Amid the wild beautiful scenery of Cornwall, where the waters of the Atlantic wash our English shores, was born in the winter of 1778 the greatest chemist England has ever seen. We read in our childish geography books that for being the birthplace of Humphrey Davy the town of Penzance has for long been famous, for the coming into the world of that man whose name is perhaps best known for the invention of the Miners’ Safety Lamp, that has lit the darkness of our coal mines and saved hundreds of human lives.

Humphrey was the son of a wood-carver, a man not high up in the world, but we find him free enough from the straits of poverty that have often been the cradle of genius, though, indeed, a cradle out of which genius has had a way of growing to sturdy stalwart manhood. The child from the outset entered on life with eagerness and enthusiasm, seeming to take a firm, earnest grip, as it were, even from babyhood. It was this same vigour of mind that spurred him on all through—in boyhood and manhood alike—that made him face difficulty with such a brave, dauntless spirit, and overcome obstacles with never a thought of letting them overcome him.

He was quick, energetic, and alert, even as a child. When hardly more than five years old his mother often noticed him with baby fingers rapidly turning the pages of some book as if he were counting their number or glancing at the pictures. To her no small astonishment on questioning him, she found the lisping baby lips could repeat the story. It was the same through life. Long years after, when he was a great chemist, making wonderful experiments in his laboratory, he had no patience with slowness. He would keep several experiments going at the same time, attending first to one, then to another. If the exact instrument he wanted were not at hand, he would recklessly break or alter another to suit his purpose. His impetuous spirit could never brook delay. With him quickness meant power, and while quick he was also sure.

As a child he specially loved the Pilgrim’s Progress. The charm of its word-pictures, its characters fired his quick imagination. And history too, especially the history of his own country. These two, it may be, inspired him very early to a love of romance and story, and among the boys at school in Penzance he was not slow to gain the reputation of story-teller. Some were tales of fun, others tales of thrilling wonder and terror, but all flowed easily from the boy’s lips and held his listeners enthralled.

When he was no more than eight years old he would take his stand on a cart in the middle of the market-place, his boyish figure drawn to its full height, and there harangue the boys who gathered in little groups to hear the young orator. At school there was nothing in any way remarkable about young Humphrey, except, perhaps, that somewhere hid away within him was the gift of rhyme or the gift of poetry. English and Latin verse alike came easy to him, and by-and-by his schoolfellows found out his facility, and they pressed him into their service to compose valentines and love-letters. But except for this he seemed in these early years to be nothing more than a happy, healthy English boy, full of fun and spirits. He would fish off Penzance Pier for grey mullet, catching more than his companions. He would bait his hooks and wait till a shoal of these difficult fish were swimming about the bait, then by a clever jerk of his tackle entangle and capture them. His love of fishing remained with him all through life—almost to the end. So strong was it that even as a man he never could conceal his annoyance if unsuccessful, or if he discovered a friend to have caught a larger number than he. So keen and ardent was he that he would dress himself in green that the wily fish might know no difference between him and the green trees and grassy banks!

In his boyhood we find it difficult to trace any germs of that talent for experimenting and inventing that distinguished him in later life. He scooped turnips hollow, and lighted up the insides with candles—but what boy has not experimented in the same way? He made squibs, or “thunder-powder,” that exploded on a stone with a loud report that delighted his companions. But there is no trace of an unusual bent of mind here—just an example of an ardent, eager English boy, full of life and spirits.

In 1793 he went to school in Truro, not far from Penzance. He was quick, but that was all—a clever boy, not a prodigy. His master, writing long years after, when the boy’s name had become a household word in England, said:—

“I did not at that time discover any extraordinary abilities.”

It must have been a school of the old sort that Mr. Davy had lighted upon for his son, for the story goes that young Humphrey, at times in scrapes like other boys, while punishment hung over him, had these doggrel lines fired off by his master at his head—

And with the end of the rhyme down came the flat ruler on the open palm of the culprit! School, while it may not have done him a great deal of good, at least did not do him much harm. His own frank, buoyant mind prevented his being twisted into a cut-and-dried shape, or pressed into any special mould. Long years after he gave thanks that in those young days he was left very much to his own bent.

