Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm tra c Ev Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of our accidental two parter on chemist Sir Humphrey Davy. In part one, we talked about how he became medical superintendent at the Pneumatic Institute and did a bunch of experiments involving nitrous oxside and then wrote a five hundred and eighty page book about it. He was only nineteen when he got that job. He did not have a lot of formal education. When I started envisioning this episode, I sort of thought that was going to be the episode. But he also had a whole career after that point, and that is what we are talking about today. So last time, our discussion of Humphrey Davies's work was mainly about gases and specifically nitrous oxide, but that's not the only thing that he was working on. He published his first paper in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions in eighteen oh one, and that paper was on the voltaic pile, an early electrical battery invented by Alessandro volta in a voltaic pile, Alternating discs of two different medals, such as copper and zinc, are stacked together, along with fabric discs that are soaked in something like saltwater or vinegar. Initially, it was believed that the current in a voltaic pile was caused by the voltage difference between the two alternating medals. Davy's paper argued correctly that it was really the result of a chemical reaction. In March of eighteen oh one, Davy was offered a position at the Royal Institution, which had been founded in seventeen ninety nine to teach the general public about science. He was assistant lecturer in chemistry, director of the laboratory, and assistant editor of the institution's journals. Adition to his salary, this position came with a room call and candles so charming. We have discussed about how most of Davey's education was self directed, and this was not all that unusual for someone of his social class, especially in a field like chemistry, which was basically brand new. This was also the age of the so called gentleman's scientist, although there were also women like Mary Anning and Caroline Herschel. A lot of scientists pursued their work independently, often without any kind of backing from a formal institution or a lot of formal education, and the field had not been professionalized. But even in that context, Davy's appointment to this position was pretty remarkable. It wasn't just that he didn't have formal education in chemistry. He didn't have much formal education at all, and he was only twenty two, already well published when he was offered this position. His work with nitrous oxide it didn't entirely end when he left the Pneumatic Institute. On June twentieth, eighteen oh one, he gave a public lecture at the Royal Institution. This lecture was on respiration, and he told the audience that anybody who wanted to could experience this gas afterward. In the words of a nineteen thirty write up on Davy in Science Progress in the twentieth Century, quote, the spectators were amused by the antics of the experimenters, and one subject at least enjoyed paradise. For mister Underwood was so transported and so reluctant to leave Heaven for Earth that the breathing bag had to be snatched forcibly from him. As a side note, the Pneumatic Institute didn't keep his focus on gases as a curative forever. In eighteen oh four it became the Preventive Medical Institution for the Sick and Drooping Poor, which, as its name suggests, was a hospital for the poor focused primarily on the treatment of tuberculosis. Its founder, Thomas Beddows, died four years later. Some of Davies's other lectures that the Royal Institution were on tanning. He tried to figure out how tanning worked as at a chemical level, I'm talking about the tanning of animal hides, not going out for a suntan, so he was figuring out how that worked and whether there were improvements that could be made to the process. He concluded that workers at England's best tanneries had already developed pretty good methods for their work, so he didn't try to come in and revolutionize the whole process. But he did look for substitutes for some of the more expensive and harder to source materials that were used in tanning. In particular, he found a substitute for oak bark, which was in short supply, but that substitute was katachew, which was an extract from acacia trees which grew in India. So of course that gets into a whole tangle of British imperialism and colonialism. He also worked in agriculture, including testing the quality of the soil and developing recommendations for different types of fertilizer. This followed the same basic pattern as his tannery work. He was figuring out the chemical processes involved and making recommendations for adjustments when necessary, but generally he thought what Britain's farmers were already doing was working pretty well, and he did not try to totally re envision things. He published Elements of Agricultural Chemistry based on this work in eighteen thirteen. Davy also gave lots of public lectures on chemistry more generally, and soon he was really in high demand as both a speaker and a dinner guest. He was charismatic and used a lot of showmanship in his lectures, and he tended to attract a lot of women in the audience and around town. There are some sort of comedic illustrations of him doing lecturing in which like audiences overwhelmingly women. There are also stories about him working in his lab until the absolute last second, and then putting a clean shirt on on top of what he already had on as he walked out the door to go to some dinner engagement. Davy became a fellow of the Royal Society in eighteen oh four, and he was awarded the Society's Copley Medal in eighteen oh five. The Copley Medal is an award for outstanding achievement. It is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, scientific awards in the world. In eighteen oh seven, Davy was elected as one of two secretaries of the Royal Society, and he was also awarded the Napoleon Prize from the Institute de France, although England and France were at war and a naval blockade meant that there was no way for him to even be informed that he had won this prize. That's going to come up again later though. Also in eighteen oh seven, Davey started working on isolating and identifying different elements using electrolysis. This was connected to his earlier work with the voltaic pile. He had concluded that if a chemical reaction could generate an electrical current, then you could maybe basically do the opposite. An electrical current could also be used to initiate a chemical reaction, so he used electricity to isolate pure sodium from caustic soda and potassium from caustic potash. Apparently he wanted the word potassium to start with pt, like the word pterodactyl, but a transcriber misspelled it in the first manuscript on the subject as that was being prepared, and this like incorrect in Davy's mind. Spelling stuck, Let's just go with this. Yeah. Also, a lot of these elements are like very reactive when they are isolated on their own, so this probably involved some very dramatic moments in the lab. Davy isolated more elements in eighteen oh eight, including boron from boricap acid and calcium, which that process involved electrolyzing lime and mercuric oxide together. By this point, Humphrey was incredibly well respected and he was influential as a scientist. He was also trying to put his work into use out in the world. At one point, he visited Newgate Prison to evaluate its ventilation system, and while there he contracted typhus, also known as jail fever. In eighteen ten. Some of Davies's work focused on acidity. We mentioned back in Part one that Antoine Laurent la Foisier had believed that oxygen was present in all acids, and he had coined the name for oxygen based on that idea. At the time, hydrochloric