Humphrey Davy, according to his contemporaries, could have chosen any one of several roads to fame. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of him, “Had not Davy been the first chemist, he probably would have been the first poet of his age.” Among many activities he invented the safety-lamp, the object of which was to protect miners from the perils of exploding fire-damp. George Stephenson invented a similar device at about the same time, or a little earlier, but Davy’s lamp was the one most generally adopted, and his claim as inventor is commonly recognized, while Stephenson’s fame is secure with the perfection of the steam-locomotive and the railroad.

Davy was born at Penzance in Cornwall December 17, 1778, the eldest son in a family of five children. More alert and imaginative than other boys, and with an uncommonly good memory, he made great headway at Mr. Coryton’s grammar school, where he went when he was six. Coleridge’s opinion of him may have been correct, for history says that he was a fluent writer of English and Latin verses while still a schoolboy, and that he could tell stories well enough to hold an audience of his teachers and neighbors. He liked fine language and the arts of speech, and, according to his brother, Dr. John Davy, he cultivated those arts in his walks. Once when he was taking a bottle of medicine to a sick woman in the country he began to declaim a stirring speech, and at its climax threw the bottle away. He never noticed its loss until he reached the patient, and then wondered what could have become of the vial. The bottle was found next morning in a hay-field adjoining the path Davy had taken.

When he was fourteen he left Mr. Coryton’s school for the Truro Grammar School, where he stayed for a year. Here he was famed for his good-humor and a very original turn of mind. A school friend, reminiscing about Humphrey, told of a walk several of them took one hot day. “Whilst others complained of the heat,” said he, “and whilst I unbuttoned my waistcoat, Humphrey appeared with his great-coat close-buttoned up to his chin, for the purpose, as he declared, of keeping out the heat. This was laughed at at the time, but it struck me then, as it appears to me now, as evincing originality of thought and an indisposition to be led by the example of others.”

This originality of thought and love of experiment for its own sake were to be chief characteristics of the future scientist.

His school education was finished when he was fifteen, and he returned home, where he studied French in a desultory fashion, and devoted most of his time to fishing, of which he was always very fond. His father’s death made him realize that as the eldest of the sons he must shoulder the responsibility for the family’s support, and, all his natural tastes lying in that direction, he decided to become a physician.

A practicing surgeon and apothecary of Penzance, Bingham Borlase, was willing to take Davy as an apprentice, and the youth began work and study in his office. But the boy was no ordinary apprentice. He became almost at once an omnivorous student and writer. He laid out a plan of study that included theology, astronomy, logic, mathematics, Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew, and he wrote essays, remarkably mature and well-phrased, in a series of note-books that he kept in the office. Poetry he wrote also, filled with love of the sea that circled his native Cornwall, and the great cliffs and moorlands that make that part of England one of the most picturesque spots in the world.

His work with Mr. Borlase brought him into the field of chemistry when he was nineteen. It was a field of magic to him. He read two books, Lavoisier’s “Elements of Chemistry,” and Nicholson’s “Dictionary of Chemistry,” and rushed from them to experiment for himself. His bedroom was his laboratory. His tools were old bottles, glasses, tobacco-pipes, teacups, and such odds and ends as he could find. When he needed fire he went to the kitchen. The owner of the house, Mr. Tonkin, was an old friend of the Davy family, and very fond of Humphrey, but the amateur experiments were almost too much for him. Said he, after he had watched some more than usually noisy combustion at the fire, “This boy, Humphrey, is incorrigible. Was there ever so idle a dog? He will blow us all into the air.” But Humphrey minded no arguments nor objections; he was studying the effects of acids and alkalies on vegetable colors, the kind of air that was to be found in the vesicles of common varieties of seaweed, and the solution and precipitation of metals. The work was all-engrossing; it occupied every spare moment of his time and thought.

If any greater stimulus to scientific study had been needed it would have been supplied to young Davy by his acquaintance with Gregory Watt, the son of the inventor James Watt. Gregory came to board at Mrs. Davy’s house when he was twenty-one, and Humphrey nineteen. He was a splendid companion, and possessed of a remarkably brilliant mind. In a short time the two youths had become inseparable friends, experimenting together, and taking walks to the mines and quarries in the neighborhood of Penzance in search of minerals for study. It was an ideal friendship, incomparably valuable for Davy. But Gregory Watt died when he was twenty-eight. “Gregory was a noble fellow,” Davy wrote to a friend, “and would have been a great man.”