“What I am I have made myself,” he said. “I say this without vanity, and in pure simplicity of heart.”

So passed the long, sunshiny days of school-time, and when he was sixteen he left school finally. After that, for one short, blissful year he shot and fished and lived chiefly in the open, surrounded by the beauties of Cornish scenery, for which in after years his heart always kept a tender memory, when the bustle and din of a city, and the whirl of city life, had well-nigh drowned for him Nature’s softer tones. He grew then to know familiarly bird and beast, and rock and flower. In after years, when his life was more fully filled than most men’s, a chance word or reference would seem to waft him a whiff of the sea off the Cornish shore, and a great longing would seize him for the loved scenes of his childhood. Then, in the midst of his work, he would take a hurried run home. During this year of holiday, which he enjoyed with the whole-heartedness of a careless, happy boy, he collected a number of birds, and stuffed them with his own hands—and with not a little skill.

Almost to the end of life he kept his love of shooting. As in fishing he tried to efface himself and deceive the wily fish, so in shooting he was strangely beset by fear of an accident, and he would study to make himself as conspicuous as possible in a scarlet hat! Almost at the end, when his strength was failing, it is pathetic enough to find him ask to be driven to the field, that he might still fire a shot.

But already over his young life there brooded its first great shadow. In 1794 his father died. It may have been this which helped to change young Humphrey from the happy, careless boy to something more serious, more thoughtful, that fixed his mind on the responsibilities life was so full of, that helped to turn it from mere sport and pleasure to the improvement of his mind—to the gaining of knowledge. At any rate, about this time the boy laid hold of life, and, as a rower in a boat-race might do, steadied down to his responsibilities.

His mother apprenticed him to a surgeon and apothecary in Penzance, and straightway with that ardour and enthusiasm that carried him through so much of his great work in later life, he fell in love with chemistry. He tried boyish experiments. He used the rudest instruments—anything that he could lay hands on. Pots, pans, vessels in the surgery—nothing was safe or sacred from his touch. He filled the house with strange and hideous odours—he burnt holes in his sister’s dresses. When he turned the garret into a laboratory his good old guardian would exclaim—

“This boy Humphrey is incorrigible! Was there ever so idle a dog? He will blow us all into the air.”

Half an hour later he would proudly and fondly call the boy “Philosopher,” or “Sir Humphrey,” as if already his prophetic eye pierced the future and beheld his greatness.

So he spent much of the day, and in the long summer evenings he would ramble along the seashore as far as Marazion armed with a hammer with which to chip off “specimens” from the rocks, for already geology had thrown over him its peculiar spell. He would end these happy days with tea at a favourite aunt’s. And it was not merely boyish enjoyment these solitary rambles brought. They and the still small voice of Nature were telling on him. Gradually they were making and moulding the boy, approaching now as he was, very near to the threshold of manhood.

Even then, however, he was trying to improve himself. With the roar of the waves and the howl of the winds in his ears in these lonely walks, he would declaim to the elements, in the hope of softening a defect in his voice. This probably arose from his having what is called “no ear.” He had no notion of either time or tune. It used to trouble him much that he never could keep step in the Volunteer Infantry corps to which he belonged, and someone tried to teach him “God Save the King,” but without success.

The surgical part of his profession was always disagreeable and distasteful to the boy, although from no want of courage on his part. The story goes that one day about this time he was bitten in the leg by a dog supposed to be mad. No sooner did he realise what had happened to him than he there and then took a knife and cut the piece right out of his leg, and then went to the surgery and had the wound cauterised.

His mind was such that it instinctively rose to emergencies and grappled with anything—a big thing or a little thing. Both were to him alike. Knowledge was what he wanted. He wanted to know as much as possible, and he liked to get to the bottom of a difficulty for himself. Into each new thing that came his way he threw himself with all the ardour and impetuosity of his nature. Nor was he merely practical and nothing more. He had that sympathy and delicacy of mind that revelled in communing with nature. This expressed itself in sonnets and poems—some of which he wrote when he was only twelve. A great poetic genius once said of him—

“If Davy had not been the first chemist he would have been the first poet of his age.”

