c-span.org/vocal content. >> steven johnson recounts the life of scientific theologian, joseph priestley, who died february 6th 1804. joseph priestley discovered oxygen and played a key role in the founding of the unitarian church. this is a little under an hour. ..

always works really well, you know, when you start iaea this is the first book that i've written about this period in american and british history and the founding fathers and on the one hand it's very promising because a lot of people are interested in this topic as you know, and on the other hand if it doesn't go well you are on that track towards being a founding father impersonator. i may be wearing a wig or something like that. at the franklin institute for i will be on friday night philadelphia, a few months ago ibis walking in the door and there was an actual ben franklin impersonator and franklin is a huge figure in this book and i spend a lot of time reading these letters between franklin and priestly so when you walk in the door and there's been franklin, so i introduced myself and said i just wrote a book

about you and he was totally in character and said well priestley and i need many years ago 1765i believe so i'm not going to do any more impressions, but that may be in my future. i'm going to tell you a little bit about how i got to this story. i wrote two books about video games and pop culture and then went to the next logical thing which is 19th century cholera. [laughter] now i figured the only thing more excited is 18th-century chemistry. i was going to write about a bigger book which i think i'm still going to write about innovation and the spread of ideas. and one of the things i have been writing and thinking a lot about is ecosystems and how the metaphor of the ecosystem is

useful to think about the way information flows through the society, and was a theme that showed up a little bit in the last book and so i was kind of research and back into the ecosystem science reading little bit about it for ideas and i stumbled across this story about joseph priestley and i had known a little bit about priestley. like most people i heard about him as the guide the discovered oxygen for the first time and for those of you that know the story of how to change the book that is his reputation. it's a little bit strange because he didn't actually do it first and he kind of got it wrong in some fundamental ways but for some reason that is the line that has stuck with them and that is the first sentence of his britannica in triet wikipedia is that he was the guy that discovered oxygen. but i found out this other interesting thing about about him which i do think he deserves a lot more credit for in this book gets kind of e evangelizing this one discovery of his career

which is he 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 the science and that period. the whole question of investigating air as a problem that science should wrestle with is something that took a long time for people to realize and if you think about it you look around yourself and see lots of things that are probably worthy of studying. there's people in their bodies and matter and trees out there and clouds in the sky and all that kind of stuff, but the invisible space between us all didn't occur to anybody to be that interesting for a period of time and wasn't really until the 1600's when people first proved that there was this thing and tinier called vacuums' where there had been pulled out of the space and it became it is dingley different from traditional air.

camel's wouldn't leave for instance, bill splintering. people started to think their must be this invisible substance that's floating around that we can't see but somehow it is worthy of study. for the 1700's people started to think of was composed of different gases it wasn't just one single unified thing and that was about where the study of nematic chemistry was when priestley got interested in it. now, priestley was very classic enlightenment your figure. he had no training in anything. he'd come out of a dissenting religious background, had written an early influential book on linguistics, kind of radical linguistics. in fact he charted this path of radical politics and radical linguistics that basically noam chomsky would end up doing 200 years ago. no one else has quite done that combination since or before. and he started dabbling in a whole number of fields who got interested in electricity.

he met in franklin in 1765, crucially at a coffeehouse in london when franklin used to hang out and he used to write a book about electricity it yet he had this idea of these amazing discoveries were having a field of electricity people in their labs could do these interesting experiments so he wrote this book on the history of electricity which invented the whole genre of popular science writing which is kind of how i make my living now so i am indebted in that sense and it was important because it was

important one in the sense that it was about spreading of the ideas and getting ordinary people involved in scientific research and teaching the magic of all the stuff that happened but it was important also that it created this extraordinary friendship between franklin and priestley that lasted many years and shaped both of their lives in crucial ways and one of the interesting footnotes is the book on electricity is the first place anyone had publicly written about his famous experiment with a kite so that classic school kid image we have been franklin great pioneer the kite flying with the lightning storm comes from joseph galvin. that's a great story i'm going to write a book that talks about that. so, priestley developed his friendship and he then got interested in this question of air and gases and one of the reasons he got interested in it is that he accidentally moved in

