Franklin helped Joseph Priestley understand why we have air to breathe in the first place.

This is a story that begins—like so many tales of innovation and controversy in 18th-century culture—with a coffeehouse. The Enlightenment-era coffeehouse was the Internet of its day: a hub of conversation, news, shoptalk and public debate. Whole industries were invented in these new social environments, fueled by the buzz of caffeine and the intellectual energy of different professions gathering together to share ideas. Lloyd’s of London, the first insurance business, was created in Lloyd’s Coffeehouse. And while merchants and ship owners made insurance deals at Lloyd’s on Lombard Street, profound ideas about science, faith and politics took flight among the gentlemen who frequented a busy establishment just north of St. Paul’s Cathedral: the London Coffeehouse.

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The most famous denizen of the London Coffee­house was, ironically, an American: Benjamin Franklin. Franklin had a regular clan in the coffeehouse, a band of fellow iconoclasts that he would later dub “The Club Of Honest Whigs.” The club “consists of clergymen, physicians and some other professions,” wrote Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell, who attended a few sessions. “Some of us smoke a pipe, conversation goes on pretty formally, sometimes sensibly and sometimes furiously: At nine there is a sideboard with Welsh rabbits and apple-puffs, porter and beer.”

Franklin relished his time with the Honest Whigs. He would write mournful letters from America in the last years of his life, reminiscing about the many days and nights he spent with the “honest souls” at the London Coffeehouse. But of all those over-caffeinated sessions in the shadow of St. Paul’s, one stands out as particularly significant. In late December 1765, he met a young minister and author named Joseph Priestley. It was the beginning of a friendship between intellectual soul mates who would revolutionize our understanding of the natural world. Franklin was already recognized as one of the great scientists of the century, though his reputation would grow in the coming years, thanks in large part to Priestley’s writings. At 32, Priestley was at the beginning of his career, but he was soon to embark on a series of experiments that would ultimately give him claim to the title of the man who “discovered oxygen.”

While Franklin is renowned for advancing mankind’s knowledge of the basic laws of electricity, his role in encouraging Priestley’s experiments and in helping make sense of what he discovered has been almost entirely ignored by both scientists and historians. Priestley initially set out to answer a chemistry question: What is air? But it was Franklin who helped Priestley understand that he was grappling with an even more profound mystery: why we have air to breathe in the first place.

Long overlooked correspondence between Franklin and Priestley gives us front row seats to a remarkable historical drama: two great minds grappling with the first stirrings of a genuinely new way of thinking about life on earth. Priestley’s experiments revealed that the air we breathe is not some unalienable physical phenomenon, like gravity or magnetism, but is rather something that has been specifically manufactured by plants. In turn, Franklin recognized that the manufacture of breathable air is itself part of a vast, interconnected system that links animals, plants and invisible gases. And the choices we make as humans—destroying trees that grow near houses, for instance—can have a dangerous impact on that flow, if the core participants in the system aren’t properly appreciated and protected. In discovering how Mother Nature had invented our atmosphere, Franklin and Priestley were inventing something just as profound: the ecosystems view of the world.

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