But poetry was not the field in which he was to shine. His genius was for experiments. He went on eagerly experimenting on anything—heat, light, air. Anything connected with chemistry drew him as with a magnet. The first time some real experimenting apparatus found its way to his hands he could not conceal his delight. Specially did an air-pump charm him. It was to him as a new and fascinating toy to a child. He kept working the piston up and down, and would hardly let it go!

And now it seemed as if it were almost time for him to try his wings in the larger air of the great world. More than one man had come to Penzance who perhaps gave the boy a foretaste of the delights he was to know by-and-by as a man in the atmosphere of culture and talent in which his lot was to be cast. Among these were Josiah Wedgwood, the Staffordshire Potter, and young Watt, the son of the inventor of the Condensing Steam Engine.

There was about young Humphrey’s outward appearance about this time nothing specially attractive. He had round shoulders, not a comely face, and a manner that was in no way remarkable or engaging, but surely the light of genius must have shone from his eyes!

However, such as he was outwardly, he now prepared to launch away into the great world. A professor of chemistry in Bristol had heard of his experiments in light and heat, and proposed to him that he should become assistant in the Pneumatic Institution there. There was not much money to be earned by it.

“He must be maintained, but the fund will not furnish a salary from which a man can lay up anything.” So they told him. But was it not his most direct road to fortune?

Perhaps Humphrey thought so. At any rate, the Penzance surgeon was prevailed upon to cut short the term of the boy’s apprenticeship, “on account of the singularly promising talents Mr. Davy had displayed.”

So Humphrey went out from his native town, and from his home, as many a young man had gone before him, with a heart beating high with hope, and, as his young, ardent spirit believed, the world spread out before him.

And certainly a brilliant future was opening to the boy. He turned his steps to Bristol, throwing himself in his own characteristic way into his new work.

He made experiments on air and gases, some of these daring and dangerous enough, and entailing not a little personal risk. But while these things lay nearest to his heart, he had eye and ear both open for all that was going forward in his new life. He was so many-sided himself, it was as if he could not come in contact with anyone without catching some spark of interest from him—the philosopher, the poet, the physician, the sportsman. He had something in common with all.

He entered into his work as if body and mind knew no fatigue. If an idea came into his head he could not rest until he had worked it out. If he broke down in health, he simply started afresh when he had recovered.

In his spare time he wrote books and pamphlets on chemistry, so that in writing and experimenting his name came to be known to the scientific men of the day. And now it seemed as if one step in fame followed another. Success was crowned by success.

He was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Chemistry to the Royal Institution in 1801. He had now entered on manhood, and was launched on the great world of London, having all the ability to carry himself through. He may have been handicapped with slight flaws of manner. If he appeared over-confident, it probably was that in reality he was shy and timid, and attempted to cover these little awkwardnesses. His friends grieved in secret over the noticeable change, fearing lest with simplicity of manner he might throw over simplicity of character. But no man is, after all, perfect, and in spite of this, Davy was rapidly mounting the ladder of success.

The young chemist soon discovered that his lectures drew crowds, even created a great and extraordinary sensation. In imagination we can picture the lecture-room, the crowded audience—all sorts and conditions, from lovers of science, ladies of fashion, men of rank, to the threadbare-coated student—eagerly watching the experiments, and all drinking in his words as the young lecturer, fired with his subject, animated with all the charm of which he was so complete a master the dry bones of geology with life and breath, or again brought the study of chemistry, hitherto unget-at-able and out of reach, down to their level. The audience hung on his lips spellbound.

The young popular lecturer was caressed and made much of.

“Davy, covered with glory,” writes a friend at this time, “dines with me to-day.”

Soon they made him Professor of Chemistry to the Institution. Promotion followed promotion, but each year was a spur to greater exertion. Time would fail to enumerate the steps in his triumphs. A continuous sun seemed to shine upon him. And his strength seemed equal to all demands. Money had never been of much account to him. Now, indeed, he might have had it in abundance had he chosen, by helping forward manufactures with his scientific knowledge, but that was not his aim. His ambition was scientific glory.