next door to a brewery. we will talk about his religious life, but he was a minister and as well as a pioneer chemist handling withstand political radical the townspeople were back in the day someone said reading about this book they thought what if i had done what my life what this guy has accomplished. so he had gotten a gay as a minister in a church -- to the move into this house that was adjacent to the brewery and ever inquisitive he kind of walked over and started investigating and he noticed the of these giant vats of the year that were brewing and he saw this kind of gas coming off the liquid and he thought this is going to be a good place to do experiments, and so he asked to the proprietors if you would be alright if he could do a little work over the year and i love that image of just this kind of

eccentric minister comes over to the brewery and open up a little lab. one of the things he does, one of the early experiments he does is starts pouring water back and forth over the brewing beer and accidentally in vince soda water. he passes it back and forth and creates a carl fizzy carbonated water and sense of letters to everyone about it. i invented this wonderful wv is delightful. if you put a little juice in it its -- he almost invented the wine cooler. [laughter] he thought for a while it was going to fight scurvy but they didn't have anything to do with scurvy said that was a false lead but he was typical of priestley with anyone who was interested in listening to them. he had almost to a fault of interest in making any money or keeping anything proprietary in

anything that he did which put him in a situation he was trying to find support for his work. a few years later a certain johann patented his water and did it better since we are still paying royalties on my to this day anytime you have a gin and tonics. so he was very much about the kind of open flow of ideas and the shared the value. at a certain point it leads in 1771 he got interested in this problem of their and plants and he had known for a long time, everyone knew for a long time if you took an organism a mouse as he did many times, and in a sealed vessel of some kind of a certain point the creature would run out of air and go into convulsions and eventually die if you didn't open up and let more air in there.

they didn't understand why that was happening. they didn't understand of the mouse was poisoning the environment or something about the limited space. they didn't understand entirely. but priestley's memory trapping little spiders and watching them body in the class which nowadays would get you put into some kind of a remedial for troubled children but back in the day it was the sign of a budding genius so they did not about this and then he had this idea which no one seems to have had before that which is what would happen if you plant in a similar situation? and so, he took all little plant from his garden and pretty much everything he did was stuff that you could do in your own kitchen. he did all these experiments pretty much in a big laundry sink that he had stolen from his wife and with going to the kitchen and steel beer glasses. they would pull these mant plants out of the garden and he

isolated the mant plant, sealed it up and then, you know, went away and waited for it to donley and would come back day after day and week after week and it kept growing said he thought that's puzzling. so then he had this idea f-35 from the experiments that if you lay a candle on the vessel which he would do with a little when is he would concentrate and light the candle inside of the vessel and burn all the oxygen out of a vessel and then almost instantly the mouse would die because there's nothing to brief and at that point would be impossible to light the candle again because there is no air. he thought i'm going to try that again with the plant. succumb he isolated the little bit of mant and lit the candle from the outside, burn all the oxygen and put it down and waited to see what would happen and the days passed and the plant seemed fine and continue to grow and roots started to

appear. two weeks later he went back and tried to light the candle and the candle lit. a low flame appeared. so there had been no compostable a year before. all of that had been burned out and without any new air coming in that era had been created. somehow the plant was creating that compostable air. in that little vessel in that little kind of globe with his plant was a clue to how a local plan that involved in the history of life on this planet because the natural levels of oxygen on earth before the plants involved was something like less than 1%. we do not have a big bubble of oxygen around us because that is the kind of inmate state of the earth. we have the because billions of years ago plants evolved and the strategy of extracting energy from the sun we call photosynthesis have a waste product called oxygen and overtime the oxygen bulbous photosynthesis became so successful and so many organisms

spread around the globe. over time the bubble grew until they reached the point of remarkable stabilization which is a whole other scientific story of about 20% and this was initially the world's greatest pollution crisis. oxygen is a deadly chemical so there's all these organisms that died without oxygen and was a horrible but to real holocaust but over time organisms evolved lifting of oxygen and lived because of this invention of air and millions of years ago as an accidental byproduct of photosynthesis and that is what joseph priestley was seeing here but what is wonderful about the story is he didn't fully realize it. he knew there was something interesting happening so what he did is he started writing letters to his friends about it and one of the first people he wrote was benjamin franklin and

