"Why did the problem of air become visible..? Why were Priestley, Boyle and Black able to see the question clearly enough..? ...because they had new tools. The air pump designed by Otto von Guericke and Boyle (...in collaboration with his assistant Robert Hooke...) were essential to Priestley's lab in Leeds. ...In a way, the air pump had enabled the entire field of pneumatic chemistry in the seventeenth century... [T]he air pump allowed you to... create a vacuum, which behaved markedly differently... even though air and the absence of air were visually indistinguishable."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Priestley
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Joseph Priestley
Joseph Priestley (13 March 1733 – 6 February 1804) was an English Unitarian clergyman, theologian, political theorist, and the scientist who is usually credited with the discovery of oxygen, as he was the first to isolate it in its gaseous state.
54 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Joseph Priestley →
Related Quotes
"It is known to all persons who are conversant in experimental philosophy, that there are many little attentions and p…"
"We more easily give our assent to any proposition when the person who contends for it appears, by his manner of deliv…"
"All hereditary Government is in its nature tyranny. An heritable crown, or an heritable throne, or by what other fanc…"
"Our anxiety during the King of France's escape, and our joy on his capture, cannot be described. I hope the new const…"
"Having thought it right to leave behind me some account of my friends and benefactors, it is in a manner necessary th…"
"I married a daughter of Mr. Isaac Wilkinson, an ironmaster, near Wrexham, in Wales, with whose family I had become ac…"
"The History of Electricity is a field full of pleasing objects, according to all the genuine and universal principles…"
"For the government of the temporary magistrates of a democracy, or even the laws themselves may be as tyrannical as t…"
"The history of philosophy enjoys, in some measure, the advantages both of civil and natural history, whereby it is re…"
"[The doctrine of air] I was led into in consequence of inhabiting a house adjoining to a public brewery, where I at f…"