Author Description

This long out-of-print nine-volume collection brings together the major writings of the pioneering chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778—1829). Davy was responsible for many major discoveries in electrochemistry (a term he coined), discovering the elements sodium and potassium, and is perhaps best known for his invention in 1815 of the miner’s safety lamp, the Davy lamp. Davy’s career, from obscurity in Cornwall to international celebrity in science, pure and applied, astonished contemporaries. A friend of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Scott, he seemed a Romantic genius showing how electrical forces underlay chemistry. Antoine Lavoisier (1743—94) had refounded chemistry as a static science of weights: Davy made it dynamic. After discovering laughing gas at Thomas Beddoes’s Medical Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, he was invited to London where he proved himself a great lecturer, a star, drawing large and fashionable audiences to the Royal Institution, in competition with London’s other attractions. ‘The enthusiastic admiration which his lectures obtained is at this period scarcely to be imagined. Men of the first rank and talent, the literary and the scientific, the practical, the theoretical, blue stockings and women of fashion, the old, the young, all crowded, eagerly crowded the lecture-room’ — Dr J. A. Paris, The Life of Sir Humphry Davy (1831). The works collected here reflect Davy’s science which was fuelled by questions about life, matter, God, thought and immortality. Volume 1 contains Davy’s Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, the work which secured his reputation as an outstanding chemist. Other volumes gather his Bakerian Lectures (volume 5), and miscellaneous papers (volumes 2 and 6), which illustrate his remarkable talent both as a lecturer and as a chemist. From these Works we are able to acquire an extraordinarily full picture of the astonishing career of one of the leading promoters of the scientific method. With an Introd