can have that land under the condition that you free the serfs and that they're no longer slaves in poland. and then the money that kosciuszko was given by the czar in london, he never touched that money because he felt that was blood money. in the end he wrote a will giving some of it to a friend and one of zeltner's daughters and he also had money in paris and switzerland and he said that money save and use and give it to peasants in switzerland who are going to carry me to my grave. ..

>> yes, he was buried by the catholic church. in fact, he had his heart taken out along with his entrails and buried in switzerland, with the instructions that when poland was once again free, it be sent to poland and meet up with the rest of his body. and it wasn't until after world

war i that his heart was actually sent back to poland and buried together with the rest of his remains. that's it. thank you very much. [applause] alex storozynski is executive editor and president of the kosciuszko foundation.

>> i'm here because i am a d.c. born boy. back home from brooklyn for the first real stop on the invention of air, world tour. so it's great and it is great to start here in such a fantastic bookstore. politics and prose is really special. so you are a little bit about what this about. i'm going to talk. i'm not going to be. i'm going to do one brief, brief reading, which is a little trick i've learned about how to excel at book readings, which is not to read your own words but to be thomas jefferson's words. [laughter] that always works really well. you know, when you start, this is the first book i've written about this period in american and british history and the founding fathers. on the one hand it is very

promising because a lot of people are interested in this topic, as you know. on the other hand, if it doesn't go well you are on the track towards being a founding father impersonator. by the end of two or i may be wearing a powdered wiggler something like that. i actually, i gave a talk at the franklin institute where i will be on friday night. in philadelphia. but i gave a talk there a few months ago, and as i was walking in the door, there was an actual ben franklin impersonator there. franklin is a huge figure in his book and i spent a lot of time reading these letters between franklin and priestley. so when i walked in door and there's been franklin nutter, and so i introduced myself. i said i just wrote a book about your. andy was totally in character and said really? that is very present. just priestley and i met many years ago. it was 7065, i believe. so i'm not going to do any more impressions. but that may be in my future. i'm going to take a little bit about how i got to the story, as

some of you know i wrote above, two books ago about videogames and pop-culture. and then went to the next logical thing which was 19th century cholera. and now i figure the only thing more exciting than 19th century cholera was 18th century imagery. here i am with this book. i got to this in a roundabout way, which i was going to write a bigger book which i think i am so going to write, about innovation and the spread of ideas. and one of the things i have been writing and thinking a lot about it ecosystems and how the metaphor of ecosystem is useful to think about the way that information flows through society. and it was a team that showed up a little bit in the last book. sauce can researching back into ecosystem science and reading about it for ideas. and i stumbled across this story about joseph priestley. and i had done a little bit

about priestly. like most people, i think i heard of him as the guy who discovered oxygen for the first time. and for those of you who haven't had a chance to look at the book that is his reputation but it is strange because he didn't actually do it first and he kind of got it wrong in some fundamental ways when he did do it. but for some reason that is the line that is kind of stuck within. and that is his wikipedia entry is that he's the guy who discovered oxygen. but i found this other very interesting thing about him which i think he deserves a lot more credit for. and part of the book is kind of evangelizing this one discovery of his career, which is that you was the first person to realize that plants were creating oxygen. and it's really quite an extraordinary story, and what basically happened is you go back and look at the history of science in that period. the whole question of investigating air as a problem

that sites should wrestle with was something that took a long time for people to even realize. if you think about it, you look around yourself and you see lots of things that are probably worthy of studying. there are people and their bodies, matter, trees out there, clouded skies and all that kind of stuff. but the invisible space between us all didn't occur to anybody to be all that interesting for a long period of time. and it was a really until the 16 hundreds when people really first proved that there was this thing called anti-air. there was back in for all the air had been pulled out of a space and behaved very distinctly different. bells would ring in it. candles would not let. people started to think there must be this invisible substance that is kind of floating around us that we can't see but that somehow is probably worthy of study. into the 1700s people started to think that maybe it was composed of different gases. it wasn't just one single unified thing. and that was about where the

study of pneumatic chemistry was when priestly got interested in it. now, priestly was you know, classic enlightenment figured he had no training in anything. yet come out of kind of a religious background, had written an early influential book on linguistics, kind of radical linguistics. and that, he charted this path of radical politics and radical linguistics that basically noam chomsky would end up doing 200 years later. no one else has quite an accommodation since or before. and he started dabbling in a whole number of different filter got interested in electricity. he met ben franklin in 1765, at a coffeehouse in london. where franklin used to hang out and pursue persuaded franco to let him write a book about electricity. priestly had this idea that they were all these amazing discoveries that were happening in the field of electricity.

