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“It’s not hard to understand that these people tend to be smarter than the rest of us, and thus tend to come up with a disproportionate share of the Big Ideas. The mystery is why, every now and again, one of these people seems to get a hot hand.”
In Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, 
Revolution, and the Birth of America, the “hot hand” in question is that of Joseph Priestley. Something of a forgotten man now (certainly in terms of his role in the American Revolution), Priestley could be considered the quintessential Enlightenment thinker, in much the same way that da Vinci is the embodiment of the “Renaissance man.”
He is probably best known today for his ingenious experiments which illustrated the complementary nature of plants and animals. (We breathe out what plants take in, and vice versa, meaning that a closed system with a mouse and a plant can sustain itself for quite a while.) However, Priestley’s influence was much broader in his day—he founded the Unitarian church, a direct affront to the English religious structure, and as a confidant to Benjamin Franklin, he was a staunch supporter of the American and French revolutions.
But more than a look at the work of one man, Johnson’s book investigates the nature of revolution. The unique conditions around the Enlightenment enabled a brilliant individual to have a central part in several drastic shifts. Could we be in the midst of another revolutionary era? We talked to Johnson himself over the holidays to get his thoughts, but if you have questions of your own, he will be appearing tomorrow night at the Harvard Book Store at 7 pm. So come with your copy of this article in hand and fire away with the questions we left out!
In a bit of our own luck, The Invention of Air touches on many of the same themes as the book we last reviewed, Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun. In fact, the key message of both books is virtually identical: that we have the ability to solve today’s (and tomorrow’s) problems through our own creativity. Priestley was a fundamentally optimistic person—even when an angry mob burned down his house—and it seems that today’s scientists have lost that optimism, and the inspiration that stems from it.
While maintaining the same optimism, Johnson was still concerned about the relationship between science and progressivism today. “My version of being progressive is much closer to Priestley's: it means you believe in progress, that the present is fundamentally better than the past, and that the future can be even better,” he said. “So when we look at problems like global warming, I don't think it helps to be excessively apocalyptic, or to assume that civilization has hit some kind of energy-consumption wall that we'll never get around.”
Where the books diverge, however, is in the expected relationship between the political and scientific landscapes. Morton accepted it as a given that most scientists are not too concerned with the “big-picture” aspects of their work. Johnson, inspired by Priestley, has a slightly different take. “I'd hope more scientists got involved in politics, and more politicians developed a more nuanced and engaged relationship to science, given how many crucial issues of our time revolve around problems that can't be understood without some kind of scientific understanding.”
Priestley’s own writing (on science, not his more controversial tracts on religion and politics) served to galvanize the masses in support of the leaps of understanding which embodied the Enlightenment. Perhaps this biography of Priestley will play a part in inspiring us to take on the challenges and seize the opportunities present in our own time. 200 years from now, will someone look back at the world of 2009 and remark how one, or several, of us had our own “hot hands?”
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