Humphry Davy

Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet (17 December 1778 – 29 May 1829) was a Cornish chemist and inventor.^[1] He is best remembered today for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline earth metals, as well as contributions to the discoveries of the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine. Berzelius called Davy's 1806 Bakerian Lecture On Some Chemical Agencies of Electricity^[2] "one of the best memoirs which has ever enriched the theory of chemistry."^[3] He was a 1st Baronet, President of the Royal Society (PRS), Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA), and Fellow of the Geological Society (FGS).

Education, Apprentice and poetry

Humphry Davy was born at Penzance in Cornwall, England, on 17 December 1778. The family moved to Varfell, near Ludgvan, when he was 9, and in term-time Davy boarded with John Tonkin, his mother's godfather.^[1] From the Penzance school Davy went in 1793 to Truro Grammar School, finishing his education there under the Rev. Dr. Cardew, who, in a later letter to Davies Gilbert, said dryly: "I could not discern the faculties by which he was afterwards so much distinguished." Davy said himself: "I consider it fortunate I was left much to myself as a child, and put upon no particular plan of study... What I am I made myself."^[4]

After the death of Davy's father in 1794, Tonkin apprenticed the boy to John Bingham Borlase, a surgeon with a large practice at Penzance. Davy's indenture is dated 10 February 1795. In the apothecary's dispensary, Davy became a chemist, and a garret in Tonkin's house was the scene of his earliest chemical operations. Davy's friends would often say: "This boy Humphry is incorrigible. He will blow us all." His eldest sister complained of the ravages made on her dresses by corrosive substances.^[4]

Much has been said of Davy as a poet, and John Ayrton Paris somewhat hastily says that his verses "bear the stamp of lofty genius". Davy's first production preserved bears the date of 1795. It is entitled The Sons of Genius, and is marked by the usual immaturity of youth. Other poems produced in the following years, especially On the Mount's Bay and St Michael's Mount, are pleasingly descriptive verses, showing sensibility but no true poetic imagination. Davy was also a painter and three of his paintings dating from circa 1796 have been donated to the Penlee House museum at Penzance. One of these is of the view from above Gulval showing the church, Mount's Bay and the Mount, while the other two depict Loch Lomond in Scotland.^[5][6]

Davy soon abandoned poetry for science. While writing verses at the age of seventeen in honour of his first love, he was eagerly discussing with his Quaker friend and mentor Robert Dunkin the question of the materiality of heat. Dunkin once remarked: ‘I tell thee what, Humphry, thou art the most quibbling hand at a dispute I ever met with in my life.’ One winter day he took Dunkin to Larigan river,^[7] to show him that rubbing two plates of ice together developed sufficient energy by motion, to melt them, and that after the motion was suspended, the pieces were united by regelation. This was a crude form of an analogous experiment later exhibited by Davy, in the lecture-room of the Royal Institution, which elicited considerable attention.^[4] As professor at the Royal Institution, Davy would later repeat many of the ingenious experiments which he learned from his friend and mentor, Robert Dunkin.

Early scientific interests

Davies Giddy, afterwards Davies Gilbert, accidentally saw Davy in Penzance, carelessly swinging on the half-gate of Dr Borlase's house. Gilbert was interested by the lad's talk, offered him the use of his library, and invited him to his house at Tredrea. This led to an introduction to Dr Edwards, who then resided at Hayle Copper House, and was also chemical lecturer in the school of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Dr Edwards permitted Davy to use the apparatus in his laboratory, and appears to have directed his attention to the floodgates of the port of Hayle, which were rapidly decaying from the contact of copper and iron under the influence of seawater. Galvanic corrosion was not then understood, but the phenomenon prepared the mind of Davy for his experiments on the copper sheathing of ships in later days. Gregory Watt, the son of James Watt, visited Penzance for his health's sake, and lodging at Mrs Davy's house became a friend of her son and gave him instructions in chemistry. Davy also formed a useful acquaintance with the Wedgwood family, who spent a winter at Penzance.^[4]

