A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen

  • Joe Jackson
Viking: 2005. 384 pp. $27.95, £17.99 0670034347 | ISBN: 0-670-03434-7

One of the most famous episodes in the history of chemistry is the race for priority between the two rival champions of oxygen, Joseph Priestley and Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. Priestley was a Unitarian minister who divided his life between laboratory experiments and theology, and was forced to move from England to exile in the United States. Lavoisier was a young, ambitious and wealthy academician who never left France and met a tragic end in 1794, when he was guillotined by French revolutionaries. Joe Jackson plays nicely on the contrast between the two men in his extremely readable book A World on Fire. The title refers both to the role of oxygen in combustion, first established by Lavoisier, and to the context of scientific competition and political upheaval.

Flame and fortune? Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (left) beat Joseph Priestley to the discovery of oxygen. Credit: S. BIANCHETTI/CORBIS

Jackson tells the story in the manner of a standard historical narrative, in chronological order, occasionally interrupted by glimpses of the broader cultural and political context. However, some of these interludes, such as the chapter on the guillotine, which speculates on how long its victims had to suffer before they died, do not seem particularly relevant. If the goal of the book was to weave together science and politics, it is not fully achieved. And this is not just because of the spelling mistakes and incorrect dates (for example, Descartes's Discourse on Method was published in 1637, not 1677).

The narrative fails to adequately recreate the scientific milieu of the late Enlightenment in Britain and France. Jackson consulted Priestley's archives, but he did not rely on primary sources for the French part of the story. He didn't even get his information from the recent wealth of scholarly publications on the chemical revolution. For instance, Frederic L. Holmes' Antoine Lavoisier: The Next Crucial Year (Princeton University Press, 1998) would have been a useful source for describing the pathway to the discovery of oxygen, especially as it is based on a close examination of Lavoisier's laboratory notebooks of the year 1773. As a result, Jackson's book reinforces some old clichés, such as the view of Lavoisier's career as a systematic development of a seminal idea, a revolutionary plan meant to overthrow Georg Stahl's phlogiston theory.

More importantly, Jackson's early chapters suggest that pre-lavoisierian chemistry was an inconsistent, empirical science, clinging to the ancient doctrine of the four elements. In truth, historians of eighteenth-century chemistry describe a booming field, based on more robust notions: not only had the four elements been redefined in terms of simple substances and agents or instruments, but laboratory practices were guided by tables of affinities.

The narrative itself suffers a major bias, being written from a present-day perspective. Because Jackson knows that the ‘dephlogisticated air’ that Priestley released from mercury calx was oxygen, he doesn't create any dramatic suspense. He assumes from the beginning that Priestley was wrong and Lavoisier was right. It would have been more interesting to show how the identity of oxygen was constructed through the confrontation between Priestley and Lavoisier. The contrast between Lavoisier's academic experiments, using sophisticated and expensive instruments, and Priestley's attachment to more democratic and qualitative practices, was described in a more balanced way by Jan Golinski in Science as Public Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1992). Jackson portrays Priestley as a complex and interesting character, but makes no effort to understand his strong convictions and religious beliefs. In contrast, the two-volume biography by Robert Schofield, The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley and The Enlightened Joseph Priestley (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977 and 2005), provides a detailed account of Priestley's multiple facets.

Popular historical narratives should not be blamed for distorting scholars' historical accounts; after all, each historical narrative is a reconstruction of the past, even those based on a detailed analysis of primary sources. Popular historical accounts can convey a clear picture of the period and the characters, something achieved by the Open University video The Publicity of Oxygen (BBC, 1993). Some of them openly presented as fictions raise stimulating issues. This was the case with Oxygen, a play written by Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffman that created a ‘retro’ Nobel to be awarded to the discoverer of oxygen. The discussions of the Nobel committee as it decides between Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Priestley and Lavoisier prompt reflection about the mechanisms of discovery attributions. Historical fiction like this may be more useful and more pleasant than inaccurate pseudo-realistic accounts.