midwood franklin had pioneered. it would be important for somebody to come along and write a real kind of popular account of it, write it in english verse which was an innovation. and all scholars at the time were written in latin. to really tell the story of how the site had developed and flourished over the last 50 years, and how it had all these interesting practical application and how people at home, in their homeland could build, take a little electrical machines into these interesting experiments. so he wrote his book on the history of electricity, which really in many ways invented the whole genre of popular science writing. which is kind of how i make my living a. so i am indebted to priestly in that sense. so it was very important because it was important, one instance that it was about spreading the idea and getting ordinary people involved in scientific research and teaching them the magic of all the stuff that happened. but it was important also in that it created this really extraordinary friendship between franklin and priestly, that lasted many years and shape both of their lives in crucial ways.

one of the interesting little footnote is that that was the first place anyone had publicly written about franklin's famous experience with the kite. so that classic, you know, go get him into all have a ben franklin, the great pioneering kite flying, sort of insane guy with lightning storm, comes from joseph priestly actiontec priestly was like that is a great story that i will write a book that talks about that. pursley and franklin developed this friendship and priestly and that interest had in his question of their and gases. and in part, one of the reasons why he got interested in it was a kind of accidentally moved in next door to a brewery. we will talk a little bit about his religious side, but he was a minister as well as a pioneering chemist and linguist and political radical. as people were back in the day. someone said written about this book that he read the whole thing and they thought one of

id. at my life? [laughter] this guy is so complex. so he had gotten a new gig as a minister in a church, and the ministers house wasn't ready so they moved and temporary to a house that was adjacent to a brewery. and ever inquisitive priestly kind of walked over and started investigating. noticed they had this giant vats of beer that word brewing. and he saw this kind of gas, kind of haze coming off the liquid. and he thought this is going to be a great place to do experiments. so he asked the proprietors it would be all right if he could do a little work over their beer. and i love that image of just kind of eccentric minister from extra comes over to the brewery and can i open up a little lab here? over your beer. so one of the things that he does as he starts, one of the early experience he does is start pouring water back and forth over this brewing your. in the accidentally invents soda

water. and instantly, you know, since off letters to everyone about it. i have invented this wonderful beverage and it is just delightful. if you put a little juice in it it is really tasty. he almost invented the wine color. [laughter] >> and he thought for a while it was going to fight scurvy, but it didn't in fact have anything to do with scurvy so that was kind of a falsely. but it was typical of him and franklin also to share his ideas and innovations with anyone who's interested in listening to them. he had almost to a fault no interest in making any money or keeping anything proprietary in anything he did. which put him in a situation where he was constantly trying to find support for his work. a few years later, a certain johan schleps cottoned a tonic water and did a little better with it as we're still paying paying royalties on it to this day. anytime you have a gin and tonic. so priestley was very much about

the kind of open flow of ideas, and he and franklin really share that value to and at a certain point, it leads in 1771, he got interested in the problem of air and plants. and he had done for a long time, and everyone had done for a long time, if you took an organism, if he took a mouse has presented many, many times and put it in a sealed vessel of some kind, at a certain point the creature would run out of there and would go into convulsions and eventually die, if you didn't open it up and let more air into. they didn' understand why that was happening. they did know at the mouth was somehow poisoning the environment or if there was something about the limited space. they didn't understand it entirely but to do that happened. priestly's brother, his memories of his brother, dropping spiders now did you put into some kind of remedial, for troubled

children killing spiders and chartered but back in the day it was thought of as a budding genius. everyone had known about this. and then you decided which no one seems to have had before that, which is what would happen if you put a plate in a similar situation. so he talked a little bit plant from his garden and that pretty much everything he did was stuff that you could do in your own kitchen. he did all of his experiments pretty much any big resent any kind of had stolen from his wife and he would go into the kitchen and steal beer glasses. there's a lot of beer and coffee in his book. book. he would pull these plants out of the guard. he isolated this meant that. sealed it up and then went away and kind of waited for it to die. and would come back day after day, week after week and this thing kept growing. and so he thought, that's puzzling. and so then he had this idea. he thought, well, what would happen, he knew from the mice experiments that if you let the

candle in a sealed vessel, which he would do with a little lens, he would concentrate the sun phrase, like to get inside the sealed vessel and then burn all of the oxygen out of the vessel, and then almost instantly the mouse would i. there was nothing to breathe. and then at that point it would be impossible to light the candle again because there is no in there, right? so he thought i'm going to try that again with a plate instead of a mouse. and so he isolated the little bit of mint and lit the candle from the outside, burn all the oxygen out and then he put it down and waited to see what would happen. and days passed and the plant seemed fine, continue to grow. little route started to appear. in about two weeks later he went back and try to light a candle. and a candlelit. a little flame appeared so there have been no combustible air in there before. all that had been burned out and somehow without any new air coming in, that there had been created. somehow the plant was creating that combustible air.

