We went to Bowood House last weekend. It is not a very exciting place as country houses go (they demolished the best bit some years ago) but there is one small room there which holds a very special place in history. It is so small that I could not get far enough away from the walls to take a decent photo.
In it, Joseph Priestly discovered oxygen in the 18th century. I suppose someone had to.
Priestly was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and lived between 1733 and 1804, dying in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Maybe that was the beginning of the Brain Drain.
I saw Sweet at A New Day Festival in Faversham the other week and they played Love Is Like Oxygen. Joseph Priestley would have loved it perhaps?
ReplyDeleteYou actually paid to go and see Sweet?
DeleteI was in Faversham the other week...and by coincidence heard sweet sing 'You get too much and you get too high...not enough and you die' or something like that....about oxygen.....how strange
DeleteDid you see an elderly glam rocker singing along to it?
DeleteHe came a cropper with Edmund Burke over the French Revolution and eventually fled to the US because he was being labelled seditious by the media and thought he had better hot foot it out. He was a most remarkable man and on the back of what I have just read about him following reading your post I will seek out a biography as soon as possible. Clergyman, scientist, philosopher - that combination doesn't seem possible today.
ReplyDeleteAh, I thought it was odd for an Englishman to go and live in America in the 18th C. I had never heard of him until last Monday.
DeleteHe lived between 1733 till 1780 in Calne, just down the road from Bowood, where he was a tutot. The primary school is named after him, and in the town centre a mosaic of stones is his memorial.
ReplyDeletehttps://statues.vanderkrogt.net/object.php?webpage=CO&record=gbsw019
Edit: or a tutor!
DeletePriestley was from Yorkshire. I remember him from school chemistry lessons, along with Lavoisier and things that burn with a bright white light.
ReplyDeleteYou don't look old enough.
DeleteYes, truly an impressive man. Indeed, the brain drain continues.
ReplyDeleteWe design, others make.
DeleteAll the best people are from Yorkshire Tasker.
ReplyDeleteI agree.
DeleteAll the best people are from Yorkshire Tasker.
ReplyDeleteI disagree.
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