Dr Thomas Beddoes and Professor Hailstone were engaged in a geological controversy upon the rival merits of the Plutonian and the Neptunist hypotheses. They travelled together to examine the Cornish coast accompanied by Davies Gilbert, and thus made Davy's acquaintance. Beddoes, who had recently established at Bristol a 'Pneumatic Institution,' required an assistant to superintend the laboratory. Gilbert recommended Davy for the post, and Gregory Watt, in 1798, showed Beddoes the Young man's Researches on Heat and Light, which were subsequently published by him in the first volume of West-Country Contributions. Prolonged negotiations were carried on, mainly by Gilbert. Mrs Davy and Borlase consented to Davy's departure, but Tonkin desired to fix him in his native town as a surgeon, and actually altered his will when he found that Davy insisted on going to Dr Beddoes.

In 1809, it is said that Davy actually invented the first electric light. He connected two wires to a battery and attached a charcoal strip between the other ends of the wires. The charged carbon glowed, making the first arc lamp.

The Pneumatic Institution

James Watt in 1792 by Carl Frederik von Breda

On 2 October 1798, Davy joined the Pneumatic Institution at Bristol. This institution had been established for the purpose of investigating the medical powers of factitious airs and gases, and to Davy was committed the superintendence of the various experiments. The arrangement concluded between Dr. Beddoes and Davy was a liberal one, and enabled Davy to give up all claims upon his paternal property in favour of his mother. He did not intend to abandon the profession of medicine, being still determined to study and graduate at Edinburgh, but he soon began to fill parts of the Institution with voltaic batteries. During his residence at Bristol, Davy formed the acquaintance of the Earl of Durham, who became a resident for his health in the Pneumatic Institution, and close friendships with Gregory Watt, James Watt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, all of whom became regular users of Davy's nitrous oxide (laughing gas), to which Davy would become addicted. The gas was first synthesised by the English natural philosopher and chemist Joseph Priestley in 1772, who called it phlogisticated nitrous air (see phlogiston).^[8] Priestley published his discovery in the book Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1775), where he described how to produce the preparation of "nitrous air diminished", by heating iron filings dampened with nitric acid.^[9]

James Watt built a portable gas chamber to facilitate Davy's experiments with the inhalation of nitrous oxide. At one point these were combined with wine to judge the efficacy of the gas as a cure for hangover (his laboratory notebook indicated success). The gas was popular among Davy's friends and acquaintances, and he noted that it might be useful for performing surgical operations.^[10] Anesthetics would not be regularly used in medicine or dentistry until decades after Davy's death.^[11]

Davy threw himself energetically into the work of the laboratory and formed a long romantic friendship with Mrs Anna Beddoes, who acted as his guide on walks and other fine sights of the locality.^[12] In December 1799 Davy visited London for the first time, and his circle of friends was there much extended.^[4]

In these gas experiments Davy ran considerable risks. His respiration of nitric oxide may have led, by its union with common air in the mouth, to the formation of nitric acid (HNO₃),^[13] which severely injured the mucous membrane, and in Davy's attempt to inhale four quarts of 'pure hydrocarbonate' gas in an experiment with carbon monoxide he 'seemed sinking into annihilation.' On being removed into the open air, Davy faintly articulated, 'I do not think I shall die,'^[13] but some hours elapsed before the painful symptoms ceased.^[4] Davy was still able to take his own pulse as he staggered out of the laboratory and into the garden, and he described it in his notes as 'threadlike and beating with excessive quickness'.

In this year the first volume of the West-Country Collections was issued. Half of the volume consisted of Davy's essays On Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light, On Phos-oxygen and its Combinations, and on the Theory of Respiration. On 22 February 1799 Davy, writing to Davies Gilbert, says: ‘I am now as much convinced of the non-existence of caloric as I am of the existence of light.' In another letter written to Davies Gilbert, on 10 April, Davy informs him: "I made a discovery yesterday which proves how necessary it is to repeat experiments. The gaseous oxide of azote (the laughing gas) is perfectly respirable when pure. It is never deleterious but when it contains nitrous gas. I have found a mode of making it pure." He then says that he breathed sixteen quarts of it for nearly seven minutes, and that it ‘absolutely intoxicated me.’ During this year Davy published his Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, chiefly concerning Nitrous Oxide and its Respiration. In after years Davy regretted that he had ever published these immature hypotheses, which he himself subsequently designated as ‘the dreams of misemployed genius which the light of experiment and observation has never conducted to truth.’^[4]