in that little vessel, and a little kind of globe, with the slow plant, was a clue as to how our whole planet evolves in the history of life on this planet because the natural levels of oxygen on earth, before the plants evolved with something like less than 1%. we do not have a big bubble of oxygen around us because that's kind of an innate state of the earth that we have a because billions of years ago, extracting energy from the fund called photosynthesis. it had a waste product of oxygen. and overtime, oxygen buildup as photosynthesis became so successful under so many organisms spread around the grow untraveled. overtime that bubble grew until it reached a point of remarkable stabilization actually which is a whole other scientific story. of about 20%. this was initially the world's greatest illusion crisis. oxygen was a deadly chemical in many ways. so there are all of these organisms that instantly died in

contact with oxygen. it was a terrible holocaust. but over time, organism evolved that made a living off of oxygen and figured out ways to extract energy from oxygen. and we are their descendents. with it because of this invention of air, many of millions of years ago as an accidental byproduct of photosynthesis. and that was what joseph pursley was sitting in this little orb here. but what is wonderful about the story is he didn't fully realize the. he knew that there was something interesting happening. is what he did was he started writing letters to his friends about a. one of the first to be wrote about it was benjamin franklin. one of the things that is great about doing research for this book, and i hope it comes across in reading it, is so much of these conversations are preserved in the correspondence between these people. and because he was in leeds and franklin was most of the time in london, a lot of their important conversations actually took place in forms that we can see the actual original words of.

and franklin wrote back to priestly after he got word of this experiment, and he took it to kind of the next level. he said that sounds like a rational system. it sounds like probably a system that happens on a kind of a global level. all around the world wiese and seen things like fire will purify water. and it probably makes sense that the earth need some kind of dish nature need some kind of mechanism for purifying the air so it would make sense that probably plans are doing it. so right there you see this collaboration between the two men were priestly has half of an idea and franken has the other have to kind of complete it. when you have those two ideas together, what you have is really i think one of the core beginning moments of the ecosystem's view of the world. the idea that we live in a connected web of life and energy of all these forces, we exist because other organisms are creating an atmosphere that we are able to thrive in. and it's incumbent upon us to recognize that connection and to preserve it and to safeguarded in many ways.

in fact, franklin and the very letter to get to that next that beyond just an ecosystem to almost the beginning of kind of green politics, which is he as a workable and what he says i hope this will temper the rage of late of people cutting down trees their houses because the trees are supposed to make the air unwholesome. in america, we have lots of trees, and where the hell these people that ever lived. something like that. so right there you can see not only is there this connected life on earth but we have to be careful about it, not just chop it all down. so right there is this extraordinary little exchange. and so i heard about this and the more i kind of red i thought this is a great story. and in the more i read about priestly, the more i realized that he was bound up in all these wonderful ways with the american founding fathers. in some ways, as i describe in the book, kind of this zelig of arlie american history just keeps showing up at all of these unusual points.

and get inmost account of this period, he is not talked about very much, or he is almost as kind of a photo. what ends up happening is he developed a number of other controversial ideas, very fluent to but also got a lot of people angry with him over the years. he moved up to birmingham, became part of the wonderful lunar society of there. and played a role in their kind of formation of the industrial revolution. was front of people like james watt. became a little bit more politicized, was one of the major supporters of the american cause. probably one of the two or three most vocal supporters in britain of the american cause in the revolutionary war. and was a supporter of the french revolution, which also made him an enemy of a number of folks in england at the time. and he cofounded the unitarian church in england. just as a kind of citing. and he had a number of radical religious views that were very controversial at the time. he had an event empiricists approach to the history of the

christian church. he did, he was a very devout man. he was krishan to the very end of his life. but believed that his vision of christianity was about the original words of jesus and the original message of jesus that had been kind of compromised by later scholars and overtime who had introduced all of these kind of supernatural distortions, as he said, to the christian tradition. and he wrote a number of books about this including a very influential in about the corruption of christianity which had huge impact on thomas jefferson. in fact, the final cut of tipping point decide to write this book was written to jefferson had ultimately credited priestly with keeping him a christian. and all the challenges, kind of config faith that jefferson had. when he would receive book he said this is my. this is my fate. this man understands this better than anyone opec so that was brought up this would be a real interesting project to go on.