acid was known as muriatic acid, which was the term some people still use today. Lavoisier had believed that removing the hydrogen from muriatic acid resulted in oxy muratic acid, and that that contained oxygen, But Davy concluded that this did not contain oxygen, and that in fact, it was not a compound at all. Instead, he said this was its own element, chlorine, which he named for its green color. Davy didn't actually discover chlorine, that's usually attributed to Karl Wilhelmschill in seventeen seventy four, but Davy was the one who determined that it was an element. Davy was awarded an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin in eighteen eleven. On April eighth, eighteen twelve, he was knighted, and three days after that he married Jane, a priest who he had proposed to about a month before. She was a wealthy widow and a socialite and an intellectual, sometimes described as a bluestocking, and she had hosted her own salon. Jane had inherited money from her late husband and from her father, who was a merchant whose business had been primarily out of Antigua, where he dealt in both goods and enslaved people. Also, in eighteen twelve, Davy published a book titled Elements of Chemical Philosophy, which was dedicated to his wife, and that same year he was injured in a lab accident while working with nitrogen trichloride, which is highly explosive. While he was recovering from this accident, he needed an assistance, especially to help with things like record keeping, so he hired twenty one year old Michael Faraday. Faraday continued working with Davy for years. Sometimes his role was more like a valet or a personal secretary, which she seems to have found pretty degrading. Sometimes he was more like a lab assistant or an apprentice. Davey recovered from his injuries in eighteen thirteen, and that year he also left his position at the Royal Institution. Thanks to his marriage, he no longer needed the job. But in spite of their common intellectual ground, Humphrey and Jane don't seem to have been very well matched. There was just a lot of friction between the two of them, and a lot of public bickering in the later years of their marriage. Sometimes they spent long stretches of time apart, each of them pursuing their own interests, but they also did travel together at some points, including taking a trip to France in October of eighteen thirteen to collect that medal that Davy had been awarded back in eighteen oh seven. It is a weird trip. England and France were still at war with each other. The Davies apparently made this trip along with Michael Faraday, with Napoleon's permission, but even with that permission they were still arrested and detained after they got to France. Once they were released, they went to Paris. They met Napoleon's second wife, Marie Luise. They did not meet Napoleon himself. Davy seems to have butted heads with a lot of people on this trip, making no secret about his antipathy for the French. This was about politics and the ongoing wars between England and France, and it was also about science. We have already talked about his criticisms of some of the work of French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. He also had a huge rivalry with French chemist and physicist Joseph Luis guille Lussac, with the two of them arguing over who should get credit for the identification of iodine as an element, which was connected to the work Davey carried out while in Paris. Bernard Courtois had first described iodine in eighteen eleven, and then in eighteen thirteen, Gui le Sac and Davy had written work identifying it as an element. About a week apart. This is a trip where I was like, hey, a friend, you didn't have to go to France and laker with everyone that you were angry at and your nation was at war with it. He wanted that award. Some of the descriptions of it just make him sound like a big jerk to me. After leaving France, the party would on to Italy. Eventually, as we know, Napoleon was forced to abdicate as Emperor of the French and he was exiled to Elba. The party decided they should go back to Britain after they heard of Napoleon's return from exile in eighteen fifteen. After returning to Britain, Davy was asked to work on the problem of coal mine explosions, and we're going to talk about that after we pause for a sponsor break. Humphrey Davy was living at a time when demand for coal was skyrocketing in Britain and in other parts of the world due to the Industrial Revolution. In the mid eighteenth century, Britain had been producing about five million tons of coal per year. By the mid nineteenth century, that number had increased more than tenfold. As railroads and factories burned coal to drive steam engines. Miners had to work faster and dig deeper, and that made a job that was already difficult and dirty, increasingly unsafe in the face of mine collapses and explosions of flammable gas, which at the time were known as fire damp. One of Britain's worst mine explosions happened on May twenty fifth, eighteen twelve, at the Felling Colliery. This was an enormous explosion that was heard for miles and it killed ninety two men and boys who had been working in the mine. When crews attempted to reopen the mine, it took days for the flammable gases inside to become diluted enough for anyone to try to enter. The Society for Preventing Accidents in Mines was established a following year, and they contacted Humphrey Davy for help. Davy's first step was to collect samples of gas from the mine and analyze them, and he concluded that firedamp was primarily methane. This was not new discovery. Other researchers had already said this is methane, but he confirmed that earlier work, and then he started experimenting with it, collecting it and testing it in things like jars and tubes and other vessels to figure out exactly in which conditions it would explode. He eventually concluded that firedamp only exploded when exposed to very high temperatures, which is not really surprising, but the methods to light the mines involved an open flame, so this meant that the risk of explosion was just constant. So to solve this problem, he set out to create a safer lamp, and Davy's first design enclosed the flame in a glass chimney with tubes to allow air into the lantern and exhaust out of it. This limited the amount of methane that could come into contact with the flame, and it also gave the gases time to cool as they moved into and out of the tubes. It wasn't possible for large amounts of methane to move through these tubes, so exposure to fire damp could cause the flame to burn a bit brighter, but not explode, and the outside of the lamp did not get hot enough to cause anything to ignite. Soon, Davy modified this design, replacing the glass chimney with a mesh screen after determining exactly how fine the mesh had to be to prevent explosions. While it was possible for methane to make its way through this screen and burn inside of the lamp, that flame could not pass outside of the screen and cause an explosion. This lamp could also help miners detect whether there were build ups of dangerous gases in the area based on the height and the color of the flame. Davy started publishing papers on this research within a couple of weeks of starting work in eighteen fifteen, and by eighteen sixteen, lamps he had made were being successfully tested in mines. When a friend said that he should patent his invent, he said, quote, I never thought of such a thing. My sole object was to serve the cause of humanity, and if I have succeeded, I am amply rewarded in the gratifying reflection of having done so. More wealth could not increase either my fame or my happiness. It might undoubtedly enable me to put four horses to my carriage, but what would it avail me to have it said that Sir Humphrey drives his carriage in four I love that. In March of eighteen seventeen, Davy