Davy's later time at the Pneumatic Institution was spent partially in experimentation In 1800, Davy informed Davies Gilbert that he had been ‘repeating the galvanic experiments with success’ in the intervals of the experiments on the gases, which ‘almost incessantly occupied him from January to April.’

The Royal Institution

In 1799, Count Rumford had proposed the establishment in London of an 'Institution for Diffusing Knowledge', i.e. the Royal Institution. The house in Albemarle Street was bought in April 1799. Rumford became secretary to the institution, and Dr. Garnett was the first lecturer.

1802 satirical cartoon by James Gillray showing a Royal Institution lecture on pneumatics, with Davy holding the bellows and Count Rumford looking on at extreme right. Dr Garnett is the lecturer, holding the victim's nose.

Davy's 'Researches,' which was full of striking and novel facts, and rich in chemical discoveries, soon attracted the attention of natural philosophers, and Davy now made his grand move in life. Joseph Banks had long had his eye on Davy, and in February 1801 Davy was officially interviewed by Banks, Benjamin Thompson (who had been appointed Count Rumford) and Henry Cavendish, the Committee of the Royal Institution. Davy wrote to Davies Giddy on 8 March 1801 about the offers made by Banks and Thompson, a possible move to London and the promise of funding for Davy's work in galvanism. In that letter he also mentioned that he might not be collaborating further with Beddoes on therapeutic gases. The next day Davy left Bristol to take up his new post at the Royal Institution,^[11] it having been resolved 'that Humphry Davy be engaged in the service of the Royal Institution in the capacity of assistant lecturer in chemistry, director of the chemical laboratory, and assistant editor of the journals of the institution, and that he be allowed to occupy a room in the house, and be furnished with coals and candles, and that he be paid a salary of 100l. per annum.'^[4]

On 25 April 1801, Davy gave his first lecture on the relatively new subject of 'Galvanism'. He and his good friend Coleridge had had many conversations about the nature of human knowledge and progress, and Davy's lectures gave his audience a vision of human civilisation brought forward by scientific discovery. "It [science] has bestowed on him powers which may almost be called creative; which have enabled him to modify and change the beings surrounding him, and by his experiments to interrogate nature with power, not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her operations, but rather as a master, active with his own instruments."^[11] The first lecture garnered rave reviews, and by the June lecture Davy wrote to John King that his last lecture had attendance of nearly 500 people. "There was Respiration, Nitrous Oxide, and unbounded Applause. Amen!"^[11]

Davy's lectures also included spectacular and sometimes dangerous chemical demonstrations for his audience, a generous helping of references to divine creation, and genuine scientific information. Not only a popular lecturer, the young and handsome Davy acquired a huge female following around London, and nearly half of the attendees pictured in Gillray's cartoon are female. When Davy's lecture series on Galvanism ended, he progressed to a new series on Agricultural Chemistry, and his popularity continued to skyrocket. By June 1802, after just over a year at the Institution and at the age of 23, Davy was nominated to full lecturer at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Garnett quietly resigned, citing health reasons.^[11]

In November 1804 Davy became a Fellow of the Royal Society, over which he would later preside. He was one of the founding members of the Geological Society in 1807^[14] and was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1810.

Discovery of new elements

Sodium metal, about 10 g, under oil

A voltaic pile

Magnesium metal crystals

Davy was a pioneer in the field of electrolysis using the voltaic pile to split common compounds and thus prepare many new elements. He went on to electrolyse molten salts and discovered several new metals, including sodium and potassium, highly reactive elements known as the alkali metals. Davy discovered potassium in 1807, deriving it from caustic potash (KOH). Before the 19th century, no distinction had been made between potassium and sodium. Potassium was the first metal that was isolated by electrolysis. Davy isolated sodium in the same year by passing an electric current through molten sodium hydroxide. Davy discovered calcium in 1808 by electrolyzing a mixture of lime and mercuric oxide.^[15][16] Davy was trying to isolate calcium; when he heard that Berzelius and Pontin prepared calcium amalgam by electrolyzing lime in mercury, he tried it himself. He worked with electrolysis throughout his life and was first to isolate magnesium, boron, and barium.