so in doing all of these things, he basically offended a lot of people. by the early 1790s, he became in some ways the most hated man in all of england. and it eventually got so intense, you know, an old fashion angry mob came in burn his house down. and really set out to try to kill him. and ended up in the birmingham riots burned down about a dozen houses around birmingham. he managed to escape but never really felt safe again in england. and so in 7094, he set sail for america. and in doing that, he really cannot be rated one of the great amazing tradition of the american experts which was that he was kind of art first great scientist accepted he was the first kind of dissident scientist who decided to come to america to find a country where his ideas would be allowed to

develop unfettered by angry mobs and the state and the king. and so he got here and was greeted as a hero. you develop a friendship with adams when adams was in london. and he's been an lot of time in adams. is a funny sidenote were all the major founders kind of buy to get priestly to move to their part of the country. adams was like all the intellectuals live in boston. jefferson was like monticello, the climate is a would've a. to go back and forth. eventually decide to live in rural pennsylvania. which is an odd choice. he had his vision of kind of a utopian society that he was going to build in pennsylvania that did not pan out. but he moved there. he spent a lot of time in philadelphia. he initially was very close to adams, but he and adams had a little bit of falling out. then he got very close to jefferson. had a wonderful correspondence with jefferson. when adams got elected president and jefferson as vice president, when the rift develops between adams and jefferson, you know,

over a number of things, but largely over france, priestly decides to pretty much throw his lot in with jefferson. and he starts writing, having come to a mac you try and stay out of trouble, and he wasn't quite able to do. he starts writing some pamphlet kind of in support of jefferson and more specifically very critical of adams. he had a colleague at his pennsylvania named thomas cooper who wrote even more attacks on adams. so when the alien acts are passed, thomas cooper is actually a restive. is one of the few people arrested. priestly is put on the hit list of people who should be deported for their criticism of the adams administrations. is an extraordinary turning point in this country's history because right there you have this very important question about what kind of country are we going to be building here. what do we do with our dissenting intellectuals in this country priest at that point is probably the most prominent

scientist and theologian alive in the united states. he had the audacity to criticize the adams administrations and we all know from various forms how scandalous adams could be. and so there was this the questionable kind of country are we going to be. are we going to arrest and deport and incarcerate people like joseph breezy or are we going to let them right there pampas and argue it out in the public sphere? right there, and who is probably the contest of adams true feelings about alien tradition and it's true feelings about priestly and all of this. while he was famously combustible and thin-skinned, adams in this one point decide to blink and he advised his people cannot do anything with breezy picu said he is an old man living out in the woods and his influence is not with adams and his were. which if you look at all the evidence is clear that that was not true. he was enormously influential

writer and figure and he had the year of the vice president was at that point pretty much adams nemesis. so the whole question that is very priestly is very interesting when. my assessment of it based on what i read and what i look at is that is a case of just have a personal connection. he could not bring himself to bring the force of law on his old friend. but it is a hard one to call. so priestly is very picky dodges this board. and then several years later his jefferson is elected president. and one of the first things he does is he writes joseph breezy a letter. he gets word that person had been quite seriously ill in pennsylvania. and to one of his first written acts as president is to write priestly a letter. he writes an amazing letter you can read it in your entirety. i want to do. but it effectively is initially saying i've heard you were ill.

and i'm glad you are recovered. yours is one of the great, you know, lives that all thinking people want to see, continue. you were one of my great heroes. and then he goes on to talk about how horrible the adams administration had been an basically to apologize for priestly's treatment. and he talks about how the adams administration was all about looking backwards backward, not forward. it was against the innovation of science, that he and priestly understood that this was a forward-looking country it was not about the education of our ancestors, where is adams was all about that old stuff and they were about new stuff. and it's this great kind of trashing of adams for the goes on quite a while. and then he has this amazing kind of stirring passage, one of the most beautiful kind of optimistic things he ever wrote what i just want to be briefly. he was talking about how he feels now, now that the country has weathered the storm. and survived it and not chosen the path of deporting somebody like priestly. so he wrote this extraordinary

passage. as the storm is now subsiding, there may be some relevant to it today. as the storm is now subsiding, and the horizon becoming serene, it is pleasant to consider the phenomenon of contingent if we can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. for this whole chapter in the history of man is new. a great extent of our republic is new. its sparse habitation is new. the mighty weight of public opinion which has rolled over it is new. but the most pleasing novelty is it so quietly subsiding over such an extent service to its true level again. the order and good sense displayed in his recovery from delusion, and in the momentous crisis which lately arose, really do speak a strength of character in our nation which offers where did it republic and a much better satisfied out of its stability that i was before it was tried. >> that is the world politics as you'd from the eyes of a

