Humphry Davy: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · Breathing the Gas Himself

Penzance to Bristol, and a very dangerous self-experiment

1778 – 1801 · Penzance · Bristol

Humphry Davy was born at Penzance in Cornwall in December 1778. His father was a woodcarver who lost money in speculation and died when Davy was sixteen, leaving the family in debt. Davy was apprenticed to a local surgeon-apothecary and taught himself chemistry from Lavoisier's *Traité*, which he read in French.

At nineteen he was recruited by Thomas Beddoes to the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol — an establishment set up to investigate whether the newly discovered gases could treat disease, particularly tuberculosis.

Davy's method was to breathe them.

He investigated nitrous oxide by inhaling large quantities of it repeatedly over months, and published a 580-page book on it in 1800, including detailed accounts of his own sensations: giddiness, an intense pleasurable feeling, uncontrollable laughter, and a sense of thrilling in the extremities. He noted that it relieved a headache and the pain of an erupting wisdom tooth, and suggested it might be used in surgical operations — a suggestion nobody acted on for forty-four years.

He also gave it to friends, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, and recorded their accounts.

And he breathed other things. He inhaled carbon monoxide, in stages, and passed out; he came very close to killing himself and had to be revived. He tried nitric oxide, which formed acid in his mouth and injured it badly.

The damage was permanent and cumulative. He was in poor health for much of his later life, and the gases are the most likely cause.

“Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument.”

— Humphry Davy, on the voltaic pile

Why this matters

Davy proposed nitrous oxide for surgical anaesthesia in 1800 and nobody acted on it for forty-four years, during which every operation was performed on a conscious patient.

You have the gas, the laughter and the damage. What would you ask?

Ask Davy

• “What did nitrous oxide actually feel like?”
• “You suggested it for surgery in 1800 — why did nobody use it?”
• “How close did carbon monoxide come to killing you?”
• “Should you have experimented on yourself at all?”
• “How did you learn chemistry in Penzance?”

Chapter 2 · Albemarle Street Made One-Way

The most popular lecturer in England

1801 – 1812 · London · The Royal Institution

In 1801 Davy was appointed to the Royal Institution in London, and within two years he was the most celebrated lecturer in the country.

The crowds were extraordinary. The lecture theatre held around a thousand and was regularly full; Albemarle Street became so congested with carriages arriving for his lectures that it was made one-way — reputedly the first one-way street in London.

His audience was fashionable London, and a large proportion of it was women, at a time when women were excluded from almost every other scientific venue in Britain. Coleridge attended, and said he went to renew his stock of metaphors.

What he did on stage was *perform experiments* — explosions, brilliant flames, gases, the newly built battery throwing sparks — combined with clear exposition and an unusual gift for making an audience feel the significance of what they were watching.

It is easy to be sniffy about this. It should not be. The Royal Institution depended on subscriptions, and Davy's lectures funded the laboratory in the basement where the actual research was done. Public science paid for private science, directly.

He also worked on agricultural chemistry, on tanning, and on the chemistry of soils, giving lecture courses to the Board of Agriculture.

His stated position was that an experiment worth doing is worth performing in front of an audience, and that a discovery is worth nothing until it has been shown to people.

Why this matters

Davy's public lectures funded the laboratory beneath them: the popular science paid directly for the research.

You have the crowded theatre and the laboratory below it. What is your question?

Ask Davy

• “What did a Royal Institution lecture actually look like?”
• “Why did so many women come to hear you?”
• “Is a discovery worth nothing until it is shown?”
• “Did the performing take time from the research?”
• “Who paid for the laboratory in the basement?”

Chapter 3 · Six Elements in Two Years

Electricity as a chemical crowbar

1806 – 1808 · London

Volta announced the electric pile in 1800. Nicholson and Carlisle immediately used a current to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Davy saw the implication and took it further than anyone.

His hypothesis: chemical combination is *electrical* in nature. Compounds are held together by opposite electrical charges on their components. If that is so, then a sufficiently powerful current should be able to tear apart any compound whatever — including those no chemical reagent could touch.

The alkalis were the test case. Potash and soda had resisted every attempt at decomposition, and Lavoisier had listed them among the simple substances because nobody could break them.

Davy built the most powerful battery in existence at the Royal Institution — hundreds of plates, funded by subscription.

On 6 October 1807 he electrolysed slightly moistened potash. Small globules of a bright metallic substance appeared at the negative electrode, some of which burst into flame. It was a metal, lighter than water, that caught fire on contact with it. He named it *potassium*. His cousin recorded that Davy danced about the room in ecstasy.

Sodium followed within days. In 1808 came calcium, magnesium, strontium and barium.

Six elements in two years, all by the same idea: what chemistry cannot open, electricity can.

In 1810 he turned on Lavoisier. Lavoisier had insisted every acid contains oxygen — the name says so. Davy showed that the substance then called oxymuriatic acid contains no oxygen at all, is an element in its own right, and named it *chlorine*.

He could not explain *why* electricity decomposes compounds. The electron was ninety years away.

Why this matters

Davy's guess that chemical bonding is electrical gave him a method that opened six compounds nothing else could touch, ninety years before the electron explained why it worked.

You have the battery and the burning globules. What would you ask?