was thanked for his service to miners at a general meeting of mine owners that was held in Newcastle. He was also awarded the Royal Society's Rumford Medal and made a baronet. But Humphrey Davy was not the only person to develop a miner's safety lamp. Around this time, George Stevenson call your Engineer, at Killingworth Colliery in Northumberland, had also developed a safety lamp, pretty much by trial and error. This lamp was known as the Jordi and it was popular in the area near where he lived. Like Davey's initial design used a long glass chimney as well as a series of tubes to allow air end to fuel the flame. The chimney was also protected by a metal tube that had holes through it. Stevenson contended that Davy had stolen his design, while Davy called Stevenson a pirate and a thief, so that went great. Eventually, a committee was convened in Newcastle in November of eighteen seventeen, with Royal Society President Joseph Banks presiding. They cleared Davy of all suspicion of having stolen the design of the lamp. But to be clear, these were also Davy's friends and scientific associates. Yeah, and the you know, Stevenson was not regarded as a scientist. He was a mine engineer. A third contender for the inventor of the minor safety lamp was William Reid Clanny, doctor from Ireland. Davy had examined one of Clanny's lamps in October of eighteen fifteen, so this lamp definitely existed before any of Davey's were being tested in the mines. But Clanne's lamp was also a lot different from Davy's or Stevenson's. It was airtight and the air was supplied to the interior of the lamp through bellows. This meant that using this lamp required the mine to hire a boid to pump the bellows while the lamp was being used. All three of these designs were in use in different parts of Britain and Ireland in the early nineteenth century, with different designs being popular in different regions, but they did not totally eliminate mine explosions. Each type of lamp worked as long as it was used correctly and as long as it was in good repair, but there was a lot that could go wrong. The designs that used glass chimneys meant that those chimneys were breakable, so if a lamp was dropped and broken, flammable gas around it could still explode. The wire mesh used in Davy's lamp could also corrode over time, leaving holes large enough for flames to pass through. Sometimes miners opened the cover or bypassed the safety to do something like light a pipe, and some didn't want to use them at all because they were more cumbersome and unwieldy than other light sources. Davy's refusal to patent his lamp, which we read earlier, makes them sound pretty noble. But he was also vocally critical of these other two lamps and the men who had developed them, and he was really self righteous when it came to his descriptions of his own work. He was really angry about the fact that there were people who thought the other lamps were better, or that he did not deserve any credit for the one that he had developed. I read a paper that argued that, according to his behavior in this whole incident, he was a narcissist. Some of Davy's critics on this, though, were also very vocal. There were people who favored the Stevenson or Clanny lamps who called Davy's lamp the murder lamp. Oh bless him. It just sounds like a lot of people mad that they they're not getting lauded. Davy went on another trip to Europe after finishing his work on a minor safety lamp, and while there he tried and failed to find a way to unroll and read a scroll that had been retrieved from herculaneum. Was also involved chemistry. He didn't just try to open it up, but the fact that this came up recently on Unearthed. I know how excited would he be to see the stuff that people have developed today? He might be mad? Uh. In eighteen eighteen, Mary Shelley published her book Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, and in this book, Professor Waldman is a chemist who delivers a lecture that's attended by Victor Frankenstein, and this chemist inspires Victor Frankenstein's later work. Sometimes Humphrey Davy is cited as an inspiration for this character, while other people cite a similarity to various other British scientists from the early nineteenth century. Mary Shelley definitely went to some of Davy's lectures, and of course she was also influenced by the work of the Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor, Coleridge Shoe we talked about in Part one, who were part of Davy's social circle. Yeah, they had a lot of the Venn diagram of their social groups. Has Humphrey Davies's career as a chemist had been groundbreaking and influential, but that is not the note that he went out on, and we'll talk about that after a sponsor break. In eighteen twenty, Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society died. Banks had been president of the Royal Society for forty two years. His interim successor was William Hyde Wallaston, who served until an election could be held, and then Humphrey Davy was elected in November of eighteen twenty. Davy's tenure as President of the Royal Society really did not go well. Under Banks's four plus decades of leadership, the Royal Society had become part social club for gentlemen and part scientific institution. Some of its members were Banks's personal friends who didn't necessarily have any interest or aptitude in science. Davy wanted to reform the Royal Society into a bona fide scientific institution, and of course that raised the ire of people who liked it the way it was. Divisions developed between the people who wanted reform and the ones who wanted to keep things the way they were, the way that Banks had done it. Yeah, this is also connected to the whole process of professionalizing and formalizing scientific fields. His presidency also threw a wrench and to his relationship with Michael Faraday. Faraday had worked with Davy for eight years at this point, and he'd gone from basically being Davy's scribe and assistant to a respected scientist in his own right. He could no longer be described as anything like an apprentice, and he didn't need Davy's supervision. But the Royal Society also had its own internal politics that Faraday kind of ran a foul of. Like William Hyde, Wallaston was doing a lot of work with electromagnetism, and he seemed to think that Faraday's work on the same subject was horning in on his own territory. And then Faraday felt like Davy did not give him enough support in this dispute. Things became even more contentious when Faraday did an experiment that produced liquefied chlorine. It was an experiment that Davy had suggested he do, but producing liquid chlorine was not part of the expected outcome. Davy thought Faraday should have credited him when he reported the results of this experiment. Faraday did not. Then, in eighteen twenty three, Faraday applied to be a fellow of the Royal Society, so taken on his owns, probably would not have been very controversial. Like we said, he had developed his own reputation by this point, but there had been so much nepotism in the Royal Society under Joseph Banks. Davey felt like if he supported Faraday's application, it would look like he was just doing the same thing, so he told Faraday to withdraw his application. Faraday refused, and ultimately did become a Royal Society fellow. A number of sources that I read when I was working on this episode characterized Davy's behavior here as really arrogant and petty, and suggest that he was suffering from kind of an overinflated ego after his earlier years of such tremendous success. My first thought is, okay, just recuse yourself from that process, dude. I don't know what the bylaws were like, but it does seem like there would have been other options. Yeah. Uh. Davy also had some setbacks in his professional work. In eighteen twenty three, he was asked to find a solution for