Oxygen

Melvyn Bragg discusses the discovery of Oxygen by Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier. In the late 18th century Chemistry was the prince of the sciences - vital to the economy, it shaped how Europeans fought each other, ate with each other, what they built and the medicine they took. And then, in 1772, the British chemist, Joseph Priestley, stood in front of the Royal Society and reported on his latest discovery: “this air is of exalted nature…A candle burned in this air with an amazing strength of flame; and a bit of red hot wood crackled and burned with a prodigious rapidity. But to complete the proof of the superior quality of this air, I introduced a mouse into it; and in a quantity in which, had it been common air, it would have died in about a quarter of an hour; it lived at two different times, a whole hour, and was taken out quite vigorous.” For the British dissenting preacher, Joseph Priestley, and the French aristocrat, Antoine Lavoisier, Chemistry was full of possibilities and they pursued them for scientific and political ends. But they came to blows over oxygen because they both claimed to have discovered it, provoking a scientific controversy that rattled through the laboratories of France and England until well after their deaths. To understand their disagreement is to understand something about the nature of scientific discovery itself.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Simon Schaffer 25 episodes
  Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge
• Jenny Uglow 4 episodes
  Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Warwick
• Hasok Chang 3 episodes
  Reader in Philosophy of Science at University College London

Related episodes

• Robert Boyle
  
  12 Jun, 2014 540 Chemistry
• Kinetic Theory
  
  23 May, 2019 530 Physics
• Chemical Elements
  
  25 May, 2000 540 Chemistry
• The Royal Society
  
  23 Mar, 2006 500 Science
• Radiation
  
  12 Nov, 2009 530 Physics
• The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 2
  
  5 Jan, 2010 500 Science
• Louis Pasteur
  
  18 May, 2017 610 Medicine and health
• The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 1
  
  4 Jan, 2010 500 Science
• The Lunar Society
  
  5 Jun, 2003 500 Science
• The Scientist
  
  24 Oct, 2002 500 Science

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b0088nql

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0088nql

Auto-category: 540.1 (Chemistry - History)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In 1772, the British chemist Joseph Priestley stood in front of the Royal Society and reported on his latest discovery.