what's great about doing research in this book and i hope this comes across in reading it is so much of these conversations are preserved in the correspondence and because franklin was most of the time in london, a lot of their important conversations actually took place in forums so we can see the actual original words, and franklin wrote back to priestley after he got this experiment and he took it to the kind of next level. he says that sounds like a rational system. it sounds like a system that happens on the kind of a global level. all around the world we've seen things like fired will purify water and it makes sense the earth needs, the nature need some kind of mechanism for purifying air so it would make sense if plants are giving it, and so right there you see this collaboration between the two men where he has half of the mit and franklin has the other half that kind of completes it. when you have the two ideas together when you have is i

think one of the corps' beginning moments of the ecosystem view of the world. the idea that we live in a connected web of life and energy in all these forces that we exist because of the organisms are creating an atmosphere that we are able to thrive in and that it's incumbent on us to recognize the connection and preserve it and safeguard its and franklin in that letter to get to the next step beyond the ecosystems to the beginning of the green politics which he has a wonderful line where i hope this will temper the rage of fleet of people cutting down trees near houses because they are supposed to make the air on hosam to read in america we have a lot of trees and we are the healthiest people that ever lived and so right there you can see not only is there this connected web of life on earth but we've to be careful about it and not just top it all down. right there is this extraordinary exchange and so i heard about this and i thought

this is a great story. the more i read the more i around kuwait realized he was bound up in these ways with the american founding fathers and in some ways as i describe in the book, he was kind of this zelig of early american history. he keeps showing devotees unusual points yet in most accounts of the period he's almost just kind of a foot note and wooden said happening to see defaults a number of other controversial ideas that were influential but got a lot of people angry with him over the years. he moved to birmingham and became a part of the wonderful society of their and played a role in that kind of formation of the industrial revolution conference with people like james watt, became ill but more politicized and was one of the major supporters of the american cause, probably one of the three or four most in the american cause in the revolutionary war and was a supporter of the french revolution which also

made a number of folks in england at that time and co-founded the unitarian church in england just as a kind of slide thing and he had a number of radical religious views that were very controversial with the time. he had a kind of interest approach to the history and this is a fascinating combination was a christian to the 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 come to the kind of compromise by scholars overtime who introduced all these supernatural distortions as he said to the christian tradition and he wrote a number of books about this including an influential one about the corruption of christianity which had a huge impact on thomas jefferson, and in fact the final tipping point in my head about the deciding to reduce because the jefferson had ultimately credited priestley with keeping

him a christian. when he read the books about the corruption of christianity he said this is mine. this is my faith, this man understands us better than anyone else, so that is my thought this is an to be interesting project to go on. so in doing all these things he basically funded a lot of people by the early 1790 he became in some ways the most hated man in all of england and eventually got so intense and old-fashioned in fremont burned his house down and set up to try to kill him and ended up in the birmingham riots with a dozen houses around birmingham he managed to escape but never really felt safe again in england. so in 79 before he set sail for

america. and in doing that, he really inaugurated a great, one of the great amazing traditions of the american experience which is that he was kind of the first great scientist exile who was the first great 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 said he got here and was greeted with as a hero and spent quite a bit of time in a funny little site know where all of the major founders kind of by to get priestley to move to their part of the country. adams was like all of the intellectuals live in boston and jefferson is like monticello the climate is so wonderful to go back and forth and eventually decides to live in rural pennsylvania which is an odd choice he had a vision of the kind of utopian society he was going to build in pennsylvania that didn't pan out.

but he spent a lot of time in philadelphia, and he was very close to adams but he and adams had a little bit of a falling out and got very close to jefferson and have a wonderful correspondence and when adams got elected president and vice president and the rift develops between adams and jefferson and largely over france priestly decides to pretty much throwing with jefferson and he starts writing having come to america to try to stay out of trouble he wasn't quite able to do that so he starts writing some pamphlets conditions for the jefferson and more explicitly with critical adams he had a colleague on pennsylvania thomas cooper who wrote even more the tree all like a tax on adams. so when the alien and sedition acts or past, thomas cooper is arrested, one of the few people arrested in the alien and sedition, and priestley is the

