Heroes of Science Part 5

After Cavendish had discovered (or rather rediscovered) hydrogen, and had established the fact that this air is extremely inflammable, most chemists began to regard this gas as pure or nearly pure phlogiston, or, at least, as a substance very highly charged with phlogiston. "Now," said Priestley, "when a metal burns phlogiston rushes out of it; if I restore this phlogiston to the metallic calx, I shall convert it back into the metal."

He then showed by experiment that when calx of iron is heated with hydrogen, the hydrogen disappears and the metal iron is produced.

He seemed, therefore, to have a large experimental basis for his answer to the question, "What happens when a substance burns?" But at a later time it was proved that iron was also produced by heating the calx of iron with carbon. The antiphlogistic chemists regarded fixed air as composed of carbon and dephlogisticated air; the phlogisteans said it was a substance highly charged with phlogiston. The antiphlogistic school said that calx of iron is composed of iron and dephlogisticated air; the phlogisteans said it was iron deprived of its phlogiston. Here was surely an opportunity for a crucial experiment: when calx of iron is heated with carbon, and iron is produced, there must either be a production of fixed air (which is a non-inflammable gas, and forms a white solid substance when brought into contact with limewater), or there must be an outrush of phlogiston from the carbon. The experiment was tried: a gas was produced which had no action on limewater and which was very inflammable; what could this be but phlogiston, already recognized by this very property of extreme inflammability? Thus the phlogisteans appeared to triumph. But if we examine these experiments made by Priestley with the light thrown on them by subsequent research, we find that they bear the interpretation which he put on them only because they were not accurate; thus, two gases are inflammable, but it by no means follows that these gases are one and the same. We must have more accurate knowledge of the properties of these gases.

The air around a burning body, such as iron, after a time loses the power of supporting combustion; but this is merely a qualitative fact. Accurately to trace the change in the properties of this air, it is absolutely necessary that exact measurements should be made; when this is done, we find that the volume of air diminishes during the combustion, that the burning body gains weight, and that this gain in weight is just equal to the loss in weight undergone by the air. When the inflammable gas produced by heating calx of iron with carbon was carefully and _quant.i.tatively_ a.n.a.lyzed, it was found to consist of carbon and oxygen (dephlogisticated air), but to contain these substances in a proportion different from that in which they existed in fixed air. It was a new kind of air or gas; it was _not_ hydrogen.

This account of Priestley's experiments and conclusions regarding combustion shows how easy it is in natural science to interpret experimental results, especially when these results are not very accurate, in accordance with a favourite theory; and it also ill.u.s.trates one of the lessons so emphatically taught by all scientific study, viz. the necessity of suspending one's judgment until accurate measurements have been made, and the great wisdom of then judging cautiously.

About 1779 Priestley left Lord Shelburne, and went as minister of a chapel to Birmingham, where he remained until 1791.

During his stay in Birmingham, Priestley had a considerable amount of pecuniary help from his friends. He had from Lord Shelburne, according to an agreement made when he entered his service, an annuity of 150 a year for life; some of his friends raised a sum of money annually for him, in order that he might be able to prosecute his researches without the necessity of taking pupils. During the ten years or so after he settled in Birmingham, Priestley did a great deal of chemical work, and made many discoveries, almost entirely in the field of pneumatic chemistry.

Besides the discovery of dephlogisticated air (or oxygen) which has been already described, Priestley discovered and gave some account of the properties of _nitrous air_ (nitric acid), _vitriolic acid air_ (sulphur dioxide), _muriatic acid air_ (hydrochloric acid), and _alkaline air_ (ammonia), etc.

In the course of his researches on the last-named air he showed, that when a succession of electric sparks is pa.s.sed through this gas a great increase in the volume of the gas occurs. This fact was further examined at a later time by Berthollet, who, by measuring the increase in volume undergone by a measured quant.i.ty of ammonia gas, and determining the nature of the gases produced by the pa.s.sage of the electric sparks, proved that ammonia is a compound of hydrogen and nitrogen, and that three volumes of the former gas combine with one volume of the latter to produce two volumes of ammonia gas.

