Adv Physiol Educ 40: 370 –376, 2016;
doi:10.1152/advan.00076.2016.
Historical Perspectives
Eight sages over five centuries share oxygen’s discovery
John W. Severinghaus
Professor Emeritus of Anesthesia, University of California, San Francisco, California
Submitted 11 May 2016; accepted in final form 2 June 2016
discovery; history; oxygen
LAVOISIER, the greatest chemist of the 18th century, both plagiarized and stumbled until he was urged to do a simple
experiment.
Ibn al-Nafis (1213–1288)
The story of oxygen begins in the 13th century with Ibn
al-Nafis (Fig. 1), a Syrian physician and anatomist who became
the Egyptian sultan’s doctor and chief of Cairo’s hospital. In
1250 CE, he correctly described the pulmonary circulation and
oxygen in a single sentence: “Pulmonary arterial blood passes
through invisible pores in the lung, where it mingles with air to
form the vital spirit and then passes through the pulmonary
vein to reach the left chamber of the heart.” Vital spirit was a
term used by Galen in ⬃200 CE to refer to red (arterialized)
blood.
Al-Nafis clearly was the first to understand lung blood flow,
400 years before William Harvey. This finding was scarcely
Address for reprint requests and other correspondence: J. W. Severinghaus, 20 Allen Ave., PO Box 974, Ross, CA 94957-0974 (e-mail: jwseps
@comcast.net).
370
known in the West until discovered in the Prussian state library
in 1924 (1, 2) by Egyptian medical historian Muhyo al-Deen.
Nafis wrote over 100 medical texts, science fiction novels,
and humorous theological novels.
Michael Servetus (1511–1553)
Three hundred years later, Michael Servetus (Fig. 2) rediscovered the pulmonary circulation and blood color change in
the lung. He was a brilliant polymath, geographer, mapmaker,
biblical scholar, and doctor who became physician to the
archbishop of Vienne (Dauphiné), France. Early in Martin
Luther’s Reformation, Servetus got into trouble by repeatedly
writing that doctrines of the trinity and infant baptism were not
biblical. Both Catholics and Protestants declared him a heretic.
To avoid the Inquisition, he hid in Strasburg, and, under a
pseudonym, he wrote Christianity Restored (also called Restoration of Christianity) in 1553, proposing that the Reformation should return to biblical roots. He sent John Calvin a copy.
Calvin realized his authorship.
Figure 3 shows the cover page of Christianity Restored.
Calvin threatened to have him killed for heresy if he came to
Geneva. Inquisition leaders burned him in effigy.
While escaping to Italy, rashly and inexplicably, he snuck
into Calvin’s church in Geneva. He was recognized, reported,
arrested, and jailed as a heretic by order of Geneva’s government. He was held for over 2 month in prison while Calvin
consulted with all the Swiss cantons and was then indicted.
On Oct. 27, 1553, Servetus was burned at the stake in the
Champel district of Geneva, with a copy of Christianity Restored strapped to his leg.
Calvin ordered the burning of all copies of his book. It
contained Servetus’s only description of the effects of air on
blood in the lung. His science report remained unknown for
400 years.
A French historian, August Dide, published a book called
“Heretics and Revolutionaries” in 1887. After his election as a
Senator in 1900, Dide proposed erecting a monument in
Geneva to Michael Servetus as France’s most important heretical martyr. In 1907, Rodin’s pupil, Clothilde Roch, finished a
sculpture of Servetus in prison. The Calvinist Geneva town
council refused to celebrate a heretic. So Dide had it mounted
nearby in France, angering the Calvinists. During World War
II, the Vichy government melted it because Servetus championed freedom of speech. In 2011, on Servetus’s 500th birthday,
Roch’s sculpture was recast and mounted in Geneva near the
site of his burning with the agreement of Geneva’s now secular
government (Fig. 4).
In 1953, 400 years after Servetus’ martyrdom, Roland Bainton, Yale Professor of Ecclesiastical History, by borrowing one
of the three surviving copies of Servetus’ heretical book,
published the most authoritative Servetus biography, Hunted
Heretic (3). Bainton had spent most of 20 years studying
Servetus’ life and works. Bainton’s colleague at Yale, John
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Severinghaus JW. Eight sages over five centuries share oxygen’s discovery. Adv Physiol Educ 40: 370 –376, 2016;
doi:10.1152/advan.00076.2016.—During the last century, historians
have discovered that between the 13th and 18th centuries, at least six
sages discovered that the air we breathe contains something that we
need and use. Ibn al-Nafis (1213–1288) in Cairo and Michael Servetus
(1511–1553) in France accurately described the pulmonary circulation
and its effect on blood color. Michael Sendivogius (1566 –1636) in
Poland called a part of air “the food of life” and identified it as the gas
made by heating saltpetre. John Mayow (1641–1679) in Oxford found
that one-fifth of air was a special gas he called “spiritus nitro aereus.”
Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–1786) in Uppsala generated a gas he
named “fire air” by heating several metal calcs. He asked Lavoisier
how it fit the phlogiston theory. Lavoisier never answered. In 1744,
Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) in England discovered how to make
part of air by heating red calc of mercury. He found it brightened a
flame and supported life in a mouse in a sealed bottle. He called it
“dephlogisticated air.” He published and personally told Lavoisier and
other chemists about it. Lavoisier never thanked him. After 9 years of
generating and studying its chemistry, he couldn’t understand whether
it was a new element. He still named it “principe oxigene.” He was
still not able to disprove phlogiston. Henry Cavendish (1731–1810)
made an inflammable gas in 1766. He and Priestley noted that its
flame made a dew. Cavendish proved the dew was pure water and
published this in 1778, but all scientists called it impossible to make
water, an element. In 1783, on June 24th, Lavoisier was urged to try
it, and, when water appeared, he realized that water was not an
element but a compound of two gases, proving that oxygen was an
element. He then demolished phlogiston and began the new chemistry
revolution.
Historical Perspectives
EIGHT SAGES
371
Fulton, Professor of Physiology, found in it Servetus’s unknown description of the pulmonary circulation (4, 5). It is now
clear that Servetus had discovered, a century before William
Harvey, that blood flows through lung tissue, excreting waste
products into the air and changing the color of blood (5, 6).
Michael Sendivogius (1566 –1636)
The third sage was a famous 16th century Polish noble
physician and alchemist, Michael Sendivogius (Fig. 5). In
Fig. 3. Cover page of Christianismi Restitutio. [Retrieved from http://
www.miguelservet.org/servetus/works.htm#christianismi. Reproduced with
permission from the Instituto de Estudios Sijenenses, “Miguel Servet,” Villanueva de Sigena, Spain.]
Fig. 2. Michael Servetus, painted by Guillermo Pérez Baylo and commissioned by the Michael Servetus Institute. [Retrieved from http://www.
miguelservet.org/servetus/iconografia/guillermo.htm. Reproduced with
permission from the Instituto de Estudios Sijenenses, “Miguel Servet,”
Villanueva de Sigena, Spain.]
1604, he published that air contains what he named the “secret
food of life.” He had realized that this “food” was the same gas
emitted by saltpetre (potassium nitrate) when heated. He called
it part of the “saltnitre of the earth.” Sendivogius’s writings
were frequently copied and read for over a century. However,
no one grasped the chemical importance of his discovery, not
even physicists Boyle and Newton at Oxford, who read his
work 60 years later.
In 1621, a Dutch inventor named Drebbel built the world’s
first manned submarine (Fig. 6). King James I and a horde of
viewers watched it travel submerged 10 miles down the
Thames from Westminster to Greenwich. Drebbel never revealed the secret of refreshing submarine air, but newspapers
and others believed that he had learned from Sendivogius in
Prague how to make oxygen on board. I doubt that and suspect
the rowers sucked in air through tubes to snorkles from little
surface floats some said they saw.
Forty years later, Robert Boyle in Oxford wrote that he had
spoken with a mathematician who had been on Drebbel’s
submarine. He said that “Drebbel used a chemical liquor to
replace the quintessence of air.” Although both Boyle and
Newton read Sendivogius, they ignored his work, perhaps
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Fig. 1. Ibn Al-Nafis. [Retrieved from Wikipedia (Ibn al-Nafis; https://
ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Nafis); public domain.]
Historical Perspectives
372
EIGHT SAGES
Fig. 4. Clothilde Roch’s recast sculpture of Michael Servetus. [Retrieved and
adapted from Photos Autour du Monde (http://magdaghali.blogspot.com/p/
sculpteurs.html); free use.]
because they didn’t grasp the importance of his chemistry. Or,
perhaps they thought he was just another fraudulent alchemist.