rationalist, in a sense this the american experiment is literally an experiment to come and some level you have to run the data and see what happens and test it and test its release and its internal resiliency to see if it really works. he write this amazing letter. priestly dies about three years later. and one of his last messages he sent off to jefferson sank 12 mr. jefferson that i am not going to last much longer but i'm honored to die under his administration and in a country where i finally feel at home and in peace. though i am going to somewhere better. really just the very end. and in years past. eight years past. to the spirit, adams and jefferson famously don't talk to each other. old comradarie and friendship that has broken apart over things like alien tradition and things like priestly. they don't speak.

and in all of a sudden letters start to appear going back and forth between quincy and monticello and is the beginning of the famous adams jefferson correspondence. at those first letters a to go back and read them, they are very kind of delicate and tiptoeing. they don't really get into anything in substance. to old lies and got into a huge fight and our try to be out a way to talk to each other again. so they do it by talking about how my grandchildren they have. . .

all this trash about his administration. yet [laughter] and making him sound incredibly backwards and opposed to science and all these ways and you can imagine the response adams has said he fires off to monticello basically saying what is this letter! do you know of this letter? i have many more things to say about it but for now please acknowledge this letter. but of course it takes like 14 days for the letter to get there and adams can't sit around so he fires off like six more letters every day. and each one of them takes a little bit of the letter jefferson had written to priestley, a little paragraph or

quote and how dare you say that, that's ridiculous. and the first thing he starts with and this is one of the important lessons of the book all of the critiques jefferson has leveled against adams in this letter to the first thing he fires off is how dare you say i am resistant to the innovations of science? i never said anything like that and it goes against everything i believe and i demand proof why ever said anything like that when i was president. i think of all the accusations she's made the thing that hurts the most was this idea he was an antiscience president. eventually jefferson writes back this wonderful, calling, soothing note saying my dear friend, it was so long ago. but he kind of holds his own and says however i did have a point and there were many abuses mostly directed at my people, not your people, and it is through the exchange, that is the point conversations began between those men and they start talking about what the revolution meant, what the

constitution meant, what the american experiment stood for. why science had progressed so much faster than civil society and forms of government and with the world of technology was, the religious values priestly have mentioned and priestley is mentioned 52 times in the jefferson adams letters whereas franklin and hamilton are mentioned between them less than ten times, so you can see the impact it had. and in some ways he was the catalyst although he had been dead for eight years getting these two men to talk to each other in this amazing way and that turns into the great american political conversation we are going back and reading to this day. so he's everywhere through this story and all these unusual ways, and i think what i wanted to do in this book is go back and revive them a little bit. but also to look at the founders through this kind of outside ankle of priestly's life and values and when you look at

particularly at franklin and jefferson and some extent adams in the context of their collaborations and friendship with priestly i think what it tells is a couple of things. first is all these men really have a unified world view they did not believe it was possible or responsible to kind of compartmentalize the inside of science and advances of technology and new experiment in political life and religious life these things all existed like ecosystems and a connected wed and one had to be first in all of them and reach out and find connections and the informed life and educated life was about making those connections. and i start the book with a quote from an unnamed political candidate that i will name which is mike huckabee. in one of the debates from a year and a half ago, he was asked about his belief in evolution, and he said a telling a classic huckabee line and it was very funny that it had a

kind of telling subtext which is i'm actually kind of find it amusing i am being asked this question. i am being asked to be your president, not right in eighth grade science textbook and it was the kind of remark to be funny you had to go into it with a basic assumption the world of science is irrelevant to the world of being present and at some level if you had said i can't believe you're asking me about foreign policy i am not here to read a textbook about international affairs i just want to be president no one would have taken it, it wouldn't have made sense but it worked as a joke because we have this before some of us have this belief that science is for the guys in the lab coats and politics is somewhere else but if you think about all the issues that confront us today, with the energy issues and environmental issues that have come out of the tremendous changes that have come from computer science and form of the internet, stem cell research, general mix, everything we are understanding about the human

brain it's not that we need scientists presence but a basic level when you look at the story from this angle you have to see taking that kind of attitude isn't just irresponsible and it's not just antiintellectual