on the hit list of people who should be deported for their criticism of the adams administration, and it's an extraordinary turning point in history because right there you have a very important building here with with our dissenting intellectuals in this country. priestley at this point was the most prominent scientist and theologian in the united states and had the audacity to criticize the adams administration and we all know from the various forms how he could be, and so there was this big question of what kind of country are we going to be. are we going to arrest and deport and incarcerate people like joseph priestley or are we going to let them write their pamphlets and argue it out in the public sphere so right there he was probably the biggest kind of test of adams true feeling about the alien and sedition and priestley in all this and he was fiercely combustible and thin

skinned, adams and this one point decided to bling and he advised his people to not do anything with priestley putative he said he's an old man living out in the woods and his influence is not an atom in this world. which if you look at all the evidence is clear that that wasn't true. he was enormously influential and had the year of the vice president who was up that point pretty much his nemesis. so the whole question about why adams scared priestley is a very interesting one to get my assessment of it based on what i've read and what i've looked at is the personal connection he couldn't bring himself to bring the force of law on this old friend but it's a hard one to call. priestley this spirit and the dodgers this bullet and then several years later jefferson is elected president and one of the first things he does his rights joseph priestley a letter and

he's quite seriously ill in pennsylvania so one of his first written acts as president is to write a letter and he writes an amazing letter you should read it in its entirety. i will do that, but it effectively is saying i heard you were ill, and i'm glad you are recovered. yours is one of the great lives that all thinking people want to see continue. you are one of my great heroes. then he goes on to talk about how horrible the atoms of penetration has been and basically to apologize for the treatment, and he talks of how the adams administration was all about looking backwards, forwards, it was against the innovation of science that he and priestley understood that this was a forward looking country and it wasn't about the education of our ancestors where adams was all about that and the word about new stuff and it's this great kind of trashing of

atoms and increasing of priestley that goes on for quite awhile and then he has this amazing passage, one of the most beautiful optimistic things he ever wrote which i just want to read briefly which he was talking about how he feels now that the country has weathered the storm and survived it and not chosen the path of departing someone like priestley said he wrote this extraordinary passage as the storm is now subsiding and i'm not going to say much about the politics in this room but i think there's some relevance today. as the storm is now subsiding and the horizon is becoming serene it is pleasant to consider the phenomenon of the attention. we can no longer say there's nothing new under the sun. for the whole chapter in history of man. the great extent of the republic is new. the spurs habitation is new, the way of the public opinion which has rolled over is new but the most pleasing novelty is it is subsiding over such an extent of the service to its true level again.

the order and good sense displayed in this recovery from the delusion and the momentous crisis that rose to speak of the strength of character in a nation that offers well for the duration of the republic. and i am much better satisfied now with its stability than i was before it was tried. that is the world of politics viewed from the enlightenment rationalist. the american experiment is literally a nexrad coming in on some level, you have to run the data and see what happens and tested and tested resilience and its internal stability to see if it really works so he writes this amazing letter to the speed lies about three years later and she sent off a message to mr. jefferson say i'm not going to last much longer or dalia under his administration i'm going to finally feel at home and peace or in going to somewhere better.

and in years past. eight years past and through this period adams and jefferson don't talk to each other and it's an old, dirty and friendship that is broken apart over things like alien and sedition and priestley. they don't speak and then all of a sudden letters start to appear going back and forth and it's the beginning of the famous adams jefferson correspondence, but the first letters if you go back and read them, they are very kind of delicate and tiptoe. they don't really get into anything of substance. its old line to have gotten into a huge fight and we're finding a way to talk to each other and talking about how many grandchildren they have and how's the weather down there. that letter got here in 11 days. the was very fast. how long did my letter take? they are all kind of nerds in this way. there is a mur quality to this

and so, they start this kind of delicate conversation, and then a book is published in england. it's a book of the reverend mincy's letters from the guy that co-founded the unitarian church in england, and it's his correspondence and it includes a letter written from jefferson to priestley from 1801 and somehow this book travels across the atlantic across massachusetts into the hands of john adams who reads this letter that jefferson had written to priestley talking all this trash about his administration and making him sound incredibly backwards and in post as finance and mention the response that adams has and fires of dismissive to monticello. what is this letter. t know if it is a distance i have many more things to say

