Joseph Priestley and the Discovery of Oxygen

At the age of eleven, the eldest son of an English cloth maker began to perform scientific experiments on spiders. The experiments ignited his interest in science, and the natural world and everything in it soon became his own personal laboratory. As an adult, his curiosity continued to burn bright and he became a well-respected scientist. The results of his experiments impacted the way modern scientists have come to understand everything from respiration and combustion to the composition of the human body and the Earth’s crust. That’s because the boy who once experimented with spiders had grown into the man who discovered the most abundant element on Earth. That man was Joseph Priestley, and the element he discovered was oxygen.