Priestley's experiments on "inflammable air"--or hydrogen--are important and interesting. The existence of this substance as a definite kind of air had been proved by the accurate researches of Cavendish in 1766. Priestley drew attention to many actions in which this inflammable air is produced, chiefly to those which take place between acids and metals. He showed that inflammable air is not decomposed by electric sparks; but he thought that it was decomposed by long-continued heating in closed tubes made of lead-gla.s.s. Priestley regarded inflammable air as an air containing much phlogiston. He found that tubes of lead-gla.s.s, filled with this air, were blackened when strongly heated for a long time, and he explained this by saying that the lead in the gla.s.s had a great affinity for phlogiston, and drew it out of the inflammable air.

When inflammable air burns in a closed vessel containing common air, the latter after a time loses its property of supporting combustion. Priestley gave what appeared to be a fairly good explanation of this fact, when he said that the inflammable air parted with phlogiston, which, becoming mixed with the ordinary air in the vessel, rendered it unable to support the burning of a candle. He gave a few measurements in support of this explanation; but we now know that the method of a.n.a.lysis which he employed was quite untrustworthy.

Thinking that by measuring the extent to which the _phlogistication_ (we would now say the _deoxidation_) of common air was carried by mixing measured quant.i.ties of common and inflammable airs and exploding this mixture, he might be able to determine the amount of phlogiston in a given volume of inflammable air, he mixed the two airs in gla.s.s tubes, through the sides of which he had cemented two pieces of wire, sealed the tubes, and exploded the mixture by pa.s.sing electric sparks from wire to wire. The residual air now contained, according to Priestley, more phlogiston, and therefore relatively less dephlogisticated air than before the explosion.

He made various measurements of the quant.i.ties of dephlogisticated air in the tubes, but without getting any constant results. He noticed that after the explosions the insides of the tubes were covered with moisture. At a later time he exploded a mixture of dephlogisticated and inflammable airs (oxygen and hydrogen) in a copper globe, and recorded the fact that after the explosion the globe contained a little water. Priestley was here apparently on the eve of a great discovery. "In looking for one thing,"

says Priestley, "I have generally found another, and sometimes a thing of much more value than that which I was in quest of." Had he performed the experiment of exploding dephlogisticated and inflammable airs with more care, and had he made sure that the airs used were quite dry before the explosion, he would probably have found a thing of indeed much more value than that of which he was in quest; he would probably have discovered the compound nature of water--a discovery which was made by Cavendish three or four years after these experiments described by Priestley.

Some very curious observations were made by Priestley regarding the colour of the gas obtained by heating "spirit of nitre" (_i.e._ nitric acid). He showed that a yellow gas or air is obtained by heating colourless liquid spirit of nitre in a sealed gla.s.s tube, and that as the heating is continued the colour of the gas gets darker, until it is finally very dark orange red. These experiments have found an explanation only in quite recent times.

Another discovery made by Priestley while in Birmingham, viz. that an acid is formed when electric sparks are pa.s.sed through ordinary air for some time, led, in the hands of Cavendish--an experimenter who was as careful and deliberate as Priestley was rapid and careless--to the demonstration of the composition of nitric acid.

Many observations were made by Priestley on the effects of various airs on growing plants and living animals; indeed, one of his customary methods of testing different airs was to put a mouse into each and watch the effects of the air on its breathing. He grew sprigs of mint in common air, in dephlogisticated air (oxygen), and in phlogisticated air (nitrogen, but probably not pure); the sprig in the last-named air grew best, while that in the dephlogisticated air soon appeared sickly. He also showed that air which has been rendered "noxious" by the burning of a candle in it, or by respiration or putrefaction, could be restored to its original state by the action of growing plants. He thought that the air was in the first instance rendered noxious by being impregnated with phlogiston, and that the plant restored the air by removing this phlogiston. Thus Priestley distinctly showed that (to use his own words) "it is very probable that the injury which is continually done to the atmosphere by the respiration of such a number of animals as breathe it, and the putrefaction of such vast ma.s.ses, both of vegetable and animal substances, exposed to it, is, in part at least, repaired by the vegetable creation." But from want of quant.i.tative experiments he failed to give any just explanation of the process whereby this "reparation" is accomplished.

During his stay in Birmingham, Priestley was busily engaged, as was his wont during life, in writing metaphysical and theological treatises and pamphlets.

At this time the minds of men in England were much excited by the events of the French Revolution, then being enacted before them. Priestley and some of his friends were known to sympathize with the French people in this great struggle, as they had been on the side of the Americans in the War of Independence. Priestley's political opinions had, in fact, always been more advanced than the average opinion of his age; by some he was regarded as a dangerous character. But if we read what he lays down as a fundamental proposition in the "Essay on the First Principles of Civil Government"

(1768), we cannot surely find anything very startling.

