Do you know what most people like best about drinks like Coca Cola or Sprite? They like the bubbles and the fizz. And it was a Unitarian minister in England, Joseph Priestley, who experimented with gases in his laboratory and made th very first fitty drinks.

Messing Around
It’s hard to imagine a minister messing around in a science lab with chemicals. But that’s just what Priestley did back II in the mid-1700s. He was a curious person who asked lots of questions. He had questions about how things worked in the universe and he hiid questions about religion, too. To Priestley, the things that science taught us about the world and the things religion taught us about the world couldn’t be separated from each other. Priestley thought they were both important and he could see that both were always changing as human beings had new experiences and new ideas.

This was a very different way of thinking, especially for a minister. In fact, in those days it was against the law to believe things that were different from what the Church of England taught people about religion. The Church of England taught that Jesus was the son of God and that all human beings are born sinful. But Priestley liked to study things when he had questions about them. He wasn’t sure he believed that Jesus was the son of God so he studied the Bible. He decided that a person could believe that Jesus was a wonderful teacher without believing that he was the son of God who was sent to earth to save sinful people.

Joseph Priestley had lots of questions about animals and plants and gases, too. His questions led him to study and perform experiments that helped him to discover some important things about science that you learn in school today. He is considered the person who "discovered" oxygen.

Ask Questions
It was pretty hard to believe things that were different from what everybody else believed. The
Unitarian churches where Priestley found work as a minister were always small and poor and they were often attacked by people who were afraid of his ideas.

For a few years, Priestley left church work and started his own school. In Priestley’s school, students were taught to ask questions about everything and to work on their own ideas and experiments. His ideas about education, just like his ideas about religion, were very different from what was normal at the time. Although some people thought his teaching was very good, the school never made enough money to support his family, so it closed.

Looking for the Truth
Finally, in 1773, Priestley got a job as a librarian and family tutor for a very wealthy man, the Earl of Shelbourne. The Earl liked Priestley and gave him space and money to do his experiments. During his years with the Earl’s Family, Priestley wrote many books about air, electricity, and even about drawing! In his writing, he always told the whole story of his experiments — the mistakes he made, as well as his successes. Priestley was more interested in finding the truth, in both religion and science, than in proving his ideas were right.

Move to USA
When his job with the Earl ended, Priestley took another job as minister, this time in a church where people agreed with his religious ideas. He was very happy there for about ten years, but the fighting between the traditional church leaders and the new churches got worse until finally Priestley’s house, church, library, and science laboratory were burned to the ground by an angry mob. Priestley and his wife barely escaped. Shortly after that they moved to the United States where Priestley’s grown-up sons had already come to start a new community in Pennsylvania.

The Priestleys settled in the small town of Northumberland, about a five-day trip from Philadelphia. It took four years for Priestley to build his house, and it was even longer before he had a scientific laboratory to work in again. During those years, Priestley traveled several times to Philadelphia to help set up a Unitarian congregation. The church wanted him to be their minister but he always returned to Northumberland. And although he never took a job as a Unitarian minister in the United States, we remember him as a founder of Unitarianism in America because of his work with this church. Priestley spent the last years of his life doing experiments and writing about the history of Christianity. Science and religion were the two great interests in his life until he died in January, 1804 at the age of 70.

Sources: "A Bit of History: Joseph Priestley" by Bill Weston
(http://home.otd.net/-sirubin/uuscv/history.txt)
"Joseph Priestley: Motion Towards Perfection" by the Rev. Jane Rzepka
The UU Kids Book by Brotman-Marshfield