Sir Humphry Davy

Consolations in Travel; Or, the Last Days of a Philosopher (Dodo Press) Sir Humphry Davy

Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet FRS MRIA (1778- 1829) was a British chemist and inventor. He is probably best remembered today for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline earth elements, as well as contributions to the discoveries of the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine. He invented the Davy lamp, which allowed miners to enter gassy workings. Davy's 1806 Bakerian Lecture On Some Chemical Agencies of Electricity " was one of the best memoirs which has ever enriched the theory of chemistry. " Davy's first production preserved bears the date of 1795. It is entitled The Sons of Genius, The poems, produced in the following years, especially those On the Mount's Bay and St. Michael's Mount, are pleasingly descriptive verses, showing sensibility, but no true poetic imagination. In 1799 the first volume of the West-Country Collections was issued. Half of the volume consisted of Davy's essays On Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light, On Phos-Oxygen and its Combinations, and on the Theory of Respiration. In 1815 Davy suggested that acids were substances that contained replaceable hydrogen.