Humphry Davy was born in 1778, in Penzance, Cornwall. His father died when he was 15, and he was apprenticed to a surgeon in Penzance in 1795, shortly after his 16th birthday. In 1798 he was employed to superintend the laboratory at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol (established by Thomas Beddoes, with the aim of treating diseases through the inhalation of different gases). Here he discovered the respiratory effects of nitrous oxide (laughing gas); he introduced James Watt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey to its pleasures, and himself became addicted to it.
In 1801 he took up a post at the newly–established Royal Institution in London, where he had what was then the world's most powerful battery (of the type known as a voltaic pile). With it he created the first incandescent light, by passing electric current through a thin strip of platinum. He became a pioneer in the field of electrolysis, using the voltaic pile to separate chemical compounds; this was what enabled him to isolate so many elements for the first time. As well as discovering sodium, potassium, calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron, he also proved that chlorine and iodine were elements.
Davy was knighted in 1812; he was arguably the first scientist to receive this honour. (Francis Bacon was knighted in 1603, but he was a statesman and lawyer as well as a scientist; Isaac Newton was knighted in 1705, but he too was a member of parliament and had been Master of the Royal Mint since 1699. Wikipedia suggests that Newton's knighthood "is likely to have been motivated by political considerations connected with the Parliamentary election in May 1705, rather than any recognition of Newton's scientific work or services as Master of the Mint.")
1812 was a momentous year in the life of Humphry Davy for other reasons. It was in that year that he was seriously injured – and temporarily blinded – while experimenting with nitrogen trichloride (a byproduct of chemical reactions between ammonia–derivatives and chlorine). The experience prompted him to take on the young Michael Faraday (aged 20 at the time – thirteen years Davy's junior) as his assistant. Davy is supposed to have described Faraday as his greatest discovery.
Also in 1812, Davy married a wealthy widow, Jane Apreece. Over the next two or three years he travelled through France and Italy, with his wife and also Michael Faraday as his assistant and valet. It was on this tour (while visiting Joseph Louis Gay–Lussac in Paris) that Davy showed iodine to be an element, and in Florence he succeeded in using the sun's rays to set fire to a sample of diamond, thus proving that it was composed of pure carbon.
On his return to England in 1815, Davy set about solving the problem of firedamp in coal mines. He invented a lamp where the flame is surrounded by a wire mesh, which allowed air in but was fine enough to prevent flames from escaping and igniting gases outside the lamp.
Davy refused to patent his lamp, and he was awarded the Royal Society's Rumford Prize for it. But there was, and still is, some controversy over the extent to which his lamp relied on earlier designs by the Irish physician William Reid Clanny, who was working at Monkwearmouth in County Durham, and George Stephenson, who would later become world–famous but was then unknown outside the north–east of England. Stephenson went to his grave believing that Davy had stolen his idea; Clanny's work was later recognised and rewarded, but the experience left Stephenson with a lifelong distrust of London–based so–called experts.
On 20 February 1829 – not long after his 50th birthday – Davy suffered a stroke, while spending the winter in Italy. He died in a hotel room in Geneva, Switzerland, on 29 May, and was buried in the same city.
Humphry Davy probably discovered more elements than any other scientist before him, but his record was broken some 250 years later by the American nuclear scientist Albert Ghiorso. Born in California, Ghiorso is credited with a part in the discovery of twelve elements – from curium (element 96) and americium (element 95) in 1944, to seaborgium (element 106) in 1974. In 1944 he was a member of the team led by Glenn T. Seaborg at the Manhattan Project in Chcago; after the end of the war in 1945 he joined the team at the University of California, Berkeley (under Stanley G. Thompson) and led it from around 1952.
It wouldn't do to finish this page without a mention of the popular English novelist and humorist, E. C. Bentley (1875–1956). It was during a science class, when Bentley was a 16–year–old pupil at St Paul's School in London, that the following lines came into his head:
Sir Humphry Davy
Was not fond of gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
By 1905, when the first collection of clerihews was published, the second line of this one – the first to be written – had been changed to the more succinct "Abominated gravy".
Having been born in 1875, Bentley of course never met Humphry Davy. History does not seem to record where the latter actually stood on the subject of gravy.
© Haydn Thompson 2017