"It must be understood, whether it be expressed or not, that all people live in society for their mutual advantage; so that the good and happiness of the members, that is the majority of the members of any state, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state must be finally determined. And though it may be supposed that a body of people may be bound by a voluntary resignation of all their rights to a single person, or to a few, it can never be supposed that the resignation is obligatory on their posterity, because it is manifestly contrary to the good of the whole that it should be so."

Priestley proposed many political reforms, but he was decidedly of opinion that these ought to be brought about gradually. He was in favour of abolis.h.i.+ng all religious State establishments, and was a declared enemy to the Church of England. His controversies with the clergy of Birmingham helped to stir up a section of public opinion against him, and to bring about the condemnation of his writings in many parts of the country; he was also unfortunate in making an enemy of Mr. Burke, who spoke against him and his writings in the House of Commons.

In the year 1791, the day of the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille was celebrated by some of Priestley's friends in Birmingham. On that day a senseless mob, raising the cry of "Church and King," caused a riot in the town. Finding that they were not checked by those in authority, they after a time attacked and burned Dr. Priestley's meeting-house, and then destroyed his dwelling-house, and the houses of several other Dissenters in the town. One of his sons barely escaped with his life. He himself found it necessary to leave Birmingham for London, as he considered his life to be in danger. Many of his ma.n.u.scripts, his library, and much of his apparatus were destroyed, and his house was burned.

A congregation at Hackney had the courage at this time to invite Priestley to become their minister. Here he remained for about three years, ministering to the congregation, and pursuing his chemical and other experiments with the help of apparatus and books which had been supplied by his friends, and by the expenditure of part of the sum, too small to cover his losses, given him by Government in consideration of the damage done to his property in the riots at Birmingham.

But finding himself more and more isolated and lonely, especially after the departure of his three sons to America, which occurred during these years, he at last resolved to follow them, and spend the remainder of his days in the New World. Although Priestley had been very badly treated by a considerable section of the English people, yet he left his native country "without any resentment or ill will." "When the time for reflection," he says, "shall come, my countrymen will, I am confident, do me more justice."

He left England in 1795, and settled at Northumberland, in Pennsylvania, about a hundred and thirty miles north-west of Philadelphia. By the help of his friends in England he was enabled to build a house and establish a laboratory and a library; an income was also secured sufficient to maintain him in moderate comfort.

The chair of chemistry in the University of Philadelphia was offered to him, and he was also invited to the charge of a Unitarian chapel in New York; but he preferred to remain quietly at work in his laboratory and library, rather than again to enter into the noisy battle of life. In America he published several writings. Of his chemical discoveries made after leaving England, the most important was that an inflammable gas is obtained by heating metallic calces with carbon. The production of this gas was regarded by Priestley as an indisputable proof of the justness of the theory of phlogiston (see pp. 63, 64).

His health began to give way about 1801; gradually his strength declined, and in February 1804, the end came quietly and peacefully.

A list of the books and pamphlets published by Priestley on theological, metaphysical, philological, historical, educational and scientific subjects would fill several pages of this book. His industry was immense. To accomplish the vast amount of work which he did required the most careful outlay of time. In his "Memoirs," partly written by himself, he tells us that he inherited from his parents "a happy temperament of body and mind;"

his father especially was always in good spirits, and "could have been happy in a workhouse." His paternal ancestors had, as a race, been healthy and long-lived. He was not himself robust as a youth, yet he was always able to study: "I have never found myself," he says, "less disposed or less qualified for mental exertion of any kind at one time of the day more than another; but all seasons have been equal to me, early or late, before dinner or after."

His peculiar evenness of disposition enabled him quickly to recover from the effects of any unpleasant occurrence; indeed, he a.s.sures us that "the most perfect satisfaction" often came a day or two after "an event that afflicted me the most, and without any change having taken place in the state of things."

Another circ.u.mstance which tended to make life easy to him was his fixed resolution, that in any controversy in which he might be engaged, he would frankly acknowledge every mistake he perceived himself to have fallen into.

Priestley's scientific work is marked by rapidity of execution. The different parts do not hang together well; we are presented with a brilliant series of discoveries, but we do not see the connecting strings of thought. We are not then astonished when he tells us that sometimes he forgot that he had made this or that experiment, and repeated what he had done weeks before. He says that he could not work in a hurry, and that he was therefore always methodical; but he adds that he sometimes blamed himself for "doing to-day what had better have been put off until to-morrow."