the corrosion that was degrading the copper sheeting used on the hulls of warships. This was part of an effort to scale back on naval spending, since at that point Britain wasn't at war with another maritime power. Britain was at war with the Ashanti Empire, but that did not involve ships beyond transporting troops to what is now Ghana. Davy's solution was based on the idea of cathodic protection. Soldering another type of metal to the copper gave it a negative electrical charge which stopped the corrosion, and after testing this in a lab, Davy had Faraday try this on three ships in a dockyard, and that seemed to work. However, it turned out that the copper was what had been keeping barnacles and other sea life from adhering to the hulls, and this solution prevented that from happening. It had been sort of leeching stuff into the water that was keeping the barnacles from making their homes on the hull of the ship. So instead of hulls that were covered and corroded copper that needed to be replaced, the hulls were instead covered in copper that was covered in barnacles, and eventually enough barnacles would affect the ship's performance. This is another moment that some sources interpret as coming from arrogance, because those miners' lamps had worked in the field the same as they had in the lab. And Davy seems to have just assumed that the same would be true of the ship protectors. In eighteen twenty four, Davey founded the s and Am Club along with Secretary of the Admiralty John Wilson, in part to try to cut down on some of the divisions that were plaguing the Royal Society by giving people who had ties to the Admiralty another outlet. Davy served as the club's first chair and Faraday was its first secretary. Two years later, Davy and Stamford Raffles founded the Zoological Society of London, which helps at the stage for the establishment of the London Zoo. In September of eighteen twenty six, Davey's mother died, and he attributed some of his own increasing health problems to her passing. He was reelected as President of the Royal Society in November of that year, but at that point he was obviously unwell. A month later, he had a stroke at the age of forty eight, while his father also died at a really young age. There is some speculation that Davy's years of self experimentation may have been a factor in this early shift in his health. Humphrey's brother John took him to Italy to try to recover, and although his condition did improve, he wrote to his wife and to Davy's Gilbert to say he planned to resign as pre president of the Royal Society. He did resign on November sixth, eighteen twenty seven, and he was replaced by Davies Gilbert. He also worked on a book on phishing called Salmonia or Days of fly Fishing. Humphrey asked his wife to come join him in Italy, but she couldn't, so he returned to England for a time before heading back to the continent, this time accompanied by a medical student named James Tobin. It occurs to me I should have looked up whether Tobin was related to his godfather. I don't actually know. Maybe Tobin took dictation for another book of Davies, and that was a set of memoirs and dialogues called Consolations in Travel or The Last Days of a Philosopher, and that was published posthumously. Humphrey had another stroke in February of eighteen twenty nine, and his wife and brother were sent for Humphrey Davy died on May twenty eighth, eighteen twenty nine, at the age of fifty in Geneva, Switzerland. He had a fear of being buried alive, and he had asked for his burial to be delayed to make sure he really was deceased, but the laws in Geneva did not allow for that to happen. He was buried in Geneva, and his wife Jane, later had a memorial tablet placed in Westminster Abbey. Davy had been incredibly well known and well respected during his lifetime. I mean we talked about him discovering a bunch of different elements and inventing the miner's safety lamp, although there were other people who did the same, but he was soon really overshadowed by Michael Faraday. Sometimes Faraday is described as Davy's greatest discovery. As a side note, when Faraday was offered the presidency of the Royal Society on two different occasions, he said no thanks. There is some presumption that his experience watching Davy go through that made him like, I don't want any part of that. Hard pass. Also, in two thousand and eight, after the Royal Society of Chemist asked for help in finding the medal that had been awarded to him by the French. Family members reported that at some point after Humphrey's death, Jane threw that French medal right into the sea. She said that it brought up bad memories. He didn't like France. Let's get rid of him. That was the worst trip of our lives. Yeah, anyway, Humphrey Davies kind of a journey. That's where I have landed after all of this. We'll talk about him some more on Friday and the behind the scenes. I have an email from Phil Phil Route and said, I just listened to your show on etiquette. It took me back to memories of my childhood. We had a family friend that was a socialite. We would often see her picture in the society section of the paper. She was often attending the best events throughout town, charities and other big events. She would often try to teach us proper etiquette. I have a feeling she wasn't sure we were getting proper education in these areas from our parents. I grew up in a family of four boys. So she gave us a gift one year. The gift was a book published in nineteen sixty nine, Stand Up, Shake hands, and say, how do you do. I remember looking through it as a kid, but the sections on attending someone's debutante ball not sure if that's what they were called in the book seemed so foreign to me. A few years ago, we were cleaning out my mom's stuff after she'd died. My brothers and I had a great weekend of telling stories. As we went through all of the items and divided them, we came across this book. My brothers are all a few years older than I am. They told stories about how strange the book was to them when they got it, and the only thing they really used it for was to learn how to tie a tie. I felt better about my thoughts about the book because that was the only thing I used it for as well. My dad moved out of our house when I was about nine, so I didn't have that around teach me that. I always thought the book was a little pretentious and stuffy for our lifestyle, but it brought great memories of our dear family. Friend. What of my brothers has the book at his house, so I can't refer back to it or confirm exactly what is in the book. Your podcast stirred that memory for me. Thanks for your show. I am including a picture of Willow, our saint shepherd. She is a goofy dog, but we love her. Phil. Thank you so much, Phil for this email. I love this whole story. I did you. I think that's a great use for that book. It gave you one life skill. That's all you need out of a book for it to be valuable. Yeah, and also reminds me a little bit of my spouse, who's not the youngest but is also one of four boys who lost his dad at a young age, so also raised by a mom. And I'm like, did they have any etiquette books to try to teach them things at their house? Most of the stories I hear about their growing up involve my spouse being put into dangerous situations by his older brother. Oh yeah. Also, will Hell is such a sweet looking talk I mean, and is cute standing in some snow. Cuteness cuteness beyond all reckoning. Yes, So, thank you so much Phil for this email. If you'd like to send us a note, we're at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and uh you can subscribe to the show wherever you'd like to get podcasts, including the iHeartRadio app, any number of other podcast apps, and on Friday, we'll talk about our own behind the scenes thoughts on this episode. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm tra c Ev Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of our accidental two parter on chemist Sir Humphrey Davy. In part one, we talked about how he became medical superintendent at the Pneumatic Institute and did a bunch of experiments involving nitrous oxside and then wrote a five hundred and eighty page book about it. He was only nineteen when he got that job. He did not have a lot of formal education. When I started envisioning this episode, I sort of thought that was going to be the episode. But he also had a whole career after that point, and that is what we are talking about today. So last time, our discussion of Humphrey Davies's work was mainly about gases and specifically nitrous oxide, but that's not the only thing that he was working on. He published his first paper in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions in eighteen oh one, and that paper was on the voltaic pile, an early electrical battery invented by Alessandro volta in a voltaic pile, Alternating discs of two different medals, such as copper and zinc, are stacked together, along with fabric discs that are soaked in something like saltwater or vinegar. Initially, it was believed that the current in a voltaic pile was caused by the voltage difference between the two alternating medals. Davy's paper argued correctly that it was really the result of a chemical reaction. In March of eighteen oh one, Davy was offered a position at the Royal Institution, which had been founded in seventeen ninety nine to teach the general public about science. He was assistant lecturer in chemistry, director of the laboratory, and assistant editor of the institution's journals. Adition to his salary, this position came with a room call and candles so charming. We have discussed about how most of Davey's education was self directed, and this was not all that unusual for someone of his social class, especially in a field like chemistry, which was basically brand new. This was also the age of the so called gentleman's scientist, although there were also women like Mary Anning and Caroline Herschel. A lot of scientists pursued their work independently, often without any kind of backing from a formal institution or a lot of formal education, and the field had not been professionalized. But even in that context, Davy's appointment to this position was pretty remarkable. It wasn't just that he didn't have formal education in chemistry. He didn't have much formal education at all, and he was only twenty two, already well published when he was offered this position. His work with nitrous oxide it didn't entirely end when he left the Pneumatic Institute. On June twentieth, eighteen oh one, he gave a public lecture at the Royal Institution. This lecture was on respiration, and he told the audience that anybody who wanted to could experience this gas afterward. In the words of a nineteen thirty write up on Davy in Science Progress in the twentieth Century, quote, the spectators were amused by the antics of the experimenters, and one subject at least enjoyed paradise. For mister Underwood was so transported and so reluctant to leave Heaven for Earth that the breathing bag had to be snatched forcibly from him. As a side note, the Pneumatic Institute didn't keep his focus on gases as a curative forever. In eighteen oh four it became the Preventive Medical Institution for the Sick and Drooping Poor, which, as its name suggests, was a hospital for the poor focused primarily on the treatment of tuberculosis. Its founder, Thomas Beddows, died four years later. Some of Davies's other lectures that the Royal Institution were on tanning. He tried to figure out how tanning worked as at a chemical level, I'm talking about the tanning of animal hides, not going out for a suntan, so he was figuring out how that worked and whether there were improvements that could be made to the process. He concluded that workers at England's best tanneries had already developed pretty good methods for their work, so he didn't try to come in and revolutionize the whole process. But he did look for substitutes for some of the more expensive and harder to source materials that were used in tanning. In particular, he found a substitute for oak bark, which was in short supply, but that substitute was katachew, which was an extract from acacia trees which grew in India. So of course that gets into a whole tangle of British imperialism and colonialism. He also worked in agriculture, including testing the quality of the soil and developing recommendations for different types of fertilizer. This followed the same basic pattern as his tannery work. He was figuring out the chemical processes involved and making recommendations for adjustments when necessary, but generally he thought what Britain's farmers were already doing was working pretty well, and he did not try to totally re envision things. He published Elements of Agricultural Chemistry based on this work in eighteen thirteen. Davy also gave lots of public lectures on chemistry more generally, and soon he was really in high demand as both a speaker and a dinner guest. He was charismatic and used a lot of showmanship in his lectures, and he tended to attract a lot of women in the audience and around town. There are some sort of comedic illustrations of him doing lecturing in which like audiences overwhelmingly women. There are also stories about him working in his lab until the absolute last second, and then putting a clean shirt on on top of what he already had on as he walked out the door to go to some dinner engagement. Davy became a fellow of the Royal Society in eighteen oh four, and he was awarded the Society's Copley Medal in eighteen oh five. The Copley Medal is an award for outstanding achievement. It is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, scientific awards in the world. In eighteen oh seven, Davy was elected as one of two secretaries of the Royal Society, and he was also awarded the Napoleon Prize from the Institute de France, although England and France were at war and a naval blockade meant that there was no way for him to even be informed that he had won this prize. That's going to come up again later though. Also in eighteen oh seven, Davey started working on isolating and identifying different elements using electrolysis. This was connected to his earlier work with the voltaic pile. He had concluded that if a chemical reaction could generate an electrical current, then you could maybe basically do the opposite. An electrical current could also be used to initiate a chemical reaction, so he used electricity to isolate pure sodium from caustic soda and potassium from caustic potash. Apparently he wanted the word potassium to start with pt, like the word pterodactyl, but a transcriber misspelled it in the first manuscript on the subject as that was being prepared, and this like incorrect in Davy's mind. Spelling stuck, Let's just go with this. Yeah. Also, a lot of these elements are like very reactive when they are isolated on their own, so this probably involved some very dramatic moments in the lab. Davy isolated more elements in eighteen oh eight, including boron from boricap acid and calcium, which that process involved electrolyzing lime and mercuric oxide together. By this point, Humphrey was incredibly well respected and he was influential as a scientist. He was also trying to put his work into use out in the world. At one point, he visited Newgate Prison to evaluate its ventilation system, and while there he contracted typhus, also known as jail fever. In eighteen ten. Some of Davies's work focused on acidity. We mentioned back in Part one that Antoine Laurent la Foisier had believed that oxygen was present in all acids, and he had coined the name for oxygen based on that idea. At the time, hydrochloric acid was known as muriatic acid, which was the