From the bestselling author of How We Got To Now, The Ghost Map
and Farsighted, a new national bestseller: the "exhilarating"( Los
Angeles Times) story of Joseph Priestley, "a founding father long
forgotten"(Newsweek) and a brilliant man who embodied the
relationship between science, religion, and politics for America's
Founding Fathers.
In The Invention of Air, national bestselling author Steven Johnson
tells the fascinating story of Joseph Priestley--scientist and
theologian, protégé of Benjamin Franklin, friend of Thomas Jefferson--an
eighteenth-century radical thinker who played pivotal roles in the
invention of ecosystem science, the discovery of oxygen, the uses of
oxygen, scientific experimentation, the founding of the Unitarian
Church, and the intellectual development of the United States. As he did
so masterfully in The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson uses a dramatic
historical story to explore themes that have long engaged him:
innovative strategies, intellectual models, and the way new ideas emerge
and spread, and the environments that foster these breakthroughs.