about it but let now acknowledge this. of course it takes like 14 days for the letter to get down there and adams can't sit around so he fires off six more letters every day and each one of them takes a little bit of the letter that was written to priestley and says how dare you say that? that's ridiculous. the first thing he starts with and this is one of the important lessons of the book. of all of the critiques jefferson leveled against adams the first thing he fires off is how dare you say that i'm resistant to the innovation of science i've never said anything like that it goes against everything i believe and i demand proof and i never said anything like that when i was president. you think right there that all of the accusations that he's made and the thing that hurt the most is this idea that he's an antiscience president. even chollet jefferson writes back this wonderful combing and soothing note saying my dear

friend that was so long ago but he holds his own and says however i did have a point and there were many abuses directed to my people, not your people, and its true that exchange that's the point when the conversation begins between the two men and they start talking about the revolution meant, with the constitution meant, what is good for, why science had progressed so much faster than the civil society and forms of government, what the role of technology was, the religious values there mentioned 52 times in the jefferson adams letters and less than 20 times, stephen c. the impact and he is the calculus although he had been dead for eight years getting these men to talk to each other and for the conversation they are still going back reading to this day. so he's everywhere.

he's fought with this story in all these unusual ways, and i think what i wanted to do in this book is the back and revive them a little it. but also to look at the founders through this outside angle of his life and values. when you look at particularly franklin and jefferson and some extent adams in the context of their collaborations i think what it really offers is a couple things. first, all of these men had a unified world view. they didn't believe was possible or responsible to kind of compartmentalize the inside of science and advances in technology and the new experiments in political life and religious life that these things all existed like ecosystems in a kind of connecting to web and one had to be reached out and find connections and the informed of life, the educated life was about making those connections, so i start the book with a quote

from an unnamed political candidate i will mean for you which is mike huckabee. in one of the dates from a year and a half ago, he was asked about his belief in evolution. a classic huckabee of line is very funny and had a kind of telling subtext that said i'm kind of finding an amusing i'm being asked this question. i'm asking to be a president i'm not writing to ask a textbook. it was the context to find it funny you to go into the wall of silence irrelevant to the world being present. and on some level if you had said -- if he said i can't believe you are asking about foreign policy i'm not here to read a textbook about international affairs i just want to be president it wouldn't have made any sense that somehow it worked as a joke because we have this kind of believe for some of us have this belief that science is just for the guys in the lab coats and politics is

somewhere else but if you think about all the issues that confront us today and all the issues that have come out of the tremendous changes that have come from computer science and the internet, stem cell research, genomics, everything we understand about the human brain it's not that we need to have scientists presence, but on some basic level when you look at the story from this angle you have to say taking that kind of attitude is not just irresponsible and it's not just antiintellectual it is on a fundamental level. so i want to take us back to this period and say these are our roots. this is the sensibility the country cannot of, and we need to return to them because these are the values that made these people so inspiring and i hope they continue to inspire us in this way today. that is my cash -- shpeal.

[applause] >> there are a lot of themes and things i didn't talk about. i would love to get into any of this, so please come up and ask a question to the microphone so that it will play forever on television. no pressure. >> picking up exactly where you left off. it's not only science and politics that mix, and there are many examples of that like einstein politics but also church/state specifically and what is your take on where the to the caprice and jefferson and jefferson stood on the church-state and what is your take on the evolution of the

problem? >> it's a big question. i think they were all -- they all believed in the separation of the two. i think one of the things that comes all of this story is how each in their way more feria eclectic religious thinkers in their time and it would be very hard for franklin are jefferson to run for president today with an open expression of their religious beliefs. franklin -- one of the things he says about franklin after he died, he wrote in his journal he said he was a wonderful man one of my great friends it's too bad he was in on the lever. and you have to love priestley because she may be the most optimistic man who ever lived and was seeing the best in people as he was causing the controversies of franklin, he said i think his problem was the reason he never really saw the wisdom of being religious was

that he just didn't have enough time to read the books i recommended. you should read my volume on this. and jefferson called himself one so they were unusual and what they brought to it was this assumption not it's not that science and politics and the experimental method of imperialism and all of the things that started to happen at the enlightenment were incompatible with faith but it was possible that faith like politics would have to be reinvented. you couldn't pretend nothing was happening over here. and so, they spend an immense amount of time particularly jefferson and priestley trying to find out how to make it work given all of the knowledge that was coming out of the sciences, and that was the part of priestley's kind of intellectual world where he brought over this idea of some kind of early original trip to the christian

