Joseph Priestley 1733 – 1804

Joseph Priestley was an English natural philosopher, theologian, and political theorist, and one of the founding figures of English Unitarianism. Best known to the history of science as the discoverer of oxygen and several other gases, he was equally significant as a defender of civil and religious liberty in support of the American and French Revolutions. His Birmingham house and laboratory were destroyed by a Church-and-King mob in 1791, and he emigrated three years later to Pennsylvania, where he lived out his last decade. His Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion and Essay on the First Principles of Government shaped early liberal political thought.