joseph priestley

Joseph Priestley was born in England on March 13, 1733, and showed a great talent for science and languages from an early age. Priestley performed many important scientific experiments, among them the discovery that the gas produced by the fermentation of grain (later identified as carbon dioxide) could be dissolved in water to produce the pleasant drink called seltzer. Also, as a result of meeting Benjamin Franklin in London in 1766, Priestley became interested in electricity and was …

…considered it to be air from which the phlogiston had been removed. His more quantitative experiments convinced him that ordinary air is one fifth dephlogisticated air, the rest considered by him to be phlogiston. Because of his nonconformist political views (he supported both the American and French revolutions), he was forced to leave England (a mob burned his house in Birmingham in 1791). He spent his last decade peacefully in the United States, and died in 1804.