ha >> just picking up exactly where you left off, these -- it is not only science and politics that makes and there are many examples like einstein's politics and science, but also church/state specifically, using huckabee as your example here. what is your take on where these -- where priestly and jefferson, franklin stood on the church stage and what is your take on the evolution of that problem? >> that's a big question. so, i think they were all -- they all believe in the separation of those to. i think one of the things that comes out of this -- this story is how each in their way they

were very eclectic religious thinkers in their time, and it would be very hard for franklin or jefferson probably to run for president today with an open expression of their religious beliefs. franklin -- one of the things priestly says about franklin after he died he wrote in his journals he was a wonderful man one of my great friends but it's too bad he was a non-believer and you've got to love him. priestley is the most optimistic man who ever lived and he was always seeing the best in people as he was causing this controversy so frankland, he said, i think his problem was the reason he never saw the wisdom of being religious was that he just didn't have enough time to read some of the books i recommended. [laughter] and he kept giving him looks like you should read my volume on this and franklin was busy with other stuff, so, you know, jefferson called himself sector of one or whatever that quote is, so they were unusual

thinkers. but they brought was this assumption that it's not that science and politics and the kind of experimental method and all the things that started to happen with enlightenment were incompatible with faith but it was clear faith like politics was quick to have to be reinvented. it couldn't pretend as if nothing was happening over here. so they spent an immense amount of time particularly jefferson and priestly trying to figure out how to make it work given all the knowledge that was coming out of the sciences and that was the part of priestly's kind of intellectual world where he brought over this idea of there is some kind of early original truth to the christian tradition that's there that it's been covered over with these leaders. so it's not that -- it's not that you want to have, you know, state religion and they clearly wanted to have some kind of separation of church and state built into the structures that were there. but they did believe that the

kind of intellectual tools that had developed out of science and empirical study had to be directed towards people's religious belief as well and that was going to cause change and they would have to come up with new ways to think about god and priestly ultimately just decided the best expression of god's will on earth wasn't colin ghost or a resurrection, but rather the widening of understanding and that god was manifest in the world in the sense that cubans were getting to understand more and more of his creation for the march of science and understanding and that is what one should worship more than an icon or st. so they were radicals -- there are all these studies talking about what people would vote for and it's gotten much more progressive and people would be willing to elect a jewish president and we got over the catholic thing but to

this day most americans wouldn't vote for an atheist so that is by far and away the most forbidding thing, it's kind of the last thing in majority of the country feels comfortable saying no way to an atheist, which is a striking fact to this day. franklin would have had a hard time. fortunately he's not running today. thank you. great question. >> i was struck by something in your author's note, you were talking about connecting social history geology and disconnected sensibility runs against the greenup specialist intellectual culture it would have been second nature to priestly and others. that is exactly how it struck me because that is how i found out about priestly is eighth grade in a class that was canceled after a brief grade class had gone through core science where we had a social studies, english and science together and our teacher was a chemist and told us the great stories about

priestly. we did things like we reticle first raffles and looked at it from the scientific viewpoint is it possible they could exist and not just the satire and the english and the historical part but i am wondering is that because your interest in science and education i think is getting so specialized in all of these tests with no child left behind. is there a way in the way you envision it that children can get exposure to larger and more integrative kind things? >> that is five good questions in there. [laughter] and i will answer all of them. so, one of the things i try to do in the book though i didn't really talk about is there is a method in the book that is a little different it is belongs to approach. one of the questions in the book tries to ask why do intellectual breakthroughs have been? why do we have paradigm shift in

society and why is somebody like priestley involved in all of them at one given time? so there is part of the storytelling here which is this happened and this happened and then it ended and there is the kind of narrative but i think there is this equally important question of why did it happen. my argument here and this was the argument and post map and in a funny way everything bad is good for you and that is to answer the question why you have to work across different skills of experience, so the individual genius great man theory is not sufficient although priestley was undoubtably a great man and a genius and we should celebrate that and not throw that away. but we also have to look at lots of other different parts of the society and in fact parts of the society that work in different time skills so one theme of the book is how intellectual activity at any given time is shaped by the larger macroflow of energy through the society. so priestley literally lived off

of the stored energy the rebels being on least with the industrial revolution. he lived off of the kind of excess profits of these early industrialists and that was energy that had been trapped 300 million years ago during the carboniferous age caused in part by the buildup of oxygen in the atmosphere created by the plant's the priestley was the first person to understand, and so to explain why priestley at that moment had to talk about his life and his biography and his friends and information network and postal system and the carboniferous era because if you don't talk about all this on levels you haven't told the whole story. part of what i try to do in my work is make those connections and fun and interesting so the people do like that kind of perspective i think for kids this is the connection to the video game book is that way of thinking about the world is actually a wonderfully taught and some very popular games that are out there.

