When people started drinking coffee and tea, instead of beer in the morning, many more things were accomplished throughout the day. First of which, people were able to think more critically about certain aspects of their life. It was common knowledge that when animals or insects were put into jars, they eventually died. Fortunately, Priestly and other scientists did experiments that demonstrated it was a lack of oxygen that would eventually kill the animal. With this experiment, he “invented air” and became friends with Ben Franklin in the process. The question itself is not straight forward, it’s asking what if a hypothetical “air pump” was to form that instead of pumping air, pumped scientific knowledge and understanding of the surrounding world. If everyone started to think critically about the world around them, there would be a lot of thought about the corruption or blind faith put in religion and government. In other words, it was a threat to their way of life.
Earlier in the semester, there was a lot of talk about how new scientific advances caused problems at the same time as fixing them. An example from the reading was the coal usage in the European “stage”, this all led to an increase in carbon dioxide and other pollutants. This is a problem that the world is still facing, on both a scientific and political side. Another much smaller advancement turned political is the increase of electric cars. The large petroleum companies are doing everything they can to disavow these new cars, including using political powers.