Discovery of chlorine

Chlorine was discovered in 1774 by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who called it "dephlogisticated marine acid" (see phlogiston theory) and mistakenly thought it contained oxygen. Davy showed that the acid of Scheel's substance, called at the time oxymuriatic acid, contained no oxygen. This discovery overturned Lavoisier's definition of acids as compounds of oxygen. In 1810, chlorine was given its current name by Humphry Davy, who insisted that chlorine was in fact an element.^[17]

Popular public figure

Davy revelled in his public status, as his lectures gathered many spectators. He became well known in 1799 due to his experiments with the physiological action of some gases, including laughing gas (nitrous oxide), with enthusiastic experimental subjects including his poet friends Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.^[13]

Davy later damaged his eyesight in a laboratory accident with nitrogen trichloride.^[18] Pierre Louis Dulong first prepared this compound in 1812, and lost two fingers and an eye in two separate explosions with it. Davy's own accident induced him to hire Michael Faraday as a coworker.

European travels

Sir Humphry Davy, 1830 engraving based on the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830)

A diamond crystal in its matrix

In 1812, Davy was knighted, gave a farewell lecture to the Royal Institution, and married a wealthy widow, Jane Apreece. (While Davy was generally acknowledged as being faithful to his wife, their relationship was stormy, and in later years he travelled to continental Europe alone.) In October 1813, he and his wife, accompanied by Michael Faraday as his scientific assistant (and valet), travelled to France to collect a medal that Napoleon Bonaparte had awarded Davy for his electro-chemical work. While in Paris, Davy was asked by Gay-Lussac to investigate a mysterious substance isolated by Bernard Courtois. Davy showed it to be an element, which is now called iodine.^[19][20]

The party left Paris in December 1813, travelling south to Italy.^[21] They sojourned in Florence, where, in a series of experiments conducted with Faraday's assistance, Davy succeeded in using the sun's rays to ignite diamond, proving it is composed of pure carbon.

Davy's party continued to Rome, and also visited Naples and Mount Vesuvius. By June 1814, they were in Milan, where they met Alessandro Volta, and then continued north to Geneva. They returned to Italy via Munich and Innsbruck, and when their plans to travel to Greece and Istanbul were abandoned after Napoleon's escape from Elba, they returned to England.

Davy lamp

The Davy lamp

A statue of Davy stands in Penzance, Cornwall; he holds his safety lamp in his right hand.

After his return to England in 1815, Davy experimented with lamps for use in coal mines. There had been many mining explosions caused by firedamp or methane often ignited by open flames of the lamps then used by miners. In particular the Felling mine disaster in 1812 near Newcastle caused great loss of life, and action was needed to improve underground lighting and especially the lamps used by miners. Davy conceived of using an iron gauze to enclose a lamp's flame, and so prevent the methane burning inside the lamp from passing out to the general atmosphere. Although the idea of the safety lamp had already been demonstrated by William Reid Clanny and by the then unknown (but later very famous) engineer George Stephenson, Davy's use of wire gauze to prevent the spread of flame was used by many other inventors in their later designs. George Stephenson's lamp was very popular in the north-east coalfields, and used the same principle of preventing the flame reaching the general atmosphere, but by different means. Unfortunately, although the new design of gauze lamp initially did seem to offer protection, it gave much less light, and quickly deteriorated in the wet conditions of most pits. Rusting of the gauze quickly made the lamp unsafe, and the number of deaths from firedamp explosions rose yet further.