Sendivogius’ “food of life” story was only recently rediscovered. A biography of Sendivogius was published in Polish
in Warsaw by Roman Bugnai in 1968 (6) as a study of his
alchemical pursuits. Water Which Does Not Wet Hands: the
alchemy of Michael Sendivogius was published in English in
1994 by Andrew Szydlo (7). Szydlo was born of Polish parents
in England and educated in London’s universities. He teaches
chemistry at London’s Highgate School. He is a dramatic
lecturer with demonstrations to fascinated audiences.
life. This idea obstructed reality-based science for nearly a
century.
In 1955, Mayow’s book about oxygen was rediscovered and
published by Donald Proctor at Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine (9).
Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–1786)
The fifth discoverer of oxygen, Carl Wilhelm Scheele
(Fig. 8), was born in German-speaking Pomerania. Trained in
Sweden, he became a very clever apothecary and chemist. In
1768, he published new studies of metal chemistry. In 1770, he
became director of Locke Pharmacy in Uppsala. He worked at
John Mayow (1641–1679)
In Oxford, in 1668, Robert Boyle’s former student, John
Mayow (Fig. 7), wrote a book about a part of air he named
“spiritus nitro-aereus.” He wrote that it is consumed in fire and
that we breathe it to provide both body heat and energy. He
was the fourth discoverer of oxygen. He was unaware of
Sendivogius.
Mayow’s own work sank into obscurity when all scientists
accepted the false phlogiston theory postulated by a famous
German physician, Georg Ernst Stahl, in the early 17th century. This mythical substance postulated that a fire-like element
called phlogiston is contained within combustible bodies and
released during combustion, avoiding the need for air in fire or
Fig. 6. Drebbel’s submarine. [Retrieved from Wikipedia (Cornelis Drebbel;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelis_Drebbel); public domain.]
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Fig. 5. Michael Sendivogius. [Retrieved from Wikipedia (Sendivogius; https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendivogius); public domain.]
Historical Perspectives
EIGHT SAGES
373
Fig. 7. John Mayow. [Retrieved and adapted from the Dibner Library of the
History of Science and Technology (http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/
hst/scientific-identity/fullsize/SIL14-M002-15a.jpg).]
the university there with the famous chemist Torbern Bergman,
who helped him publish his work in Latin in the journal Nova
Acta.
In 1774, Lavoisier sent his new chemistry textbook to
Bergman, including a copy for Scheele, whose published work
he much admired.
Scheele promptly wrote Lavoisier to thank him for the book.
He explained how, in 1771, he had generated a strange new gas
by heating certain metallic earths. He had named it fire air
because it greatly brightened a candle flame and supported life
in mice. Because neither he nor Bergman could relate it to the
phlogiston theory, Scheele had delayed publishing. He asked
Lavoisier to repeat the experiment and then help him explain it.
By the time Scheele finally decided in 1775 to publish his
fire air with all his experimental findings, he had read about
Joseph Priestley’s 1774 discovery of the same gas, so it was
too late to claim its discovery. Scheele wrote that Lavoisier
never answered his letter (10). His book was finally published
in 1777, but he could not confirm his claim of discovering fire
air. Scientists and historians therefore ignored his oxygen
discovery.
Working in Uppsala and later in Köping, Sweden, as an
apothecary, Scheele became one of the world’s greatest experimental chemists. He discovered seven elements and much
other new chemistry. On February 4, 1775, he was elected to
membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,
although his discovery of oxygen was unpublished and un-
known. This great honor, with the King of Sweden attending,
had never before or since been given to an apothecary. Over his
last 15 years, he published 48 chemistry discovery papers.
In 1893, French historian Édouard Grimaux was shown
Scheele’s letter to Lavoisier, never previously seen. He pub-
Fig. 9. Joseph Priestley, painted by Rembrandt Peale. [Retrieved from Wikipedia (Joseph Priestley; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Priestley); public domain.]
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Fig. 8. Carl Wilhelm Scheele. [Retrieved and adapted from the Larousse
Encyclopedia (http://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/images/Carl_Wilhelm_Scheele/1004529); free use.]
Historical Perspectives
374
EIGHT SAGES
scribed his method of making it to Lavoisier, who never
acknowledged his help.
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794)
Lavoisier (Fig. 10) had become the world’s most brilliant
chemist by the age of 30 years. In the spring of 1775, he began
his studies of Priestley’s newly published gas. He named it
principe oxigene but continued to refer to it as “vital air.”
However, after 8 years of extensively examining its chemistry,
he was still unable to prove whether vital air was a new
element or a compound. And he doubted but still couldn’t
disprove the phlogiston theory. By 1783, he was stalled by
these dilemmas (13).
