Humphry Davy
1778 CE–1829 CE · Penzance
Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet (17 December 1778 – 29 May 1829) was a British chemist and inventor who invented the Davy lamp and an early form of arc lamp. He is also remembered for isolating, by using electricity, several elements for the first time: potassium and sodium in 1807 and calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron the following year, as well as for discovering the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine. Davy also studied the forces involved in these separations, inventing the new field of electrochemistry. He is credited with discovering clathrate hydrates. In 1799, he experimented with nitrous oxide and was astonished at how it made him laugh. He nicknamed it "laughing gas" and wrote about its potential as an anaesthetic to relieve pain during surgery. Davy was a baronet, President of the Royal Society (PRS), Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA), a founder member and Fellow of the Geological Society of London, a member of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Berzelius called Davy's 1806 Bakerian Lecture "On Some Chemical Agencies of Electricity" "one of the best memoirs which has ever enriched the theory of chemistry."
Adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the map →
Penzance
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Humphry Davy’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Jewish world
Christian world
Hindu world
Islamic world
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.