Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant

Author:John Vaillant [Vaillant, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Like his remote colleagues, Priestley was, in his off time, using secular means to fathom the deep space of their immediate surroundings—the invisible, intangible mysteries previously relegated to the clergy and to God. If his neighbors didn’t consider these inquiries actively heretical, then many considered them pointless; after all, there was, literally, “nothing to see here.” Priestley summed up this paradox in his observation on Isaac Newton: “He had very little knowledge of air, so he had few doubts concerning it.”

Despite the fact that there is no tangible barrier between the human eye and the remotest visible star, Priestly perceived that our atmosphere was not only malleable but finite: if it wasn’t a closed system, it was a very restricted one, much like his glass bell. Wondering how other living creatures might fare in “putrefied air,” he introduced a mint plant into a sealed jar recently vacated by one more suffocated mouse. The mint plant lived—for days, and then for weeks, in what had been lifeless, “phlogisticated” air. Priestley continued, this time introducing a mint plant into a jar where a candle had smothered. Again, the mint continued to grow. That the same conditions which killed mice and smothered candles would have no adverse effect on a plant left Priestley to speculate on what was happening inside those sealed jars, in plain view yet out of sight. After a week, he placed a mouse inside the jar with the mint. Instead of dying immediately like all the others, this mouse lived long enough for Priestley to observe it, retrieve it, and put it into a second sealed vessel filled with mouse-polluted air, where it promptly died. Then he put a candle in with the mint and it, too, burned longer than the candles had in empty jars. “This observation,” he wrote later in his seminal work, Observations on Different Kinds of Air, “led me to conclude, that plants, instead of affecting the air in the same manner with animal respiration, reverse the effects of breathing, and tend to keep the atmosphere sweet and wholesome, when it becomes noxious.”

Using equipment cobbled together from his wife’s kitchen and the potting shed, and methods a resourceful twelve-year-old could master, Priestley was, solely by the brute force of his curiosity and powers of deduction, systematically linking the responses of fire, plants, and animals in a series of connections that led, inevitably, toward oxygen and, by extension, to carbon dioxide.

Priestley claimed that the motive behind his provocative experiments was “exciting the attentions of the ingenious.” Of all the ingenious thinkers active in the late eighteenth century, it is hard to name one whose attentions were more excitable than Benjamin Franklin’s. By a wonderful coincidence, Franklin visited Priestley’s home in June 1772 while he was refining his mint experiments. Following his visit, he wrote to Priestley, “that the vegetable creation should restore the air which is spoiled by the animal part of it, looks like a rational system,…The strong, thriving state of your mint, in putrid air, seems to show that the air is mended by taking something from it, and not by adding to it.

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