In 1766, Cavendish (Fig. 11) discovered and published how
to make an inflammable gas (H2) by putting iron filings in
strong acid (14). In the late 1770s, he and Priestley noted that
burning inflammable air caused dew to form on glass walls.
Fig. 10. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. [Licensed from Alamy.]
lished the text but could not show it because it had been
withdrawn by its private owners.
A century later, in 1993, various Lavoisier artifacts were
donated to the French Academy of Science to avoid high
taxation. Among them was Scheele’s 1774 letter to Lavoisier.
Descendants of Lavoisier’s wife’s brother had hidden the letter
for 219 years because they were aware that it proved that the
great chemist used Scheele’s methods without acknowledgement, proving him guilty of plagiarism.
Joseph Priestley (1733–1804)
Oxygen’s sixth discoverer was Unitarian minister Joseph
Priestley (Fig. 9). Two churches fired him as too radical, but he
soon became famous while teaching grammar and science at
Warrington Academy near Manchester, helping to make it a
leading school for dissenters–in fact, the “cradle of Unitarianism,” as one scholar called it.
In the 1760s, Benjamin Franklin, while living in England,
befriended Priestley and provided books on electricity as well
as experimental apparati. In 1766, Franklin persuaded the
Royal Society to elect Priestley to membership at the age of 33
years. The next year, Priestley published the most authoritative
and popular text on electricity. He was awarded the Royal
Society’s Copley medal in 1773, partly for discovering how to
make cheap soda water from brewery exhaust. Encouraged by
Franklin, the Earl of Shelburne offered Priestley a laboratory
on his Bowood estate in Wiltshire.
On August 1, 1774, Priestley, by heating red mercury calc,
made a gas that caused a glowing splinter to burst into flame
and supported life in a mouse in a bottle. He named it
dephlogisticated air (12). In October 1774 in Paris, he de-
Fig. 11. Henry Cavendish. [Retrieved from Wikipedia (File:Cavendish Henry
signature.jpg; https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid⫽7373371);
public domain.]
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Henry Cavendish (1731–1810)
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EIGHT SAGES
375
In celebration, his 29-year-old wife Marie Anne commissioned a portrait from France’s greatest artist of the time,
Jacques Louis David. He charged perhaps the highest artistic
fee of all time, 7,000 livre (about a quarter million United
States dollars) for this now-famous huge (2.6 m tall) double
portrait of Lavoisier and his wife (Fig. 12).
What About Lavoisier?
Cavendish analyzed and proved the dew was pure water. His
peers in the Royal Society considered his claim of making
water to be wrong, since all assumed that water was an element
that can’t be made.
In 1783, when Cavendish’s associate, physicist Charles
Blagden, became president of the Royal Society, he proposed
to be sent to ask Lavoisier to help understand the unbelievable
Cavendish report. He persuaded Lavoisier to test the Cavendish-Priestley observation by burning inflammable air himself.
On June 24, 1783, Lavoisier invited eight chemists to watch
him prove that Cavendish was wrong. When water appeared,
Lavoisier was stunned! He suddenly realized that the Cavendish observation had revealed a universally accepted error. He
declared:
What About Henry Cavendish (Fellowship of the Royal
Society)?
Cavendish was part of eight centuries of an immensely
wealthy aristocratic family. He was very shy and reclusive. He
never married and never sat for a portrait. He built his laboratory and lived part of his life in the home of his father, Lord
Charles Cavendish, in Bloomsbury on the corner of Bedford
Water is not an element, but a compound made of inflammable air and vital air.
Lavoisier then named inflammable air “hydrogen” and vital
air “oxygen.”
Lavoisier’s insight created the greatest Kuhnian paradigm
shift (15) in the history of chemistry. It led to his great
chemical revolution. Cavendish had provided the key.
Over the next 6 years, Lavoisier demolished phlogiston and
revised all chemical theory. In 1788, at age of the 45 years, he
finished writing his revolutionary treatise, Elements of Chemistry (16).
Fig. 13. Plaque honoring Henry Cavendish. [Photo taken by the author.]
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Fig. 12. Lavoisier and his wife Marie Anne, painted by Jacques-Louis
David. [Retrieved from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Antoine_Lavoisier#/media/File:David_-_Portrait_of_Monsieur_Lavoisier_
and_His_Wife.jpg); public domain.]
