Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was a British scientist who discovered the elements potassium, sodium, barium, strontium, calcium and magnesium. He also discovered laughing gas, proved that iodine was an element and that diamonds are just a form of carbon.
But his greatest discovery was a man: Faraday, one of the greatest scientists of all time.
Davy’s big trick, the reason he discovered so many elements, was that he built the world’s biggest battery. That is why he could discover so many elements. With the electricity that it created he passed it through different substances to break them down into simpler ones. Some of these simpler substances were elements that no one had ever seen before.
For example, he thought potash had some kind of metal in it. He passed his electric current through the stuff and out came little shining balls of metal. He called the metal potassium.
Guy-Lussac was doing the same sort of thing in France. In one case he beat out Davy, finding boron nine weeks before he did.
When Davy was young he studied medicine and wanted to be a poet. He loved to fish and walk through the woods and look at the mountains. In one pocket he had his fishing hooks and in the other he had stones that he found along the way.
As a poet Davy was friends with Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, some of the best British poets of the time.
But he was not to become a famous poet: at age 19 he read Lavoisier’s book on chemistry. It hooked him for life. A friend of Davy’s let him use his library and chemistry laboratory, one of the best in England as it turned out.
Davy started out by trying to understand out how batteries work. Once he understood that he saw they could be used to break down substances into simpler ones.
Davy came to London. It turned out that he was a great speaker, even though his Cornish English sounded strange. The women liked his handsome looks. His talks on chemistry made him famous and helped to give science a good name. One person who came to see him was Faraday. Davy later hired him.
Davy did not believe in Dalton’s atoms. We take them for granted now, but it was a new idea then, one that was slow to catch on.
Davy was not all that careful: sometimes things blew up, one time he almost went blind.
He made a habit of breathing in any gas he created. He wanted to learn as much as possible about it. Once this paid off when he discovered laughing gas. Another time it almost killed him. But over the years it destroyed his health. He only lived to be 50.
One of the best things he did was to make mines safer with his invention of the safety lamp. He worked out a way for the lamp’s flame to burn without being in danger of blowing up inside the mine.
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Thanks Abagond. I didn’t know that Davy invented the battery. I always thought an American invented the battery in the 1860s. Looks like I need to brush up on my science and history more often.
Stephanie B.
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Davy did not invent them either – he just studied them and made large ones to do chemistry, which was a new thing.
The first batteries appeared in Italy in the late 1700s from the work of Galvani and Volta. It is from their names that we get the words galvanize and volts.
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Thanks, Abogond. I stand corrected.
Stephanie B.
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