term some people still use today. Lavoisier had believed that removing the hydrogen from muriatic acid resulted in oxy muratic acid, and that that contained oxygen, But Davy concluded that this did not contain oxygen, and that in fact, it was not a compound at all. Instead, he said this was its own element, chlorine, which he named for its green color. Davy didn't actually discover chlorine, that's usually attributed to Karl Wilhelmschill in seventeen seventy four, but Davy was the one who determined that it was an element. Davy was awarded an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin in eighteen eleven. On April eighth, eighteen twelve, he was knighted, and three days after that he married Jane, a priest who he had proposed to about a month before. She was a wealthy widow and a socialite and an intellectual, sometimes described as a bluestocking, and she had hosted her own salon. Jane had inherited money from her late husband and from her father, who was a merchant whose business had been primarily out of Antigua, where he dealt in both goods and enslaved people. Also, in eighteen twelve, Davy published a book titled Elements of Chemical Philosophy, which was dedicated to his wife, and that same year he was injured in a lab accident while working with nitrogen trichloride, which is highly explosive. While he was recovering from this accident, he needed an assistance, especially to help with things like record keeping, so he hired twenty one year old Michael Faraday. Faraday continued working with Davy for years. Sometimes his role was more like a valet or a personal secretary, which she seems to have found pretty degrading. Sometimes he was more like a lab assistant or an apprentice. Davey recovered from his injuries in eighteen thirteen, and that year he also left his position at the Royal Institution. Thanks to his marriage, he no longer needed the job. But in spite of their common intellectual ground, Humphrey and Jane don't seem to have been very well matched. There was just a lot of friction between the two of them, and a lot of public bickering in the later years of their marriage. Sometimes they spent long stretches of time apart, each of them pursuing their own interests, but they also did travel together at some points, including taking a trip to France in October of eighteen thirteen to collect that medal that Davy had been awarded back in eighteen oh seven. It is a weird trip. England and France were still at war with each other. The Davies apparently made this trip along with Michael Faraday, with Napoleon's permission, but even with that permission they were still arrested and detained after they got to France. Once they were released, they went to Paris. They met Napoleon's second wife, Marie Luise. They did not meet Napoleon himself. Davy seems to have butted heads with a lot of people on this trip, making no secret about his antipathy for the French. This was about politics and the ongoing wars between England and France, and it was also about science. We have already talked about his criticisms of some of the work of French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. He also had a huge rivalry with French chemist and physicist Joseph Luis guille Lussac, with the two of them arguing over who should get credit for the identification of iodine as an element, which was connected to the work Davey carried out while in Paris. Bernard Courtois had first described iodine in eighteen eleven, and then in eighteen thirteen, Gui le Sac and Davy had written work identifying it as an element. About a week apart. This is a trip where I was like, hey, a friend, you didn't have to go to France and laker with everyone that you were angry at and your nation was at war with it. He wanted that award. Some of the descriptions of it just make him sound like a big jerk to me. After leaving France, the party would on to Italy. Eventually, as we know, Napoleon was forced to abdicate as Emperor of the French and he was exiled to Elba. The party decided they should go back to Britain after they heard of Napoleon's return from exile in eighteen fifteen. After returning to Britain, Davy was asked to work on the problem of coal mine explosions, and we're going to talk about that after we pause for a sponsor break. Humphrey Davy was living at a time when demand for coal was skyrocketing in Britain and in other parts of the world due to the Industrial Revolution. In the mid eighteenth century, Britain had been producing about five million tons of coal per year. By the mid nineteenth century, that number had increased more than tenfold. As railroads and factories burned coal to drive steam engines. Miners had to work faster and dig deeper, and that made a job that was already difficult and dirty, increasingly unsafe in the face of mine collapses and explosions of flammable gas, which at the time were known as fire damp. One of Britain's worst mine explosions happened on May twenty fifth, eighteen twelve, at the Felling Colliery. This was an enormous explosion that was heard for miles and it killed ninety two men and boys who had been working in the mine. When crews attempted to reopen the mine, it took days for the flammable gases inside to become diluted enough for anyone to try to enter. The Society for Preventing Accidents in Mines was established a following year, and they contacted Humphrey Davy for help. Davy's first step was to collect samples of gas from the mine and analyze them, and he concluded that firedamp was primarily methane. This was not new discovery. Other researchers had already said this is methane, but he confirmed that earlier work, and then he started experimenting with it, collecting it and testing it in things like jars and tubes and other vessels to figure out exactly in which conditions it would explode. He eventually concluded that firedamp only exploded when exposed to very high temperatures, which is not really surprising, but the methods to light the mines involved an open flame, so this meant that the risk of explosion was just constant. So to solve this problem, he set out to create a safer lamp, and Davy's first design enclosed the flame in a glass chimney with tubes to allow air into the lantern and exhaust out of it. This limited the amount of methane that could come into contact with the flame, and it also gave the gases time to cool as they moved into and out of the tubes. It wasn't possible for large amounts of methane to move through these tubes, so exposure to fire damp could cause the flame to burn a bit brighter, but not explode, and the outside of the lamp did not get hot enough to cause anything to ignite. Soon, Davy modified this design, replacing the glass chimney with a mesh screen after determining exactly how fine the mesh had to be to prevent explosions. While it was possible for methane to make its way through this screen and burn inside of the lamp, that flame could not pass outside of the screen and cause an explosion. This lamp could also help miners detect whether there were build ups of dangerous gases in the area based on the height and the color of the flame. Davy started publishing papers on this research within a couple of weeks of starting work in eighteen fifteen, and by eighteen sixteen, lamps he had made were being successfully tested in mines. When a friend said that he should patent his invent, he said, quote, I never thought of such a thing. My sole object was to serve the cause of humanity, and if I have succeeded, I am amply rewarded in the gratifying reflection of having done so. More wealth could not increase either my fame or my happiness. It might undoubtedly enable me to put four horses to my carriage, but what would it avail me to have it said that Sir Humphrey drives his carriage in four I love that. In March of eighteen seventeen, Davy was thanked for his service to miners at a