the game, "spore" as a seven year old ways this game and start as a single cell organism and evolves into a creature and build each flight and then a city and colonize a planet and develop technology that lets them go to other planets severe of thinking in placing this came across different levels of experience so that's the kind of mental exercise a seven-year-old is getting for fun as opposed to what i was doing when i was seventh which is watching the love boat on tv. [laughter] so there's opportunity to do it was like that to teach people to think across disciplines and scales so i'm hopeful for that. the other day i have a seven-year-old and 50 and two-year-old and the seven year old was playing soccer and i sat down with the five-year old and set your brother is playing soccer and i know you're jealous. what do you want to? he thought about it and said i think i would like to a science experiment. we are on the right track here, this is good but i made him play games anyway. [laughter]

>> in the late 18th century science was expensive and it was easier i suppose if you're an aristocrat and i wonder what really thought about whether he regarded this as not working in mysterious ways? >> yeah, that is a great question. so priestly's rival lewd kind fully identify and oxygen in the two different tests of how societies deal with scientists we passed by departing priestley and the french revolution didn't do quite as well by executing. i don't know. i don't remember him ever actually talking about the fact that @e was -- he had been a great supporter during that period there was the best fighting question of what was happening and france, and there is a famous exchange priestly had with adams over breakfast i to talk about in the book a little bit where adams asks priestly with his assessment was

of the french revolution and was it being derailed and was priestley as optimistic about and priestly who was quite old at this point, this is 7095 or 96, went on this long apocalyptic discussion that drew upon the book of revelation and a few other things and adams was like okay that's a weird explanation of it. [laughter] and it may be related to why he scared priestly and the alien and sedition controversy in part he might have thought that by kind of lost his mind a little bit. we don't need to rest him. he had this in his conversation with adams it's like it was going to work out fine and because of these predictions. >> i wish i could say i purchased and read your book purchase the but i did hear you on npr. you touched on something that

may have fueled priestley and how productive he was and the difference of where things were germinated instead of a pub it was a coffeehouse? >> exactly i am glad you brought that up. it is one of my favorite site stories. talk about the flow of energy through society. it's crucial to this story priestley and franklin met at a coffeehouse near st. paul. i went there just a while ago. there's no marker for it even though it's an amazing op-ed intellectual period although there is a starbucks near so that is part of it. it is crucial to the story and to waste. one, the coffeehouse was a melting pot where people from various backgrounds come together and trade ideas and hang out and talk so franklin had a group called the club of modest wages would get together and talk politics and electricity and chemistry and anything else they were interested in and it would go on for hours and hours, and a

remarkable number of key kind of innovations in british society during that period come out of coffee houses. the whole insurance business was built in wade's coffeehouse which became swedes of london because it was a place the ship captains could come together with the emerging businessmen thinking about insuring ships and things like that. so the coffeehouse culture has an interdisciplinary thinking and the space for it which was important but there's another important fact which is the actual drug caffeine being conveyed by this coffee because up until a century before, by far away the dominant dateline drug of choice for both mass and elite and england was alcohol, connecting to my last the water wasn't safe to drink. so it was a health decision, life decision and smart one given the options you could drink booze all day and people would break up that line and

start drinking beer. so think about how your life would be different and i hope this would be different from most of you if you woke up every morning and were like all right that was a good night's sleep i'm going to have my first beer. you have an entire culture that for centuries was strong all day. [laughter] so when he and coffee first came over and were incredibly expensive exotic things but there was so much demand the price drops over about a hundred years and it becomes a mass beveridge so it is not an accident the enlightened happened as coffey got introduced to this culture. you change the culture from a depressant to a stimulant and everybody changes over you're going to get smarter more alert people and better empirical science. it's just going to happen. so it is a funny little thing and those of you that know me personally know perhaps i am just justifying my habit but i do think there is evidence here.