tradition that's been kind of covered over with these players. so it's not that you want to have a state religion, and they clearly wanted to have some kind of separation of church and state building to the structures that were there but they do believe that the kind of intellectual tools that have developed out of science and the empirical study had to be directed towards people's religious beliefs as well and i was going to cause change and they would have to come up with new ways to think about god, and he just ultimately decided the best expression of god's will wonder if is not just the holy ghost or resurrection but rather the widening of understanding and god was kind of manifest in the world in the sense that humans were getting to understand more and more of the creation through the march of science and understanding and that is what one should worship more than an icon. so, they were radical and these

different ways but i think they did believe in that separation and it would be very hard to -- all these studies talk about what people would vote for, different religious sectors would vote for and it's gotten much more progressive and people would elect a jewish president where they wouldn't have been and we got over the catholic thing and all that kind of stuff but to this day most americans wouldn't vote for an atheist and so, that is by far and away the most fervid to -- forbidden to read a majority of the country feels comfortable saying no way to an atheist which is striking so franklin would have had a hard time. >> i was struck by something in your authors note you are talking about connecting social history, chemistry media ecosystem from science, geology in the connect of responsibility against the grain of the specialized intellectual culture it would have been sick and nature. that is exactly why -- it struck

me because that's how i found out about priestley in the class that was canceled after our eighth grade class had gone through core science where we had the social studies, english and science together and the teacher was a chemist and told us these great stories about priestley, and we did things like red bolivar's truffles and from the scientific point is it possible they could exist and not just of the satire and the historical part but i wonder is that because your interest in science and education i think is getting so specialized is there a way that you envision that children can get exposure to the larger and more integrated kinds of things >> fifer good questions in their and i will answer all of them.

one of the things i try to do in the book, there's an added to the book that is different in the sense that this is what i've called and the various context of the approach which is when you try to ask -- one of the questions of the book tries to ask why do intellectual breakthroughs happen and why is somebody like priestley involved in so many of them at one time? so there is part of the storytelling here which is this happen and this happened and this haven't but there is equally important why did it happen? and my argument here and this was the argument in post map in a funny way in everything that is good for you as well is to answer the question of why so the individual genius been great man theory isn't sufficient although he was on doubly a great man and a genius in these different ways 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 often work in different time scales, so one theme of the book is how intellectual activity is shaped by the larger macroflow of energy through society, and so priestley literally lived off the energy the was being on least with the industrial revolution and he moved to birmingham off the excess profits of the early industrialists and that was energy that had been tracked 300 million years ago during the carboniferous age which was caused in part by the buildup of oxygen and the atmosphere created by the plants that speed was the first person to understand and so to explain why priestley at that moment you have to cut the lead his life and biography and his friends and the information network and the postal system and the carboniferous era because if you don't talk about the different levels you haven't told the whole story, so part of what i try to do with my work is to

make the connections and make some fun and interesting so people have that kind of lightening perspective i think for kids this is the connection to the video games book is that way of thinking about the world is actually a wonderfully taught in some very popular games that are not there, so the game spore that as a seven-year-old plays this game and start as a single cell organism and devolve into a creature and pulled a tribe and a city and, as a planet and develop technology that lets them go to other plants so they're thinking and planning on the experience, so that's the exercise, the kind of mental exercise the seven year old is getting for fun as opposed to the legs during which is watching the love boat on tv so it and there's opportunities to use tools like that to get people to think across the disciplines so i'm hopeful for that. the other day i have a seven-year-old and five googled anitere-year-old.

the seven year old was playing soccer and i sat with the five-year-old and said europe brother is playing soccer in your jobless. we can do anything. he felt about it and said i think i would like to do science experiment to get okay. we are on the right track here. but i met him play games anyway. [laughter] >> even the late 18th century science was expensive and it was easier suppose if you were an aristocrat. i wonder if it is known what he thought about the guillotine whether he regarded this as working in mysterious ways. >> that's a great question to the key was priestley's rifle who really did kind of fully identify and name oxygen who in the two different tests of how the societies deal with other scientists we pass buy not departing priestley and the french revolution didn't do quite as well by executing. you know, i don't know. i don't remember him ever actually talking about the fact.

