Humphry Davy

Humphry Davy isolated more chemical elements than anyone before or since, invented the miners' safety lamp and refused to patent it, and hired Michael Faraday as a bottle-washer. He was a Cornish apprentice apothecary who came to notice at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, where he inhaled nitrous oxide, described its effects at length, noted that it might be used to relieve pain during surgery, and then did nothing about that suggestion for the rest of his life; anaesthesia waited another forty years. His lectures at the Royal Institution drew crowds large enough to require a one-way system in Albemarle Street. Using the newly invented voltaic pile he passed current through molten compounds and isolated potassium and sodium in 1807 and calcium, magnesium, barium, strontium and boron the following year, and showed that chlorine was an element rather than a compound, against Lavoisier. The Davy lamp of 1815 enclosed the flame in wire gauze that conducted heat away fast enough not to ignite firedamp; he gave it away, and George Stephenson's claim to have made a similar lamp independently caused a long dispute. He was made a baronet and became president of the Royal Society. He took Faraday to Europe as valet and assistant, and later opposed his election to the Royal Society, which is the unflattering part of the story and generally attributed to jealousy. Coleridge and Southey were friends, and Coleridge said he attended Davy's lectures to increase his stock of metaphors. He wrote that his greatest discovery was Faraday, though the quotation may be apocryphal. He was seriously injured by an explosion of nitrogen trichloride in 1812 and used Faraday as an amanuensis while his eyes recovered. He died at fifty in Geneva. Cornwall keeps a statue of him in Penzance.

• Lived: 1778 CE – 1829 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: scientist