A World on Fire

A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen

by Joe Jackson

2005 432 pages eng

Like Charles Seife's Zero and Dava Sobel's Longitude, this passionate intellectual history is the story of the intersection of science and the human, in this case the rivals who discovered oxygen in the late 1700s. That breakthrough changed the world as radically as those of Newton and Darwin but wa…