What were his major scientific discoveries? Was he really the first person to discover oxygen?
Priestley is most famous for discovering oxygen, but one of the interesting twists in the story of his life is that he didn’t really discover oxygen first, and some of his analysis of what he had discovered turned out to be fundamentally flawed. Part of the argument of the book is that Priestley should be remembered more for another discovery of his, which in its own way was every bit as important: He was the first person to recognize that plants were creating oxygen. The original oxygen content of the earth’s atmosphere was vanishingly small; the whole reason we have an atmosphere that we can breathe is because the plants manufacture oxygen for us. And Priestley was the first person to grasp that essential life-support system. (Interestingly, Franklin helped him understand the full implications of his discovery, so in a way, it was a collaboration between the two men.) How is Priestley related to today’s ecosystem science? The discovery of plant respiration is now seen as one of the f