In the meantime the young physician’s apprentice had been lured away from Penzance. Dr. Beddoes had established what he styled a Pneumatic Institution at Clifton, the object of which was to try the medicinal effects of different gases on consumptive patients. Davy, only twenty, had been offered the position of director, and had accepted. His old friend Mr. Tonkin, who had thought to see Humphrey become the leading physician of Penzance, was so much put out with this change of plan that he altered his will and revoked a legacy he had intended for Davy.

Filled with the ardor of research Davy went on with his experiments at Clifton. He discovered silica in the epidermis of the stems of weeds, corn, and grasses. He experimented with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) for ten months until he had thoroughly learned its intoxicating effects. Often he jeopardized his life, and once nearly lost it, by breathing carburetted hydrogen. He published the results of his more important experiments. When he was twenty-one he issued his “Essays on Heat and Light.” He experimented with galvanic electricity, and increased the powers of Volta’s Galvanic Pile. Moreover he outlined and partly drafted an epic poem on the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt. The total is a surprising catalogue of industries for the young Clifton Director.

His ardor had worn him out, and he was forced to take a holiday at Penzance. His reputation as a rising scientist had reached the little Cornish town, and he was given a hearty welcome. He loved his own country and never lost his delight in her natural beauties. Nor did he ever forget his own days in the grammar school, and in his will he directed that a certain sum of money should be paid to the master each year “on condition that the boys may have a holiday on his birthday.”

Davy had already made influential friends, and one of them, Dr. Hope, the professor of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, was to give him his next step forward. Dr. Hope knew Davy’s works on heat, nitrous oxide, and galvanic electricity, and he recommended the young scientist to Count Rumford for the professorship of chemistry in the Royal Philosophical Institution in London, which Count Rumford had been instrumental in founding. Davy wrote to his mother that this was “as honorable as any scientific appointment in the kingdom, with an income of at least five hundred pounds a year.”

He went to London in 1801, and there he had the great satisfaction of meeting many scientific men whose names and work were well known to him. Six weeks after he arrived he began his first course of lectures, taking for his subject the history of galvanism, and the various methods of accumulating galvanic influence. The Philosophical Magazine said of the new lion, “The sensation created by his first course of lectures at the Institution, and the enthusiastic admiration which they obtained, is at this period hardly to be imagined. Men of the first rank and talent,—the literary and the scientific, the practical and the theoretical,—blue-stockings and women of fashion, the old and the young, all crowded, eagerly crowded, the lecture-room. His youth, his simplicity, his natural eloquence, his chemical knowledge, his happy illustrations and well-conducted experiments, excited universal attention and unbounded applause. Compliments, invitations, and presents were showered upon him in abundance from all quarters; his society was courted by all, and all appeared proud of his acquaintance.”

Davy was an eloquent, enthusiastic, forceful speaker. He prepared his lectures with the greatest care, and he delivered them with that attention to dramatic effect which is instinctive in all really great speakers. Coleridge said, “I attend Davy’s lectures to increase my stock of metaphors,” and there were many others who went to hear the young chemist for other reasons than a liking for science. He had his own theories of the arts of public address. “Great powers,” said he, “have never been exerted independent of strong feelings. The rapid arrangement of ideas from their various analogies to the equally rapid comparisons of these analogies, with facts uniformly occurring during the progress of discovery, have existed only in those minds where the agency of strong and various motives is perceived—of motives modifying each other, mingling with each other, and producing that fever of emotion which is the joy of existence and the consciousness of life.”

In addition to his lectures Davy worked hard in the well-stocked laboratory of the Institution, where he was supplied with a corps of capable assistants. His researches covered a very large part of the field of chemistry, and he was indefatigable in running down any new idea which his active brain chanced to hit upon. In his vacations from London he went to the farthest regions of the British Isles, spending considerable time in the north of Ireland and the Hebrides. Here he studied the geological structures, and collected all the information he could in regard to agriculture. Anything to do with natural science interested him. He sketched a great deal, and he was forever asking questions of all the countrymen he met. His questions made him famous in many a hamlet, where such inquisitiveness had never been known before.