Many of his most startling discoveries were the results of chance operations, "not of themes worked out and applied." He was led to the discovery of oxygen, he says, by a succession of extraordinary accidents.

But that he was able to take advantage of the chance observations, and from these to advance to definite facts, const.i.tutes the essential difference between him and ordinary plodding investigators. Although he rarely, if ever, saw all the bearings of his own discoveries, although none of his experiments was accurately worked out to its conclusion, yet he did see, rapidly and as it appeared almost at one glance, something of their meanings, and this something was enough to urge him on to fresh experimental work.

Although we now condemn Priestley's theories as quite erroneous, yet we must admire his undaunted devotion to experiment. He was a true student of science in one essential point, viz. Nature was for him the first and the last court of appeal. He theorized and speculated much, he experimented rapidly and not accurately, but he was ever appealing to natural facts; and in doing this he could not but lay some foundation which should remain. The facts discovered by him are amongst the very corner-stones on which the building of chemical science was afterwards raised.

So enthusiastic was Priestley in the prosecution of his experiments, that when he began, he tells us, "I spent all the money I could possibly raise, carried on by my ardour in philosophical investigation, and entirely regardless of consequences, except so far as never to contract any debts."

He seems all through his life to have been perfectly free from anxiety about money affairs.

Priestley's manner of work shows how kindly and genial he was. He trained himself to talk and think and write with his family by the fireside; "nothing but reading aloud, or speaking without interruption," was an obstruction to his work.

Priestley was just the man who was wanted in the early days of chemical science. By the vast number, variety and novelty of his experimental results, he astonished scientific men--he forcibly drew attention to the science in which he laboured so hard; by the brilliancy of some of his experiments he obliged chemists to admit that a new field of research was opened before them, and the instruments for the prosecution of this research were placed in their hands; and even by the unsatisfactoriness of his reasoning he drew attention to the difficulties and contradictions of the theories which then prevailed in chemistry.

That the work of Priestley should bear full fruit it was necessary that a greater than he should interpret it, and should render definite that which Priestley had but vaguely shown to exist.

The man who did this, and who in doing it really established chemistry as a science, was Lavoisier.

But before considering the work of Lavoisier, I should like to point out that many of the physical characters of common air had been clearly established in the later years of the seventeenth century by the Honourable Robert Boyle. In the "Sceptical Chymist," published in 1661, Mr. Boyle had established the fact that air is a material substance possessed of weight, that this air presses on the surface of all things, and that by removing part of the air in an enclosed s.p.a.ce the pressure within that s.p.a.ce is diminished. He had demonstrated that the boiling point of water is dependent on the pressure of the air on the surface of the water. Having boiled some water "a pretty while, that by the heat it might be freed from the lat.i.tant air," he placed the vessel containing the hot water within the receiver of an arrangement which he had invented for sucking air out of an enclosed s.p.a.ce; as soon as he began to suck out air from this receiver, the water boiled "as if it had stood over a very quick fire.... Once, when the air had been drawn out, the liquor did, upon a single exsuction, boil so long with prodigiously vast bubbles, that the effervescence lasted almost as long as was requisite for the rehearsing of a _Pater noster_." Boyle had gone further than the qualitative fact that the volume of an enclosed quant.i.ty of air alters with changes in the pressure to which that air is subjected; he had shown by simple and accurate experiments that "the volume varies inversely as the pressure." He had established the generalization of so much importance in physical science now known as _Boyle's law_.

The work of the Honourable Henry Cavendish will be considered in some detail in the book on "The Physicists" belonging to this series, but I must here briefly allude to the results of his experiments on air published in the _Philosophical Transactions_ for 1784 and 1785.

Cavendish held the ordinary view that when a metal burns in air, the air is thereby phlogisticated; but why is it, he asked, that the volume of air is decreased by this process? It was very generally said that fixed air was produced during the calcination of metals, and was absorbed by the calx.

But Cavendish inst.i.tuted a series of experiments which proved that no fixed air could be obtained from metallic calces. In 1766 inflammable air (hydrogen) was discovered by Cavendish; he now proved that when this air is exploded with dephlogisticated air (oxygen), water is produced. He showed that when these two airs are mixed in about the proportion of two volumes of hydrogen to one volume of oxygen, the greater part, if not the whole of the airs is condensed into water by the action of the electric spark. He then proceeded to prove by experiments that when common air is exploded with inflammable air water is likewise produced, and phlogisticated air (_i.e._ nitrogen) remains.