In his Elements of Chemistry, Lavoisier falsely wrote that
“This species of air was discovered almost at the same time by
Mr. Priestley, Mr. Scheele, and myself,” both a bold lie and
proof that he had read Scheele’s 1774 letter, using his method
of making fire air while failing to acknowledge Scheele!
Lavoisier was condemned in print by Edmond Genet, later
French ambassador to the United States, by Joseph Black, the
discoverer of CO2, and by Priestley himself, who accused him of
plagiarism (17) for claims of discoveries that actually belonged to
others.
Lavoisier was a brilliant polymath, meticulous scientist, and
the most able chemist of his time. Born into a wealthy family,
he became even richer as a despised tax “farmer” in France’s
ancien régime, who built a hated wall around Paris to ensure
that incoming merchants would pay taxes. As a leading figure
in the Academy of Science in 1780, he belittled the work of an
aspiring academician, Jean Paul Marat, making a bitter enemy.
More than a decade later, during the French Revolution, the
now-radical revolutionary publicist Marat would repeatedly
demand in newspapers that Lavoisier be guillotined as among
the worst of the ancient régime. At the peak of the Reign of
Terror, the Revolutionary Tribunal tried, convicted, and beheaded the great chemist all in one day, May 8, 1794 (11).
Historical Perspectives
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EIGHT SAGES
Fig. 14. Cavendish Laboratories and the approximate dates of construction. The more recent laboratories are both in use. A: 1870s. [Retrieved from
http://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/history/old. Reproduced with permission from the Department of Physics, University of Cambridge.] B and C: 1970s and 2000s.
[Retrieved from http://www.cambridge2000.com/cambridge2000/html/0007/P7281916.html and http://www.cambridge2000.com/cambridge2000/html/2008/
P92017995.html. Reproduced with permission from Wayne Boucher; copyright Cambridge2000.com.]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Milton Djuric (history editor at Williams College) greatly assisted me with
both the history and text. Martyna Elas (biochemist at Krakow University)
informed me of the evidence about Sendivogius. Nobelist Cornell Prof. Roald
Prof. Roald Hoffmann sent me a copy of Scheele’s letter to Lavoisier. A
condensed version of this article has previously been posted online at http://
www.josephpriestleyhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/Eight-Sages-over-FiveCenturies-Share-Oxygen-Discovery.pdf.
DISCLOSURES
No conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise, are declared by the author(s).
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
J.W.S. edited and revised manuscript; J.W.S. approved final version of
manuscript.
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3. Bainton RH. Hunted Heretic: the Life and Death of Michael Servetus,
1511–1553. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1953.
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5. Fulton JF. Michael Servetus, Humanist and Martyr. New York: Herbert
Reichner, 1953.
6. Bugnaj R. Michael Sendivogius (1566 –1636): His Life and Works.
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1553) and the discovery of the pulmonary circulation. Hellenic J Cardiol
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8. Szydlo A. Water That Does Not Wet Hands: the Alchemy of Michael
Sendivogius. Warsaw: Polish Academy of Science, 1994.
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Health and Disease. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1995, vol. 83.
10. Scheele CW. Chemical Treatise on Air and Fire. Uppsala: Magnus
Swederus, 1777.
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Sciences Pures et Appliquées 1: 1–2, 1890.
12. Priestley J. An account of further discoveries in air. Philos Trans R Soc
London 65: 384 –394, 1775.
13. Guerlac H. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1975.
14. Cavendish H. Experiments on factitious air. Part I. Containing experiments on inflammable air. Philos Trans R Soc London 56: 144 –159,
1766.
15. Kuhn TS. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1962.
16. Lavoisier A. Traité Elémentaire de Chimie. Paris: Chez Cuchet, 1789.
17. Schofield RE. The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: a Study of His Life and
Work From 1773 to 1804. University Park, PA: Penn. State Univ Press,
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Square beside the British Museum and University College.
This plaque (Fig. 13) is on the wall there (18).
Cavendish was a natural philosopher, scientist, and great
experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist. He was
first to weigh the earth by a method still named the Cavendish
experiment. These very famous original and new physics
laboratories (Fig. 14) in Cambridge are named after him.
In conclusion, I submit that Cavendish made the most important single experimental observation of science because it solved
Lavoisier’s dilemma. This merits calling Cavendish the eighth
discoverer of oxygen. The Encyclopedia Britannica calls him the
greatest experimental and theoretical English chemist and physicist of his age. But no one of these eight sages can now be called
the most important discoverer of oxygen.