>> i think that warren buffett owns more coca-cola than anyone and drinks about six a day. you kept mentioning that a polluting by product or accidental byproduct of photosynthesis was oxygen, but the accidental part is what i don't understand. neither theology nor science would come accidental. i know einstein said the harmony of natural all reveals intelligence that compared with all the systematic thinking and acting of mankind has been utterly insignificant reflection. i mean he thought it all made sense. we had to discover the sense. theology at its highest level would say the same thing. isn't that -- isn't accidental. oxygen is and occidental and as you describe the linkage, the linkage isn't accidental. i had a scientist tell me recently that a problem with most people's world view is they

do not consider that the future -- they consider that the future is something that happens to them, not something that they create. and i am just focusing on that accidental part. i don't think -- >> yeah, i think there is a lot to what you say. the way i would phrase it is in the long run nature has a way of turning accidents into more accidents and useful things and making it seem like it had a purpose. if you give enough evolutionary time that someone will figure out a way to make the substance useful we have skeletons because our cells what excrete calcium as a waste product that wasn't useful so the calcium started to build up and over evolutionary time organism's said i could build a backbone out of that and that would be useful.

part of the beauty and majesty looking at life this way is the pollution and the accident turns into a way of making a living for other organisms on line. so i think in that long scale perspective i agree all of these things come around but on the other hand it didn't have an adaptive purpose for the organism at that particular time it was expelling oxygen and the important thing is what was doing with water and carbon dioxide. >> [inaudible] -- it's chaotic and accidental fry limited perspective, and its -- which is the ecosystem story you give, loved your book. >> thank you. i think it looks like we have time for two more questions if that is what we have right here that would be perfect. by the way, looking at my clock here, i'm not checking my mail just so you know. [laughter] >> i'm curious about priestly's intention so to speak of unitarianism in england. having been a practice unitarian for many years i have ever heard

or read anything of that or never studied him or been in any kind of study group and i just wondering where you came across in your own studies and why there isn't this connection or if there is a connection why is in a more universally known? i've been a unitary and since i lived in massachusetts. i was a member in the old church of boston in cape cod so i consider myself well known in unitarianism and i am amazed i haven't heard of him. >> really good question i am just starting to get asked questions and that is one that has come up once or twice. can i ask you a question? have you heard of lindsey who is the guy that started the church with him? so i think that the proper way to describe is lindsey was the one who founded the english kind of unitarian church and priestly helped him and kind of wrote about it and publicized so

lindsey is the central figure with priestly helping him, but i think part of the problem here is what you're saying about the history of unitarianism is true a lot of other things about priestley. is amazing how he is mentioned in the classic recent accounts of the founding fathers. and he's barely mentioned in mccaul's book about adams. it's a fabulous book but the impact of the letters it is just an extraordinary thing. and i think part of the problem with priestly is because he was so diverse and his interest and played a role in so many things he paid the cost of specialization when you specialize in one thing you get famous and become the renowned expert were as priestly was spread across a lot of different disciplines so his historical legacy suffered because he had a hand in so many things but i need to look more into that question because i think it's a

really interesting one. okay last question. >> thanks for a great book and a great discussion. the question i have goes to something you brought up earlier and that is innovation. several weeks ago we had an author here that said some innovators don't deserve all lot of credit because they are standing on the shoulders of everybody that went before i use bill gates as an example. >> was this glad well. [laughter] >> so the question for you is in your book you talked about thomas kuhn and his book on paradigm shifts, and it seemed to me you were leaning towards the idea that there are sparkplug people and paradigm shift is really happen and that somehow maybe people like priestley really do deserve to be seen in the light is different than simply falling on step by step and what went before them.

>> yeah, if i would say that. i think there is a lot of -- it's interesting i don't know if this is now kumquat well but there's been this interesting overlap in our approaches in this book and i think that malcolm -- this commonality in the way we approach things on a number of levels. in my mind, what happens is when you have period with radical change if you think of the medical metaphor in different scales everything from accidents of biography, and even genius all the way down to the carboniferous coal deposits under the society my hunch and i've only applied this approach in a couple of case studies when we have period of great breakthrough and this is true in the case of cholera and 1854 in the last book what's often happening is in a sense all of those kind of layers are stacking up and aligning in some way, so you do have a great genius. you have priestley, john snow,

and the right moment and technological history and priestly needed the tools he was using. if an air pump hadn't been invented 100 years before he wouldn't be able to do what he was doing. if he hadn't had the carboniferous layer fueling and thumping his innovations he would have had a hard time doing what he was doing so it's not that the great man or genius or woman is irrelevant. they have to be part of the story and i hope it is one of the things that comes across in the book is that priestly is an amazing guy and hearing about him as an individual is amazing that it's more than that so it's not to discount the genius but to say there are these kind of historical layers that support was up these points and to understand why things happen we have to be able to understand all of them and that is an idea princely would have appreciated. thank you very much. thank you. appreciate it. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] >> stephen johnson is the author of several books including the ghost map and everything that is good for you. for more information about stephen johnson, visit his web site at stevenerlinjohnson.com.