(2008-12-17) Johnson Oxygen Priestley

Steven Johnson has his new book coming out soon: The Invention of Air about Joseph Priestley: like Ghost Map, it has an organizing theme of how innovative ideas emerge and spread in a society, while integrating many different threads along the way: 18th-century London Coffee House culture; the JohnAdams-ThomasJefferson letters; the origins of EcoSystem science; the giant dragonflies of the Carboniferous Era; the impact of energy deposits on British political change; the discovery of the Gulf Stream; the AlienAndSeditionActs; Jefferson's bible; the Lunar Society; mob violence; Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Ben Franklin's kite Experiment.

Fred Wilson has been enjoying it.

PeterMe is less enthusiastic. As such, I walked away not knowing exactly what was Steven's point. I think what really drove him wasn't Priestley per se, but instead how Priestley's story supports Steven's "Long Zoom" theory of history, which disputes standard historical narratives ("GreatMan", "movement") and says that the only way to appreciate history and biography is by understanding actions at a number of scales, from the micro to the macro. This was implicit in The Ghost Map, which went from the cholera bacteria, up to the human transmitters, and up again to the infrastructure of cities. He makes it explicit here because he's clearly frustrated by standard historical practice. The problem is that the narrative pretty much stops at the point of Long Zoom explanation, and it signals the first moment of confusion for the reader - just what am I supposed to be taking away?

Cory Doctorow gives more Priestley background.