general meeting of mine owners that was held in Newcastle. He was also awarded the Royal Society's Rumford Medal and made a baronet. But Humphrey Davy was not the only person to develop a miner's safety lamp. Around this time, George Stevenson call your Engineer, at Killingworth Colliery in Northumberland, had also developed a safety lamp, pretty much by trial and error. This lamp was known as the Jordi and it was popular in the area near where he lived. Like Davey's initial design used a long glass chimney as well as a series of tubes to allow air end to fuel the flame. The chimney was also protected by a metal tube that had holes through it. Stevenson contended that Davy had stolen his design, while Davy called Stevenson a pirate and a thief, so that went great. Eventually, a committee was convened in Newcastle in November of eighteen seventeen, with Royal Society President Joseph Banks presiding. They cleared Davy of all suspicion of having stolen the design of the lamp. But to be clear, these were also Davy's friends and scientific associates. Yeah, and the you know, Stevenson was not regarded as a scientist. He was a mine engineer. A third contender for the inventor of the minor safety lamp was William Reid Clanny, doctor from Ireland. Davy had examined one of Clanny's lamps in October of eighteen fifteen, so this lamp definitely existed before any of Davey's were being tested in the mines. But Clanne's lamp was also a lot different from Davy's or Stevenson's. It was airtight and the air was supplied to the interior of the lamp through bellows. This meant that using this lamp required the mine to hire a boid to pump the bellows while the lamp was being used. All three of these designs were in use in different parts of Britain and Ireland in the early nineteenth century, with different designs being popular in different regions, but they did not totally eliminate mine explosions. Each type of lamp worked as long as it was used correctly and as long as it was in good repair, but there was a lot that could go wrong. The designs that used glass chimneys meant that those chimneys were breakable, so if a lamp was dropped and broken, flammable gas around it could still explode. The wire mesh used in Davy's lamp could also corrode over time, leaving holes large enough for flames to pass through. Sometimes miners opened the cover or bypassed the safety to do something like light a pipe, and some didn't want to use them at all because they were more cumbersome and unwieldy than other light sources. Davy's refusal to patent his lamp, which we read earlier, makes them sound pretty noble. But he was also vocally critical of these other two lamps and the men who had developed them, and he was really self righteous when it came to his descriptions of his own work. He was really angry about the fact that there were people who thought the other lamps were better, or that he did not deserve any credit for the one that he had developed. I read a paper that argued that, according to his behavior in this whole incident, he was a narcissist. Some of Davy's critics on this, though, were also very vocal. There were people who favored the Stevenson or Clanny lamps who called Davy's lamp the murder lamp. Oh bless him. It just sounds like a lot of people mad that they they're not getting lauded. Davy went on another trip to Europe after finishing his work on a minor safety lamp, and while there he tried and failed to find a way to unroll and read a scroll that had been retrieved from herculaneum. Was also involved chemistry. He didn't just try to open it up, but the fact that this came up recently on Unearthed. I know how excited would he be to see the stuff that people have developed today? He might be mad? Uh. In eighteen eighteen, Mary Shelley published her book Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, and in this book, Professor Waldman is a chemist who delivers a lecture that's attended by Victor Frankenstein, and this chemist inspires Victor Frankenstein's later work. Sometimes Humphrey Davy is cited as an inspiration for this character, while other people cite a similarity to various other British scientists from the early nineteenth century. Mary Shelley definitely went to some of Davy's lectures, and of course she was also influenced by the work of the Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor, Coleridge Shoe we talked about in Part one, who were part of Davy's social circle. Yeah, they had a lot of the Venn diagram of their social groups. Has Humphrey Davies's career as a chemist had been groundbreaking and influential, but that is not the note that he went out on, and we'll talk about that after a sponsor break. In eighteen twenty, Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society died. Banks had been president of the Royal Society for forty two years. His interim successor was William Hyde Wallaston, who served until an election could be held, and then Humphrey Davy was elected in November of eighteen twenty. Davy's tenure as President of the Royal Society really did not go well. Under Banks's four plus decades of leadership, the Royal Society had become part social club for gentlemen and part scientific institution. Some of its members were Banks's personal friends who didn't necessarily have any interest or aptitude in science. Davy wanted to reform the Royal Society into a bona fide scientific institution, and of course that raised the ire of people who liked it the way it was. Divisions developed between the people who wanted reform and the ones who wanted to keep things the way they were, the way that Banks had done it. Yeah, this is also connected to the whole process of professionalizing and formalizing scientific fields. His presidency also threw a wrench and to his relationship with Michael Faraday. Faraday had worked with Davy for eight years at this point, and he'd gone from basically being Davy's scribe and assistant to a respected scientist in his own right. He could no longer be described as anything like an apprentice, and he didn't need Davy's supervision. But the Royal Society also had its own internal politics that Faraday kind of ran a foul of. Like William Hyde, Wallaston was doing a lot of work with electromagnetism, and he seemed to think that Faraday's work on the same subject was horning in on his own territory. And then Faraday felt like Davy did not give him enough support in this dispute. Things became even more contentious when Faraday did an experiment that produced liquefied chlorine. It was an experiment that Davy had suggested he do, but producing liquid chlorine was not part of the expected outcome. Davy thought Faraday should have credited him when he reported the results of this experiment. Faraday did not. Then, in eighteen twenty three, Faraday applied to be a fellow of the Royal Society, so taken on his owns, probably would not have been very controversial. Like we said, he had developed his own reputation by this point, but there had been so much nepotism in the Royal Society under Joseph Banks. Davey felt like if he supported Faraday's application, it would look like he was just doing the same thing, so he told Faraday to withdraw his application. Faraday refused, and ultimately did become a Royal Society fellow. A number of sources that I read when I was working on this episode characterized Davy's behavior here as really arrogant and petty, and suggest that he was suffering from kind of an overinflated ego after his earlier years of such tremendous success. My first thought is, okay, just recuse yourself from that process, dude. I don't know what the bylaws were like, but it does seem like there would have been other options. Yeah. Uh. Davy also had some setbacks in his professional work. In eighteen twenty three, he was asked to find a solution for the corrosion that was degrading the copper sheeting