fast
[Priestley's italics] and the animal powers be too soon exhausted in this pure kind of air."
He was right that breathing pure oxygen for too long can be dangerous. Half an hour in a Los Angeles bar won't do any harm, but if you breathed pure oxygen for too long your lungs would fill with blood, and after a few days you would die. That's because the very thing that makes oxygen useful to us is also its greatest hazard. The oxygen we need to breathe is an exceptional releaser of energy. We need oxygen's reactive powers to enable us to live such vigorous lives, but even the diluted amount that we breathe in ordinary air comes with its own perils.
Priestley had other ideas for how his new air might be useful. He sug
gested, for instance, that strategically placed flasks could "qualify the noxious air of a room in which much company should be confined...[to make it] sweet and wholesome." But he still persisted in thinking of it as fundamentally different from ordinary air. Even the visionary Priestley maintained that "common" breathable air was the purest possible form. That's why he was so confounded when his new air seemed even purer than the common stuff, and why he had to invent his elaborate explanation of dephlogistication to account for its properties. The doctrine of phlogiston was holding back the whole story of oxygen and its importance to us all. For Priestley, oxygen remained a curiosity, a party trick with a few potential commercial applications for right-minded entrepreneurs. To discover the vital role it plays in the life of the planet would take someone else entirely, someone who was as cool and systematic in his experiments as Priestley was chaotic, and who was prepared to think in ways that nobody had thought before.
***
Antoine Lavoisier was a golden child. From infancy he was doted on, the only son of a well-to-do bourgeois French household whose father was very much on the ascent. Though he lost his mother at an early age, he was raised by a childless aunt who never doubted that he was destined for greatness.
Ten years younger than Priestley, Lavoisier was born during the reign of Louis XV, a corrupt wielder of privilege who is said to have presciently declared, "After me, the deluge." Still, during Lavoisier's youth and early manhood there must have been little sign of the revolutionary carnage that was to come, and the tragic effect it would have on his own life.
Instead, his family seemed fully favored by fortune. In only a few generations, his forebears had worked their way up from being postal couriers to attaining a considerable position in society. Lavoisier was always most precise in attitude and behavior, and his upbringing only served to reinforce that tendency. He was raised in a household where appearances were everything, and manners dictated by a delicate web of complex social codes.
Even at the exclusive Parisian school that he attended from the age of eleven, precision was reckoned a precious concept. Lavoisier's math and science teacher was a renowned astronomer named Abbé La Caille who once spent four years on an astronomical expedition to the Cape of Good Hope, where he observed ten thousand new stars and named fourteen constellations. On his return, La Caille calculated his expenses with a level of accuracy that made many Parisians titter. He declared that the entire voyage had cost 9,144 livres and five sous, which is like totaling every single expense from four years of college down to the last few cents.
And yet Lavoisier learned a great deal from La Caille and his other teachers. It didn't take them long to realize that they were dealing with an uncommon talent. To be sure, Lavoisier's grasp of the humanities was shaky—he never succeeded in mastering languages, and his understanding of art was technically appreciative rather than intuitive. But in math and science he excelled, and his teachers' encouragement fed his own natural ambition. He became determined to discover
[Priestley's italics] and the animal powers be too soon exhausted in this pure kind of air."
He was right that breathing pure oxygen for too long can be dangerous. Half an hour in a Los Angeles bar won't do any harm, but if you breathed pure oxygen for too long your lungs would fill with blood, and after a few days you would die. That's because the very thing that makes oxygen useful to us is also its greatest hazard. The oxygen we need to breathe is an exceptional releaser of energy. We need oxygen's reactive powers to enable us to live such vigorous lives, but even the diluted amount that we breathe in ordinary air comes with its own perils.
Priestley had other ideas for how his new air might be useful. He sug
gested, for instance, that strategically placed flasks could "qualify the noxious air of a room in which much company should be confined...[to make it] sweet and wholesome." But he still persisted in thinking of it as fundamentally different from ordinary air. Even the visionary Priestley maintained that "common" breathable air was the purest possible form. That's why he was so confounded when his new air seemed even purer than the common stuff, and why he had to invent his elaborate explanation of dephlogistication to account for its properties. The doctrine of phlogiston was holding back the whole story of oxygen and its importance to us all. For Priestley, oxygen remained a curiosity, a party trick with a few potential commercial applications for right-minded entrepreneurs. To discover the vital role it plays in the life of the planet would take someone else entirely, someone who was as cool and systematic in his experiments as Priestley was chaotic, and who was prepared to think in ways that nobody had thought before.
***
Antoine Lavoisier was a golden child. From infancy he was doted on, the only son of a well-to-do bourgeois French household whose father was very much on the ascent. Though he lost his mother at an early age, he was raised by a childless aunt who never doubted that he was destined for greatness.
Ten years younger than Priestley, Lavoisier was born during the reign of Louis XV, a corrupt wielder of privilege who is said to have presciently declared, "After me, the deluge." Still, during Lavoisier's youth and early manhood there must have been little sign of the revolutionary carnage that was to come, and the tragic effect it would have on his own life.
Instead, his family seemed fully favored by fortune. In only a few generations, his forebears had worked their way up from being postal couriers to attaining a considerable position in society. Lavoisier was always most precise in attitude and behavior, and his upbringing only served to reinforce that tendency. He was raised in a household where appearances were everything, and manners dictated by a delicate web of complex social codes.
Even at the exclusive Parisian school that he attended from the age of eleven, precision was reckoned a precious concept. Lavoisier's math and science teacher was a renowned astronomer named Abbé La Caille who once spent four years on an astronomical expedition to the Cape of Good Hope, where he observed ten thousand new stars and named fourteen constellations. On his return, La Caille calculated his expenses with a level of accuracy that made many Parisians titter. He declared that the entire voyage had cost 9,144 livres and five sous, which is like totaling every single expense from four years of college down to the last few cents.
And yet Lavoisier learned a great deal from La Caille and his other teachers. It didn't take them long to realize that they were dealing with an uncommon talent. To be sure, Lavoisier's grasp of the humanities was shaky—he never succeeded in mastering languages, and his understanding of art was technically appreciative rather than intuitive. But in math and science he excelled, and his teachers' encouragement fed his own natural ambition. He became determined to discover
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