The Wilkins Lecture - Sir Humphry Davy, Bt., P. R. S. 1778–1829

Abstract

A visitor to the Society’s apartments passes on the staircase, first the bust of our Royal Founder and Patron by Nollekens and then the romantic portrait by Lawrence of the most romantic of our Presidents, Humphry Davy, whose name, next to that of Newton, is the most widely remembered of them all. And rightly so, for it was his discovery of the principle of the safety-lamp that made possible the great expansion of coal mining, the basis of our national wealth. It removed so largely the risk of explosions and saved untold human agony and suffering. The invention of the lamp, based as it was on a fortnight’s brilliant work in the laboratory, was typical of Davy’s genius for making a decisive experiment. Davy’s scientific work was done mainly in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. It was a formative period in which chemistry having shaken off the leading strings of medicine and pharmacy was emerging as an independent science. It was a time of great activity in chemical research. Every year saw some new line of attack and a new harvest of chemical discoveries. Lavoisier had established the balance as the arbiter of the chemical balance-sheet but the laws of chemical composition only came to light in the new century. Dalton’s atomic weights had opened a new chapter of the atomic theory and by 1820 Berzelius’s chemical formulae were fast becoming the chemists’ shorthand for the communication of their results.