CHAPTER 3: Pneumatists Set the Atomic Stage: Boyle, Hooke, Newton, Black, Cavendish, Priestley, and Davy (Western England and Northumberland, Pennsylvania)

From about 1660 to 1800, pneumatic chemists produced and isolated gases or what were known as “airs”. We discuss the careers of seven pneumatists and early atomists and visit pertinent sites including the Royal Society in London, Newton's Woolsthorpe Manor in Grantham and his statue in the Trinity College Chapel in Cambridge, the Leeds Library and Mill Hill Chapel in Leeds, the Bowood House in Calne, and the Priestley House in the United States. Along the way, we discuss Robert Boyle's role as a chymist and chrysopoet (gold-maker), Isaac Newton's role as a devoted alchemist and atomist, the role of Ben Franklin in introducing Joseph Priestley to the sciences, Priestley's amazing career as a philosopher, preacher, educator, and scientist, the origin of the strange phlogiston-related names of these airs, and the early life of Humphry Davy as he demonstrated the intoxicating effects of “laughing gas” to his poet friends in Bristol. Although a concrete atomic theory had not yet been proposed, these pneumatic chemists accumulated the data that John Dalton would use to formulate his theory at the beginning of the nineteenth century.