he had been a great supporter and during that time there was the kind of mr. fight question of what is happening in france and there's a famous exchange that priestley had with adams over breakfast and i talked about in a clear he asked his assessment was of the french revolution and was it really being derailed and was he as optimistic about it and priestley was quite old at this point because this was 179-5496 and apparently went on this long apocalyptic discussion and a few other things and adams was kind of like okay, that is a weird explanation of bet to discuss it. and it may be why he scared priestley in the controversy. in part he might have thought life and he's kind of lost his mind a little bit. we don't need to arrest him. so, but he had this in his conversation with adams it's like a was going to work out

fine and because of these predictions he thought was going to work out fine and he was still optimistic about that part by don't know how he connected. i don't know the answer to that. yeah? >> i wish i could safely kafka by purchase your book and read it thoroughly but i did hear you on npr. [laughter] you touched on something that may have fuelled priestley and how productive he was and the difference of where things were germinated and it was a coffeehouse. >> i'm glad you brought that out. it's one of my sight stories to talk about the flow of energy. it's crucial to the story that priestley and franklin met at a coffeehouse near st. paul. i went there just a while ago, no marker for the veterans this kind of set of intellectual activity although there is a star looks quite near. but it's crucial to the story and the coffeehouse was a kind

of intellectual melting pot where people from the various backgrounds would come together and try ideas and hang out and talk some franklin had a group called the club of honest wigs are the what about religion into electricity and hemisphere and anything else they were interested in and go on for hours and hours and hours. a remarkable number of key innovations in the british society in a period come out of the coffee houses. the whole insurance business was invented in appellate's coffeehouse because it was a place where they could come together the kind of emerging business thinking about insuring ships and things like that. so the coffeehouse culture as a place of interdisciplinary thinking and an actual physical space for it is very important, but there's another important fact which is the actual drug caffeine being conveyed because up until a century before, by far and away the dominant

daytime drug of choice for both mass and elite in england was alcohol connecting to my last book the water wasn't safe to drink, so it was a health decision, lifestyle, it was a smart one given the options. you just drink booze all day and people would start drinking beer. and so, you know, think about how your life would be different and i hope this would be different for most of you if you woke up every morning and you were like that was good. i'm going to have my first beer. so you have an entire culture for many centuries just drunk all day. so when he and coffee first came over and were incredibly expensive and exotic but there was so much demand, the price drops in this extraordinary way about 100 years and becomes a kind of mass beveridge and it is not an accident that the enlightenment happened as coffey got introduced in this culture, you change the culture from 8%

to a stimulus and you were going to get better science. it's just going to happen. so it's a funny little fema and those of you who know me personally know how much coffee i drink. perhaps science is justifying my habit but i think there is evidence here. >> i think that war in buffett owns more coca-cola than anybody else. you kept mentioning that a polluting by product or accidental byproduct of the voters in this is less oxygen. but the accidental part is what i don't understand. i know that neither the novelty nor science would call that accidental. einstein said the harmony of the natural law repeals intelligence of such superiority that compared of a systematic thinking and acting of mankind has been utterly insignificant reflection. he thought it all made sense we had to discover this.

the theology at its highest level would say the same thing. isn't that it isn't occidental. oxygen is in the accidental and as you would describe the linkage of the progress isn't accidental. i have a scientist tell me recently that a problem with most people's moral view is that they do not consider that the future, they consider the future is something that happens to them not something that they create and i'm just focusing on that accidental part. >> i think there's a lot to what you say. the way that i would phrase it is in the long run the nature has a way of turning accidents and to non-accidents into useful things and making it seem like it had a purpose. if you give it enough evolutionary time that someone will figure out a way to make the substance useful we have

skeletons because ourselves we would excrete calcium as a product. calcium started to build up and over evolutionary time, we -- and organisms that i can build a backbone of that and that would be useful. so part of the duty of looking at life in this way and the majesty of looking at it in this way, the pollution and the accident turns into a way of making a living for other organisms down the line. so i think in that long scale high degree of these things come around but on the other hand, it didn't have an adaptive purpose for the organism at a particular time it was expelling oxygen. the important thing is what i was doing with water. >> it's too short to read its chaotic and accidental fry very limited perspective and its and ecosystem story that you did. loved the book. >> it looks like we have time