Priestley and Cavendish had thus distinctly established the existence of three kinds of air, viz. dephlogisticated air, phlogisticated air, and inflammable air. Cavendish had shown that when the last named is exploded with common air water is produced (which is composed of dephlogisticated and inflammable airs), and phlogisticated air remains. Common air had thus been proved to consist of these two--phlogisticated and dephlogisticated airs (nitrogen and oxygen). Applying these results to the phenomenon of the calcination of metals, Cavendish gave reasons for thinking that the metals act towards common air in a manner a.n.a.logous to that in which inflammable air acts--that they withdraw dephlogisticated and leave phlogisticated air; but, as he was a supporter of the phlogistic theory, he rather preferred to say that the burning metals withdraw dephlogisticated air and phlogisticate that which remains; in other words, while admitting that a metal in the process of burning gains dephlogisticated air, he still thought that the metal also loses _something_; viz. phlogiston.

That Cavendish in 1783-84 had proved air to consist of two distinct gases, and water to be produced by the union of two gases, must be remembered as we proceed with the story of the discoveries of Lavoisier.

ANTOINE LAURENT LAVOISIER, born in Paris in 1743, was the son of a wealthy merchant, who, judging from his friends.h.i.+p with many of the men of science of that day, was probably of a scientific bent of mind, and who certainly showed that he was a man of sense by giving his son the best education which he could obtain. After studying in the Mazarin College, Lavoisier entered on a course of training in physical, astronomical, botanical and chemical science. The effects of this training in the accurate methods of physics are apparent in the chemical researches of Lavoisier.

At the age of twenty-one Lavoisier wrote a memoir which gained the prize offered by the French Government for the best and most economical method of lighting the streets of a large city. While making experiments, the results of which were detailed in this paper, Lavoisier lived for six weeks in rooms lighted only by artificial light, in order that his eyesight might become accustomed to small differences in the intensities of light from various sources. When he was twenty-five years old Lavoisier was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences. During the next six years (1768-1774) he published various papers, some on chemical, some on geological, and some on mathematical subjects. Indeed at this time, although an ardent cultivator of natural science, he appears to have been undecided as to which branch of science he should devote his strength.

The accuracy and thoroughness of Lavoisier's work, and the acuteness of his reasoning powers, are admirably ill.u.s.trated in two papers, published in the Memoirs of the Academy for 1770, on the alleged conversion of water into earth.

When water is boiled for a long time in a gla.s.s vessel a considerable quant.i.ty of white siliceous earth is found in the vessel. This apparent conversion or trans.m.u.tation of water into earthy matter was quite in keeping with the doctrines which had been handed down from the times of the alchemists; the experiment was generally regarded as conclusively proving the possibility of changing water into earth. Lavoisier found that after heating water for a hundred and one days in a closed _and weighed_ gla.s.s vessel, there was no change in the total weight of the vessel and its contents; when he poured out the water and evaporated it to dryness, he obtained 20.4 grains of solid earthy matter; but he also found, what had been before overlooked, that the gla.s.s vessel had lost weight. The actual loss amounted to 17.4 grains. The difference between this and the weight of the earthy matter in the water, viz. three grains, was set down (and as we now know justly set down) by Lavoisier to errors of experiment. Lavoisier therefore concluded that water, when boiled, is not changed into earth, but that a portion of the earthy matter of which gla.s.s is composed is dissolved by the water. This conclusion was afterwards confirmed by the Swedish chemist _Scheele_, who proved that the composition of the earthy matter found in the water is identical with that of some of the const.i.tuents of gla.s.s.

By this experiment Lavoisier proved the old alchemical notion of trans.m.u.tation to be erroneous; he showed that water is not trans.m.u.ted into earth, but that each of these substances is possessed of definite properties which belong to it and to it only. He established the all-important generalization--which subsequent research has more amply confirmed, until it is to-day accepted as the very foundation of every branch of physical science--that in no process of change is there any alteration in the total ma.s.s of matter taking part in that change. The gla.s.s vessel in which Lavoisier boiled water for so many days lost weight; but the matter lost by the gla.s.s was found dissolved in the water.