Priestley’s Timelines

Growing up in a family of chemists, I thought of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) as the natural philosopher who discovered oxygen.

Later I learned Priestley was also a political radical, supporting both the American and French Revolutions. He was a religious explorer, championing Unitarianism.

Not until recently did I learn that Priestley invented the timeline graphic with a uniform scale. In 1765, he published his Chart of Biography as a poster-sized appendix to a series of lectures.

That’s the sample of Priestley’s chart showing the lives of “Statesmen” and “Men of Learning” from before 600 B.C.E. to a few years into the common era. Those men are from the Greek and Roman worlds, of course.

In 1769 Priestley applied the same approach to empires with A New Chart of History. This graphic tucked the “English” empire in North America into the upper right corner. The revision shown here adds the label “United States.”

A team at the University of Oregon has created digital versions of Priestley’s timelines, offering a way to dig into them online.