Friends introduced him to the major British experimenters in the field: John Canton, William Watson, and Benjamin Franklin.

Such experiments demonstrate that Priestley was interested in the relationship between chemistry and electricity from the beginning of his scientific career.

[6] In one of his more speculative moments, he "provided a mathematical quasi-demonstration of the inverse-square force law for electrical charges.

Priestley's famous text supported the distribution of Franklin's research, which helped it becoming one of the most important works on electricity in the late 18th century.

[4]Priestley's strength as a natural philosopher was qualitative rather than quantitative and his observation of "a current of real air" between two electrified points would later interest Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell as they investigated electromagnetism.