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cellars. Although Priestley denied that was his intention, his ill-judged words heightened suspicions about the mild-mannered preacher and earned him the nickname “Gunpowder Joe.” At first his outspokenviews were tolerated, but the outbreak of revolution in France hardened attitudes. Many in Britain were appalled by the French Revolution and feared that people like Priestley were out to stir up a similar revolt at home.
    So when the news broke that Priestley and his fellow Birmingham radicals intended to hold a dinner at Dadley’s Hotel to celebrate the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, fury erupted. The final straw for the city’s Anglican majority was the distribution of a mischievous pamphlet purporting to be from the dinner’s organizers that called on “every enemy to civil and religious despotism” to celebrate Bastille Day. Violent threats poured in and a spooked Priestley decided not to attend. The remaining guests pressed ahead but ate and left early, sneaking away from the scene before the growing crowd of protestors outside the hotel could realize they were gone. It took until the early evening before the hundreds of demonstrators realized they had been duped.
    Infuriated at missing their chance to confront the radicals in person, they stoned the hotel and set off to destroy the properties of the dissidents in their midst, starting with the New Meeting House of Priestley’s Unitarian Church. After setting this and many other buildings on fire, the suggestion that they head to Priestley’s home rippled through the crowd. The mob began marching toward the controversial minister’s residence. The terrified Priestley family could hear the rioters getting closer and closer to their home so they fled. On reaching his home on Fairhill, the mob ransacked the house, smashed up his laboratory, and set the building on fire. The flames tore through the house, reducing Priestley’s extensive collection of scientific equipment, books, and studies to a smoldering pile of ash.
    As their home burned, the Priestley family fled through the city’s dark back streets. Eventually they reached London, but there was little sympathy for the Priestleys. When King George III finally sent in the army to quell the violence in Birmingham, he made it clear whose side he was on: “I cannot but feel better pleased that Priestley is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have instilled, and that the people see them in their true light.” After the riots Priestley became an object of national hatred. Effigies of him were burned alongside those of fellow radical Thomas Paine. Shopkeepers refused to serve him and his family. People wrote letters accusing him ofbeing in league with the devil and newspapers lampooned him with vitriolic cartoons. Even the Royal Society turned their back on the man who had discovered oxygen.
    By April 1794, Priestley had had enough. He and his family packed their bags and set sail for the United States, hoping—like so many before him—to find freedom in this new country with its ideals of democracy and liberty. Priestley’s exit from Britain was well timed. By the time his ship docked in Battery Park eight weeks later, the British government had begun rounding up prominent radicals and charging them with seditious libel for their criticisms of the king, his government, and the Anglican Church. Priestley settled in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, but he spent a lot of his time in Philadelphia mixing with the pioneers of American science. Many of the scientists he befriended in the City of Brotherly Love shared his fascination with sparkling water, especially Founding Father and physician Benjamin Rush.
    Such was Rush’s belief in the curative abilities of fizzing water that in 1773 he published a comparative study of three mineral water sources in Pennsylvania, which sought to identify not just their composition but also what