There was some discussion as to whether Davy had discovered the principles behind his lamp without the help of the work of Smithson Tennant, but it was generally agreed that the work of both men had been independent. Davy refused to patent the lamp, and its invention led to his being awarded the Rumford medal in 1816.^[1]

Acid-base studies

In 1815 Davy suggested that acids were substances that contained replaceable hydrogen – hydrogen that could be partly or totally replaced by metals. When acids reacted with metals they formed salts. Bases were substances that reacted with acids to form salts and water. These definitions worked well for most of the nineteenth century.^[22]

Last years and death

Michael Faraday, portrait by Thomas Phillips c. 1841–1842^[23]

In January 1819, Davy was awarded a baronetcy. Although Sir Francis Bacon (also later made a peer^[24]) and Sir Isaac Newton had already been knighted, this was, at the time, the first such honour ever conferred on a man of science in Britain. A year later he became President of the Royal Society.

Davy's laboratory assistant, Michael Faraday, went on to enhance Davy's work and would become the more famous and influential scientist. Davy is supposed to have even claimed Faraday as his greatest discovery. Davy later accused Faraday of plagiarism, however, causing Faraday (the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry) to cease all research in electromagnetism until his mentor's death.

Of a sanguine, somewhat irritable temperament, Davy displayed characteristic enthusiasm and energy in all his pursuits. As is shown by his verses and sometimes by his prose, his mind was highly imaginative; the poet Coleridge declared that if he "had not been the first chemist, he would have been the first poet of his age", and Southey said that "he had all the elements of a poet; he only wanted the art." In spite of his ungainly exterior and peculiar manner, his happy gifts of exposition and illustration won him extraordinary popularity as a lecturer, his experiments were ingenious and rapidly performed, and Coleridge went to hear him "to increase his stock of metaphors." The dominating ambition of his life was to achieve fame, but though that sometimes betrayed him into petty jealousy, it did not leave him insensible to the claims on his knowledge of the "cause of humanity", to use a phrase often employed by him in connection with his invention of the miners' lamp. Of the smaller observances of etiquette he was careless, and his frankness of disposition sometimes exposed him to annoyances which he might have avoided by the exercise of ordinary tact.^[25]

According to one of Davy's biographers, June Z. Fullmer, he was a deist.^[26]

Davy's grave at Cimetière Plainpalais in Geneva

He spent the last months of his life writing Consolations in Travel, an immensely popular, somewhat freeform compendium of poetry, thoughts on science and philosophy. Published posthumously, the work became a staple of both scientific and family libraries for several decades afterward. Davy spent the winter in Rome, hunting in the Campagna on his fiftieth birthday. But on 20 February 1829 he had another stroke. After spending many months attempting to recuperate, Davy died in a hotel room in Geneva, Switzerland, on 29 May 1829.^[1]

He had wished to be buried where he died, but had also wanted the burial delayed in case he was only comatose. He refused to allow a post-mortem for similar reasons. But the laws of Geneva did not allow any delay and he was given a public funeral on the following Monday, in the Plainpalais Cemetery, outside the city walls. Jane organised a memorial tablet for him, in Westminster Abbey shortly afterwards, at a cost of £142.^{[27] [28]}

Legacy and honours

• A plaque to honour him is on the wall of the Royal Panopticon of Science and Arts in 1854.

• A lunar crater (Davy) is named after Sir Humphry Davy. It has a diameter of 34 km and coordinates of 11.8S, 8.1W.

• In his hometown of Penzance, Cornwall, a statue of Davy stands in front of the imposing Market House (now owned by Lloyds TSB) at the top of the town's main street Market Jew Street. Nearby is a house on which a commemorative plaque claims the location as the site of his birth.

• Penzance also has a secondary school named Humphry Davy School. Similar to James Prescott Joule and Isaac Newton, Davy is also remembered in his hometown by a pub – "The Sir Humphry Davy" at 32 Alverton Street, west of the Market House.

• Davy was the subject of the first ever clerihew.

• Davy was a founding Fellow of the Zoological Society of London

• A satellite of the University of Sheffield at Golden Smithies Lane in Wath upon Dearne (Manvers) was called Humphry Davy House and was home to the School of Nursing and Midwifery, until April 2009.