Shortly after he had moved to London he had been asked to investigate astringent plants in connection with tanning. To this end he visited tan-yards and farmers, and in 1802 began to deliver a course of lectures on “The Connection of Chemistry with Vegetable Physiology.” These lectures proved remarkably popular, and for ten years he repeated them at the meetings of the Board of Agriculture. They were later published in book form, and so great was their interest that they were translated into almost every European language. The Edinburgh Review, that dean of British critics, said, “We feel grateful for his having thus suspended for a time the labors of original investigation, in order to apply the principles and discoveries of his favorite science to the illustration and improvement of an art which, above all others, ministers to the wants and comforts of man.”

When his agricultural researches were finished he went back to his studies with the voltaic pile or battery. He discovered that potash and soda can be decomposed, with the resultant metals of potassium and sodium. When he made this discovery he was so delighted that he danced about the room, and was too excited to finish the experiment for some time.

He had worked too hard, and soon after this discovery he fell ill. For days all London watched for the bulletins of the young chemist’s condition. Fortunately he recovered, and in time went back to the work which was proving so invaluable for the world of science.

The Royal Institution now provided him with a voltaic battery that was four times as powerful as any that had previously been constructed. With this he made numberless chemical discoveries. The Royal Society had made him a fellow when he was twenty-five years old, and one of its secretaries when he was twenty-nine. His London lectures grew continually more popular. The Dublin Society invited him to lecture in that city, and his course at once attracted the greatest attention. He was already the scientific lion of England, but withal a very modest and unassuming lion. Cuvier said, “Davy, not yet thirty-two, in the opinion of all who could judge of such labors, held the first rank among the chemists of this or of any other age.” The National Institute of France awarded him the prize that had been established by Napoleon for the greatest discovery made by means of galvanism. Then, in 1812, when he was thirty-three, he was knighted by the Prince Regent.

Sir Humphrey Davy, as he now was, married Mrs. Appreece, a woman of many talents and unusual intelligence. She was rich, and soon after their marriage Davy was able to resign his professorship at the Royal Institution, which he had held for twelve years, and devote himself to original research and to travel. Carrying a portable chemical apparatus for his studies, Sir Humphrey and Lady Davy went first to Scotland, and then to France, Italy, and Germany. They met the most prominent men of the age in those countries. These men found the famous chemist interested in everything about him, as much of a poet as a scientist. In Rome he wrote a sonnet to the sculptor Canova, and the literary circles of Italy proclaimed him a poet after their own heart.

Davy was now one of the foremost chemists of the world, but he could as yet hardly lay claim to the title of inventor. He had been an ambitious man, and had once said that he had escaped the temptations that lay in wait for many men because of “an active mind, a deep ideal feeling of good, and a look toward future greatness.” That future greatness had always been in his thoughts, and had been one of the compelling powers in his great chemical discoveries. But beyond this thought of greatness was a very deep and earnest desire to help his fellow men. So when the chance to do this offered he took advantage of it at once.

Explosions of coal-gas were only too common in the mines of England. They were almost always fatal to the miners, and formed the greatest peril of those who labored underground. In 1812 a terrible explosion occurred in a leading English mine, and caused the death of almost a hundred miners. The mine had caught on fire, and had to be closed at the mouth, which meant certain destruction to those within. The catastrophe was so great that the biggest mine-owners met to see whether some protection against such accidents could not be devised. After much discussion they appointed a committee to call on Sir Humphrey Davy and ask him to investigate the possibilities for them.

Davy realized that here lay his opportunity to be of real service to men, the goal he had always had in mind. He took up the question, experimented with fire-damp, and found that it was in reality light carburetted hydrogen. He visited many mines, and took into careful consideration the conditions under which the men worked. For months he investigated and experimented, and at length, in 1815, he constructed what he called the safety-lamp. This was an oil lamp which had a chimney or cage of wire gauze. The gauze held the flame of the lamp from passing through and igniting the fire-damp outside. It was only possible for a very little of the fire-damp to penetrate the gauze and such as did was held harmless prisoner. The cage allowed air to pass and light to escape, and although by the combustion of the fire-damp the wire gauze might become red hot, it was still efficient as a safety-lamp.

