John Powers: The American Chemical Society and the Cult of Joseph Priestley

John Powers gives a talk entitled “The American Chemical Society and the Cult of Joseph Priestley”. This talk was presented on Tuesday 16 April 2024.
In the Summer of 1874, a group of chemists descended upon the remote town of Northumberland, Pennsylvania, to commemorate Joseph Priestley’s discovery of oxygen a century earlier. They met in the place where Priestley settled after his departure from England and, in the minds of the gathered chemists, brought modern chemistry to America. The success of this gathering led to the founding, two years later, of the American Chemical Society, the first national organization of chemists in the United States. This talk will examine the origins and reasoning behind this commemoration of Priestley, specifically how Priestley was portrayed as a founder of American chemistry at a time when American chemists were constructing a professional identity for themselves both in relation to other scientific disciplines in the United States and in trying to compete with European chemical institutions. I compare this myth of Priestley as founder of American chemistry to Priestley’s experiences in America as an immigrant (c. 1794-1804) as documented in the historical record. While Priestley wished to continue his defence of the phlogiston theory (against Lavoisier’s “antiphlogistic” chemistry built around oxygen), he found that by the 1790s even the provincial, American chemists had embraced the new chemistry and were eager to rebuff his claims and arguments. Thus, the Priestley commemoration in Northumberland in 1874 was an invention, created to suit the professional needs and disciplinary narratives of that time and place.