• There is a road, Humphry Davy Way, adjacent to the docks in Bristol named after Sir Humphry Davy.

• There is a street named after Sir Humphry Davy (Humphry-Davy-Straße) in the industrial quarter of the town of Cuxhaven, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.

• The University of Plymouth has named one of its science buildings after the chemist

• The Royal Society of London has awarded the Davy Medal annually since 1877 "for an outstandingly important recent discovery in any branch of chemistry."

• Davy is the subject of a humorous song by Richard Gendall, recorded in 1980 by folk-singer Brenda Wootton, each verse of which recalls one of Davy's major discoveries.

• English playwright Nick Darke wrote Laughing Gas (2005) a comedy script about the life of Sir Humphry Davy, unfinished at the time of Nick Darke's death; completed posthumously by actor and playwright Carl Grose and produced by the Truro-based production company O-region.

• Davy's passion for outdoors and fly-fishing earned him title "father of modern fly-fishing" and his book Salmonia is often considered as "fly-fisherman bible".

Publications

See Fullmer's work for a full list of Davy's articles.^[29]

Humphry Davy's books are as follows:

• — (1800). Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and Its Respiration. Bristol: Biggs and Cottle. Archived from the original on 12 May 2006. 
• — (1812). Elements of Chemical Philosophy. London: Johnson and Co. ISBN 0-217-88947-6. 
• — (1813). Elements of Agricultural Chemistry in a Course of Lectures. London: Longman. 
• — (1816). The Papers of Sir H. Davy. Newcastle: Emerson Charnley.  (on Davy's safety lamp)
• — (1827). Discourses to the Royal Society. London: John Murray. 
• — (1828). Salmonia or Days of Fly Fishing. London: John Murray. 
• — (1830). Consolations in Travel or The Last Days of a Philosopher. London: John Murray. 

Davy also contributed articles on Chemistry to Rees's Cyclopædia, but the topics are not known.

References

Bibliography

• Davy, John (1839–1840). The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy. London: Smith, Elder, and Company. ISBN 0-217-88944-1. 
• Fullmer, June Z. (1969). Sir Humphry Davy's Published Works. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-80961-0. 
• Hartley, Harold (1960). "The Wilkins Lecture. Sir Humphry Davy, Bt., P.R.S. 1778–1829". Proceedings of the Royal Society A 255 (1281): 153–180. Bibcode:1960RSPSA.255..153H. doi:10.1098/rspa.1960.0060. JSTOR 2413906. 
• Hartley, Harold (1966). Humphry Davy. London: Nelson. ISBN 0-85409-729-5. 
• Knight, David (1992). Humphry Davy: Science and Power. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-631-16816-8. 
• Lamont-Brown, Raymond (2004). Humphry Davy, Life Beyond the Lamp. Stroud: Sutton Publishing. ISBN 0-7509-3231-7. 
• Partington, J. R. (1964). History of Chemistry 4. London: Macmillan. pp. 29–76. 
• Treneer, Anne (1963). The Mercurial Chemist: a Life of Sir Humphry Davy. London: Methuen. 

External links

• Kenyon, T. K. (2008/2009). "Science and Celebrity: Humphry Davy’s Rising Star". Chemical Heritage 26: 30–35.  Check date values in: |date= (help)

• Pratt, Anne (1841). "Sir Humphrey Davy". Dawnings of Genius. London: Charles Knight and Company.  (Davy's first name is spelled incorrectly in this book.)

• Works by Humphry Davy at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Humphry Davy at Internet Archive
• The Collected Works of Humphry Davy
• Journal of a Tour made in the years 1828, 1829, through Styria, Carniola, and Italy, whilst accompanying the late Sir Humphry Davy by J.J. Tobin (1832)
• Humphry Davy, Poet and Philosopher by Thomas Edward Thorpe, New York: Macmillan, 1896
• Young Humphry Davy: The Making of an Experimental Chemist by June Z. Fullmer, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2000
• BBC – Napoleon's medal 'cast into sea'
• Archival material relating to Humphry Davy listed at the UK National Archives