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Joseph Priestley
Joseph Priestley was a scientist. During his time, he made
some astounding discoveries. The most renowned of these
is the Ammonia Gas and Oxygen. Without him, science
would not be as advanced as it is now.When Joseph
Priestley was younger he was very smart, and
excelled in all his subjects. He attended the University of
Edinburgh, and there he received his doctorate of laws.
He did a lot of work with Electricity, and he wrote many
books concerning it.In the laboratory he did a lot of work
involving the chemical properties of gases. He invented
a formula for Soda Water, which would eventually end the
scurvy epidemic.He wrote many papers to the Royal Society, which brought his
reputation as a chemist to light. In this paper he had Isolated Ammonia gas for the first time in 1774,
and he had discovered Oxygen which the world had never heard of before.These two elements had not
yet been by society at that time.Priestley fought a long-running battle with Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
and his followers over how to interpret the results of experiments with gases. Priestley interpreted
them in terms of phlogiston—the hypothetical principle of flammability that was thought to give
metals their luster and ductility and was widely used in the early 18th century to explain
combustion, calcination, smelting, respiration, and other chemical processes. Proponents of
phlogiston did not consider it to be a material substance, so it was therefore unweighable.
Priestley gave qualitative explanations of these phenomena, talking, for example, about
oxygen as “dephlogisticated air.This brought a whole other look to chemistry and what is possible.
In 1794 Priestley and his wife moved Pennsylvania, where he researched on his own, in his own lab.
There he waited out his days doing what he enjoyed most as a chemist.He died in 1804, and
was buried in Riverview Cemetery.