used on the hulls of warships. This was part of an effort to scale back on naval spending, since at that point Britain wasn't at war with another maritime power. Britain was at war with the Ashanti Empire, but that did not involve ships beyond transporting troops to what is now Ghana. Davy's solution was based on the idea of cathodic protection. Soldering another type of metal to the copper gave it a negative electrical charge which stopped the corrosion, and after testing this in a lab, Davy had Faraday try this on three ships in a dockyard, and that seemed to work. However, it turned out that the copper was what had been keeping barnacles and other sea life from adhering to the hulls, and this solution prevented that from happening. It had been sort of leeching stuff into the water that was keeping the barnacles from making their homes on the hull of the ship. So instead of hulls that were covered and corroded copper that needed to be replaced, the hulls were instead covered in copper that was covered in barnacles, and eventually enough barnacles would affect the ship's performance. This is another moment that some sources interpret as coming from arrogance, because those miners' lamps had worked in the field the same as they had in the lab. And Davy seems to have just assumed that the same would be true of the ship protectors. In eighteen twenty four, Davey founded the s and Am Club along with Secretary of the Admiralty John Wilson, in part to try to cut down on some of the divisions that were plaguing the Royal Society by giving people who had ties to the Admiralty another outlet. Davy served as the club's first chair and Faraday was its first secretary. Two years later, Davy and Stamford Raffles founded the Zoological Society of London, which helps at the stage for the establishment of the London Zoo. In September of eighteen twenty six, Davey's mother died, and he attributed some of his own increasing health problems to her passing. He was reelected as President of the Royal Society in November of that year, but at that point he was obviously unwell. A month later, he had a stroke at the age of forty eight, while his father also died at a really young age. There is some speculation that Davy's years of self experimentation may have been a factor in this early shift in his health. Humphrey's brother John took him to Italy to try to recover, and although his condition did improve, he wrote to his wife and to Davy's Gilbert to say he planned to resign as pre president of the Royal Society. He did resign on November sixth, eighteen twenty seven, and he was replaced by Davies Gilbert. He also worked on a book on phishing called Salmonia or Days of fly Fishing. Humphrey asked his wife to come join him in Italy, but she couldn't, so he returned to England for a time before heading back to the continent, this time accompanied by a medical student named James Tobin. It occurs to me I should have looked up whether Tobin was related to his godfather. I don't actually know. Maybe Tobin took dictation for another book of Davies, and that was a set of memoirs and dialogues called Consolations in Travel or The Last Days of a Philosopher, and that was published posthumously. Humphrey had another stroke in February of eighteen twenty nine, and his wife and brother were sent for Humphrey Davy died on May twenty eighth, eighteen twenty nine, at the age of fifty in Geneva, Switzerland. He had a fear of being buried alive, and he had asked for his burial to be delayed to make sure he really was deceased, but the laws in Geneva did not allow for that to happen. He was buried in Geneva, and his wife Jane, later had a memorial tablet placed in Westminster Abbey. Davy had been incredibly well known and well respected during his lifetime. I mean we talked about him discovering a bunch of different elements and inventing the miner's safety lamp, although there were other people who did the same, but he was soon really overshadowed by Michael Faraday. Sometimes Faraday is described as Davy's greatest discovery. As a side note, when Faraday was offered the presidency of the Royal Society on two different occasions, he said no thanks. There is some presumption that his experience watching Davy go through that made him like, I don't want any part of that. Hard pass. Also, in two thousand and eight, after the Royal Society of Chemist asked for help in finding the medal that had been awarded to him by the French. Family members reported that at some point after Humphrey's death, Jane threw that French medal right into the sea. She said that it brought up bad memories. He didn't like France. Let's get rid of him. That was the worst trip of our lives. Yeah, anyway, Humphrey Davies kind of a journey. That's where I have landed after all of this. We'll talk about him some more on Friday and the behind the scenes. I have an email from Phil Phil Route and said, I just listened to your show on etiquette. It took me back to memories of my childhood. We had a family friend that was a socialite. We would often see her picture in the society section of the paper. She was often attending the best events throughout town, charities and other big events. She would often try to teach us proper etiquette. I have a feeling she wasn't sure we were getting proper education in these areas from our parents. I grew up in a family of four boys. So she gave us a gift one year. The gift was a book published in nineteen sixty nine, Stand Up, Shake hands, and say, how do you do. I remember looking through it as a kid, but the sections on attending someone's debutante ball not sure if that's what they were called in the book seemed so foreign to me. A few years ago, we were cleaning out my mom's stuff after she'd died. My brothers and I had a great weekend of telling stories. As we went through all of the items and divided them, we came across this book. My brothers are all a few years older than I am. They told stories about how strange the book was to them when they got it, and the only thing they really used it for was to learn how to tie a tie. I felt better about my thoughts about the book because that was the only thing I used it for as well. My dad moved out of our house when I was about nine, so I didn't have that around teach me that. I always thought the book was a little pretentious and stuffy for our lifestyle, but it brought great memories of our dear family. Friend. What of my brothers has the book at his house, so I can't refer back to it or confirm exactly what is in the book. Your podcast stirred that memory for me. Thanks for your show. I am including a picture of Willow, our saint shepherd. She is a goofy dog, but we love her. Phil. Thank you so much, Phil for this email. I love this whole story. I did you. I think that's a great use for that book. It gave you one life skill. That's all you need out of a book for it to be valuable. Yeah, and also reminds me a little bit of my spouse, who's not the youngest but is also one of four boys who lost his dad at a young age, so also raised by a mom. And I'm like, did they have any etiquette books to try to teach them things at their house? Most of the stories I hear about their growing up involve my spouse being put into dangerous situations by his older brother. Oh yeah. Also, will Hell is such a sweet looking talk I mean, and is cute standing in some snow. Cuteness cuteness beyond all reckoning. Yes, So, thank you so much Phil for this email. If you'd like to send us a note, we're at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and uh you can subscribe to the show wherever you'd like to get podcasts, including the iHeartRadio app, any number of other podcast apps, and on Friday, we'll talk about our own behind the scenes thoughts on this episode. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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