Where was oxygen discovered?

Like many scientific breakthroughs, the discovery of oxygen happened in multiple locations by researchers who were working independently. Several English chemists are known to have separated oxygen in the course of their experiments, but oxygen was only identified as a distinct element by Joseph Priestly and Carl Wilhelm Scheele.

Though Priestly and Scheele were the first to recognize the product of their experiments as a previously unknown element, it fell to the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier to describe oxygen's role in forming acids and give the element its name. The discovery of oxygen could, therefore, be said to have occurred almost simultaneously in England, Sweden and France.