Davy’s safety-lamp proved exactly what was needed to act as protection from exploding fire-damp. It was tried under all conditions and served admirably. George Stephenson had worked out a somewhat similar safety-lamp at about the same time, and his was used in the collieries around Newcastle. In the rest of England Davy’s lamp was at once adopted. All miners were equipped with either the Davy lamp or the “Geordie” lamp, as the other was called, and the mine fatalities from fire-damp immediately decreased. This lamp is still the main safeguard of those who have to contend with dangerous explosive gases in mines all over the world.

Friends urged Davy to patent his lamp, and thus ensure himself a very considerable income from its sale. But he said, “I never thought of such a thing: my sole object was to serve the cause of humanity; and if I have succeeded, I am amply rewarded in the gratifying reflection of having done so. I have enough for all my views and purposes; more wealth could not increase either my fame or my happiness. It might undoubtedly enable me to put four horses to my carriage; but what would it avail me to have it said that Sir Humphrey drives his carriage and four?”

His fellow men appreciated the great value of this service he had rendered. At Newcastle, the centre of the mining country, a dinner was given in his honor, and a service of plate, worth over twelve thousand dollars, was presented to him. The Emperor of Russia sent him a magnificent silver-gilt vase, with a letter congratulating him on his great achievement, and the King of England made him a baronet.

Davy himself, in spite of his reputation as a chemist, placed this invention above all his other work. “I value it more than anything I ever did,” said he. “It was the result of a great deal of investigation and labor; but if my directions be attended to, it will save the lives of thousands of poor men. I was never more affected than by a written address which I received from the working colliers when I was in the north, thanking me on behalf of themselves and their families for the preservation of their lives.”

Davy’s note-books are most interesting reading and show the philosophic trend of his thoughts. At one time he said, “Whoever wishes to enjoy peace, and is[Pg 137]
[Pg 138] gifted with great talents, must labor for posterity. In doing this he enjoys all the pleasures of intellectual labor, and all the desire arising from protracted hope. He feels no envy nor jealousy; his mark is too far distant to be seen by short-sighted malevolence, and therefore it is never aimed at.... To raise a chestnut on the mountain, or a palm in the plain, which may afford shade, shelter, and fruit for generations yet unborn, and which, if they have once fixed their roots, require no culture, is better than to raise annual flowers in a garden, which must be watered daily, and in which a cold wind may chill or too ardent a sunshine may dry.... The best faculties of man are employed for futurity: speaking is better than acting, writing is better than speaking.”

He was fond of travel, and after he had seen the successful use of his lamp he went abroad again. When he returned he was made president of the Royal Society, a position which had been made illustrious by Sir Isaac Newton. The British navy asked him to discover what could be done to prevent the corrosion of copper sheathing on vessels, caused by salt water. He made experiments, and at last succeeded in rendering the copper negatively electrical by the use of small pieces of tin, zinc, or iron nails. But shells and seaweed would adhere to the non-corroded surface, and hence the process was not entirely successful. This principle of galvanic protection, however, was found to be applicable to many other purposes.

These and other experiments in chemistry and electricity, travel, and his duties as president of the Royal Society filled his days. In 1826 he was attacked by paralysis, and from then he spent much of his time on the continent, seeking health and strength. He wrote on fishing and on travel, and all his writings, on whatever theme he touched, are filled with the love of nature and of beauty, and permeated with that philosophic balance that had been characteristic of his whole career. He died in Geneva, May 29, 1829.

Davy was not the born inventor, drawn irresistibly to construct something new. He was the born chemist, and it was only when he was asked to investigate the nature of the fire-damp that he fell to studying whether some adequate protection could not be afforded the miners. Yet he himself said that he was more proud of his safety-lamp than of all his other discoveries, and although the scientists and chemists may think of Humphrey Davy as a great experimenter, great lecturer, and great writer on chemistry and electricity, the world at large knows him best for his safety-lamp and for the great change for the better he was able to bring about in the mines of England.