for two more questions. that would be perfect. i'm looking at my clock and not checking my mail just so you know. [laughter] >> i'm curious about priestley's reinventions of the unitarianism in england. having been a privacy unitarian for years simony is i've heard of it and never read anything, never studied him work than in any kind of study group and i am just wondering what you came across in your own studies and why there is in this connection or if there is a connection why isn't it more universally known? i've been a libertarian since 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'm just amazed i haven't heard of them. >> really good question. and as i said, it's pretty young, that is one that has come up once or twice. can i ask a question? had you heard of lindsey who

started the church with him? so, i think that lindsey is the way that founded the english unitarian church, and priestley helped him and so he's kind of the central figure with priestley holding him but i think part of the problem here is what you are saying about the history of unitarianism it is true of a lot of other things about priestley. it's amazing how rarely he is mentioned in the kind of classic accounts of the fathers and he is barely mentioning in the book about adams it's a fabulous book in pact of the letters it's just an extraordinary thing. and i think part of the problem with priestley is because he was so diverse and his interest and played a role on so many things,

he paid the cost of the kind of specialization and a specialist on the new gear famous and become the renowned expert in this one thing whereas priestley was spread across a lot of discipline and so his kind of historical legacy suffered because he had a hand in so many different things. i need to look a little bit more into that question because i think it is a really interesting one. okay, last question. >> thanks for a much regret and a great discussion. the question that i have goes to something that you brought up earlier and that is innovation. several weeks ago we had an author that said some innovators don't deserve a lot of credit because they are standing on the shoulders of everybody that went before. you use bill gates as an example the question for you is in your book you talked about thomas cony and his book on paradigm shift and it seems to me than you were leaning towards the

idea that there are smart plug people and paradigm shift really happen and that somehow maybe people like priestley really duties are to be seen in light that's different than just simply falling on step by step and what went before them. >> i think i would say that. i think that there's a lot of -- it's interesting. i don't know if this was mulken what will saying this but there's been an interesting overlap in the approach in the book and i think that malcolm has a commonality in the way that we approach things on a number of levels. in my mind what happens is when you have periods of radical change if you think about the metaphor is think of the different scales and treating from accidents of biography, in a genius all the way down to the carboniferous layer in the society. my hunch is and i've really only

applied this approach and a couple of case studies but when we have the periods of the breakthrough in the case in 1854 in the last book was often happening is in a sense all of those layers are stacking up in some way so you do have a great genius. you have priestley and john snow and the right moment in the technological history and he needed the tools he was using. if he hadn't had an air pump if it hadn't been invented years before he wouldn't have been able to do what he was doing. if he hadn't had the carboniferous layer fuelling and funding is innovation he would have had a hard time doing what he was doing so it's not that the great man or the great genius of the greek woman is irrelevant and they have to be part of the story. i hope that is one of the things that comes across in the book is he's just an amazing guy and you're in love him as an individual is interesting but it's more than that. it's not to discount the genius but to say there are these kind of historical layers that

support us and to understand why big things happen we have to be able to understand why and that is an idea that priestley would have appreciated. thank you very much. appreciate it. [applause] here are the best selling books as of january 29 that go into the new york times.

it's authors night at the national press club. several different authors are here. selling their books to support charity and one of those authors is jeremy ben-ami. booktv has covered mr. ben-ami for his book a new voice for israel. mr. ben-ami, first of all, what is j street? barras pro-israel lobby we are in the organization press for american engagement to help achieve middle east peace. >> how do you stand compared to a pack? >> we are part of the jewish community that believes that peace and a two state solution would be in israel's and the united states best interest and we want to see the president to more, not less, to help achieve peace. >> what is the new voice for israel? >> the new voice is to essentially provide a counterweight to some old

voices, that for too long have reported to speak for the entire jewish community, and who have positions on these issues that are more hawkish than the average and for those who are 40 and under in the jewish community supporting israel doesn't mean supporting every decision of the israeli government coming and it doesn't mean taking the most hawkish possible view on every issue. >> what is a position that you do support that might be different than say what you said of the 40 and over? >> than the traditional establishment -- ball for instance the president gave a speech in may in which he said this to status israel and palestine to be based on the '67 lines of pre-1967 border between the west bank and israel. we think that is exactly right. the president took a great deal of heat from the organized jewish groups and other voices. we believe he should have gotten a great deal of support because that is the only way