The discoverer of phlogiston, later known as oxygen, Joseph Priestley, began his career in Warrington and later moved to Birmingham, where he made his most famous discoveries. He would later voyage from Birmingham to the New World (in the form of America) after a mob, accusing him of “popery†(i.e. Catholicism, an absurdity, he was a member of a dissenting protestant sect) burnt his house to the ground (his own discovery, with cavalier disregard for its benefactor, actively assisted in the conflagration).
We would also move from Warrington to Birmingham and from there I would later voyage to another part of the New World, my own Promised Land, Australia (although not as a consequence of anything so dramatic as a deliberate phlogiston assisted house burning).  But I am getting ahead of myself; before we journeyed to Birmingham there was a short, although crucial diversion, pointing the ways I would later take.  When I was about three we moved to the village of Statham, a few miles from Warrington, in the county of Cheshire (at this time Warrington was still in the county of Lancashire).  Cheshire was more rural, more like the Sligo, the Irish county in which my parents had grown up, than the townscape of Warrington.
The above is an excerpt from the ebook “The Voyage to the Promised Land†by Will Keyes Byrne (my quasi-autobiography).  You may download a FREE sample from Amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/bovf37k [1]
No Kindle? No worries!
This ebook is published in Kindle format but if you do not have one don’t worry you can download a FREE app to read it on a PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Smartphone or Android Tablet.  I don’t actually own a Kindle myself; I read Kindle format on my iPhone. I love it â€" I can read on the bus, train, or while waiting for… anything.
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