Ask Davy

• “What did you see when the potassium appeared?”
• “Why should electricity be able to open a compound?”
• “How did chlorine destroy Lavoisier's theory of acids?”
• “What did you think was actually holding a compound together?”
• “Did you dance round the room?”

Chapter 4 · The Lamp He Would Not Patent

And what happened after it went into the pits

1815 – 1816 · Newcastle · The northern coalfields

In 1812 an explosion at Felling colliery near Gateshead killed ninety-two men and boys. Firedamp — methane seeping from the coal — ignited from the naked candles miners worked by. Such explosions were routine and killed continuously.

Davy was asked to help. He went north, obtained samples of the gas, and studied its combustion. He established the key fact: a flame will not pass through a fine metal mesh, because the metal conducts heat away fast enough to drop the gas on the far side below its ignition temperature.

So: enclose the flame in a cylinder of fine wire gauze. Air and firedamp pass through and burn *inside* the lamp. The flame changes colour and lengthens when firedamp is present, warning the miner. And the flame cannot get out to the gas in the workings.

He refused to patent it. His stated reason was that his only object was to serve humanity, and that knowledge which can save lives must not be owned.

George Stephenson had independently produced a lamp on a similar principle at almost the same time, and a long and bitter priority dispute followed, with Davy's supporters insisting a mere engine-wright could not have reasoned it out. Modern assessment is that both arrived at working lamps independently.

And here is the uncomfortable part. Deaths from explosions did not fall as expected. They rose.

Because the lamp made it possible to work seams previously too dangerous to enter, owners sent men deeper into gassy workings. The lamp was also fragile — a damaged gauze or a draught could let flame through. It made mining more productive, and the additional exposure outweighed the protection.

A safety device that increases the amount of dangerous activity undertaken is a pattern that recurs, and this is one of its earliest documented cases.

Why this matters

The safety lamp made deeper, gassier seams workable, and deaths rose rather than fell — an early and well-documented case of a safety device increasing exposure to risk.

You have the gauze, the refusal to patent and the rising death toll. What is your question?

Ask Davy

• “Why does a flame not pass through wire gauze?”
• “Why refuse to patent it?”
• “Why did deaths rise after your lamp went into the pits?”
• “Was Stephenson's lamp really independent of yours?”
• “Who was responsible for how the lamp was used?”

Chapter 5 · Faraday

The bookbinder's apprentice, and the vote against him

1812 – 1829 · London · Europe · Geneva

In 1812 a young bookbinder's apprentice named Michael Faraday attended four of Davy's lectures, took careful notes, bound them into a book, and sent it to Davy asking for employment.

Davy, who had temporarily damaged his sight in a laboratory explosion, employed him briefly as a secretary and then, in March 1813, as laboratory assistant at the Royal Institution.

Later that year Davy took Faraday on an eighteen-month European tour, meeting Volta, Ampère and Gay-Lussac. Davy's wife Jane Apreece — whom he had married in 1812, and whose fortune had freed him from lecturing for a living — treated Faraday as a servant, requiring him to eat with the staff and ride outside the carriage. Faraday nearly went home.

The scientific education was extraordinary. The social humiliation was real.

Faraday's own work developed rapidly, and by the 1820s he was making discoveries of the first rank. In 1821 he produced electromagnetic rotation — the principle of the electric motor. Davy accused him, unfairly, of failing to acknowledge Wollaston's prior work.

When Faraday was proposed for Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1824, Davy — by then President — opposed it, and reportedly asked Faraday to withdraw. Faraday declined. He was elected with one dissenting vote, generally assumed to be Davy's.

The remark that Faraday was Davy's greatest discovery was made in his lifetime and he did not enjoy it.

Davy's health, broken by years of inhaled fumes, gave way. He had a stroke in 1826, travelled abroad for his health, and died at Geneva in May 1829, aged fifty.

Faraday went on to discover electromagnetic induction two years later.

Why this matters

Davy brought Faraday into science and then opposed his election to the Royal Society, which makes the relationship the clearest case of mentorship curdling into rivalry.

You have the bound lecture notes and the single dissenting vote. What would you ask?

Ask Davy

• “What made you employ a bookbinder's apprentice?”
• “Why did you oppose Faraday's election?”
• “How was Faraday treated on the European tour?”
• “Was Faraday your greatest discovery?”
• “What did the gases finally cost you?”

What Davy changed

Six elements bear witness to a single idea: that electricity can take apart what chemistry cannot. Electrolysis remains the industrial route to aluminium, chlorine and sodium hydroxide. Davy proved chlorine is an element, disproving Lavoisier's theory of acids; proposed nitrous oxide for surgery forty-four years before anyone used it; left the safety lamp unpatented; and brought Michael Faraday into science.

A debate that continues

The priority dispute with George Stephenson over the safety lamp was bitterly fought and both men are now generally credited independently; and deaths in coal mines rose rather than fell after the lamp's introduction, because it made deeper and gassier workings viable.

Keep exploring — ask Davy

• “Which element gave you the most trouble?”
• “Should a life-saving invention ever be patented?”
• “What would you say to Faraday now?”

Related lives

• Michael Faraday — Discoverer of Electromagnetic Induction
• Alessandro Volta — Who Built A Battery Without A Frog
• Antoine Lavoisier — Father of Modern Chemistry
• Jöns Jacob Berzelius — Who Gave Chemistry Its Alphabet

Related themes

Electrolysis · The elements · Acids and their definition