“To be useful to science and mankind was the pursuit in which he gloried.”

The years that followed were years full of hard work. In 1812 he was knighted. It seemed as if almost everything he touched were like a gold mine which yielded some new treasure to him.

“Science,” he said once to a young man anxious to pursue it, “is a harsh mistress, and repays one poorly.” But for him she surely rather had “full measure pressed down and running over.”

And now, when he was about thirty-seven, his thoughts were first turned to the great triumph of his life, the invention that was to make his name famous.

There was in England, especially in the north and midland counties, a great and crying evil—the danger in which our miners and their families lived, as these brave men daily and hourly carried their lives in their hands. Constantly the newspapers were filled with terrible accounts of accidents in our coal-pits—mines exploding, men and boys and horses being blown to pieces or buried alive—and always from the same cause—the want of a safety lamp. A great quantity of gas got cooped up, in spite of contrivances for leading pure air into the murky passages of the mines, and these gases, directly they came in contact with a naked flame, exploded. There had been old days in which men worked by a feeble light borrowed from the phosphorescence of decaying fish-skins or “steel mills,” which gave out fitful gleams or sparks when a piece of flint was struck against them; but these days had passed, and accidents multiplied. And though men were startled and shocked when they read of them, still the wholesale slaughter went on. The gas exploded, bursting up everything near, killing the miners, erupting great masses of coal and dust and mangled men and horses. And not only this, but it blew down the trap-doors, leaving men to die of “after-damp,” the more horrible death of suffocation, because lingering and slow.

To remedy this crying evil Davy bent the whole force of his brilliant intellect, and after much thought invented the Safety Lamp. He surrounded the flame of his lamp with wire gauze. The gas entered and exploded within it, but the explosion did not pass outward.

It was the most glorious triumph of his genius. In 1816 it was adopted. With his “Davy” in his hand there was now no fear for the miner.

“The highest ambition of my life,” he wrote, “has been to deserve the name of a friend to humanity.”

He took out no patent. He wanted no money for it. It was reward enough for him to see it work.

“If you had patented it,” said a friend to him one day, “you might have been drawing your five or ten thousand a year.”

“No, my good friend,” was his reply, “I never thought of such a thing. My sole object was to serve the cause of humanity. It might undoubtedly enable me to put four horses in my carriage, but what would it avail me to have it said that Sir Humphrey drives his carriage-and-four?”

“I value it,” he said again, “more than anything I ever did.”

And now the world’s honours waited upon him. In 1818 Government made him Baronet. In 1820 he was made President of the Royal Society.

But already in the zenith of his triumph, there were small signs that showed too surely that he was failing. In 1826 he retired from the Presidentship, and later in the year he was attacked by apoplexy, followed by paralysis.

“Here I am,” he wrote pathetically from Rome, “a ruin among ruins.”

And so he began to look death in the face.

“I do not wish to live so far as I am personally concerned,” he said, “but I have views which I could develop—if it please God to save my life—which would be useful to science and mankind.”

Never again, however, was he to return to England. In Rome he had a second seizure. He had a great longing to reach Geneva, and a few hours after he arrived, although he appeared at first to rally, he took ill, and there passed away quietly and peacefully, not merely, as someone has it, “one of the greatest, but one of the most benevolent and amiable of men.”

They buried him in the little burying-ground at Geneva, the long procession wending its way to his last resting-place on foot. His widow erected a tablet to his memory in Westminster Abbey.

He was the greatest chemist of the age; but after all, his best memorial will abide in the memory of his fellow-men as the inventor of the Safety Lamp.

To himself his invention brought no small happiness.

“I was never more affected,” he said on one occasion, “than by a written address 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.”

His, indeed, is a career of striking brilliancy. He is like some mountain climber who climbs ever upwards. And we, looking up, seem to see him leap from one dazzling peak to another. Honours and attainments were his such as come to few men in this world, but we cannot but feel that what gave him the greatest joy in life was that he had been enabled to rescue hundreds of lives, to bring light out of darkness, and cheer and safety where before there had been uncertainty and death. It is for this that the name of Humphrey Davy will be blessed by men and women in the ages still to come.