book does not seem as interesting in that latter portion. All-in-all, the book was fun to read and worth reading, but by no means a must-read book.
    • 3/5
      Quick review: This book is nothing near Steven Johnson's previous works. Ghost Map is a far superior book. The Invention of Air is very repetitive (sometimes Johnson repeats the same argument twice within the same paragraph) and consists of way too many quotes from letters and other books.Almost 20-25% of the book is direct quotes and it becomes very tiresome to read all of them after a while. But all in all the story of Priestley is a very interesting one and that kept me going to the end, but a long magazine article could also have done the trick.
    • 4/5
      Coffee as a motivating force in The Enlightenment? How can I not rave about this book? Never mind that Joseph Priestley was this amazing indivdual, amateur chemist making wildly important discoveries, theologian writing groundbreaking works on the "corruptions of Christianity" (hugely influential on one Thomas Jefferson), political theorist caught up in a couple revolutions in other countries while being targeted as a traitor in his own...all while being a Unitarian minister (and instrumental in the beginnings of Unitarianism in both Britain and the U.S.) Not bad...
    • 5/5
      This was a wonderful listen that wove together political, scientific, and philosophical history. We learn about Enlightenment culture, ecology, the gulf stream, and many other topics in the course of examining Priestley's life from multiple directions. Johnson is also careful to give all of the players their due, from Priestley's particular suitability for discovery to the socioeconomic readiness of the British empire to the coincidence of natural events that primed this era of progress. A poetic, enriching book.Mark Deakins is a good enough reader. He soars through foreign phrases; however, he stumbles strangely on some ordinary English words and at times makes everything amusingly portentious. But he was very clear and audible, requiring very little effort to understand while on a 1900 mile drive.
    • 3/5
      The life and times and work of Joseph Priestley. Johnson is a bit too obsessed with the notion of information networks -- perhaps he should have taken a sabbatical from outside.in while writing the book. In other respects, it's a useful overview of Priestley's life, work, and importance in the late 18th and early 19th century, especially in his connections with Franklin, Adam, and Jefferson. His previous book, The Ghost Map was better.
    • 1/5
      I thought it tried to do too much and was muddled as a result.
    • 5/5
      Steven Johnson places Joseph Priestley well in his time as well as in the intellectual development science (natural philosophy), faith (a founder of the Unitarian Church), and political theory (interactions with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson) coming out of the Age of Enlightenment. His multi-disciplinary approach laid the groundwork for ecosystem theories in today's science even though his experiments were as an "amateur." Finally, the end of the story regarding how the Jeffereson-Priestley letters had such a profound influence on the later Adams-Jefferson infamous correspondence exchanges was fascinating.
    • 5/5
      Even if you have no interest in 18th century chemistry, the friendships and conflicts among America's founders, or the integration of reason and religion, a book that looks at the history of ideas through the lens of ecosystem science has important implications for the interdisciplinary work that our world needs today. Gadflies like Joseph Priestly can pull from different areas of thought to shake things up and give more systematic thinkers something to chew on as they flesh out the details. Many great insights into the times and people who gave rise to this idea of "America."