Humphry Davy named laughing gas and used electricity to isolate seven elements
In 1799 a young Cornish chemist breathed nitrous oxide, found himself laughing, and dubbed it laughing gas, speculating it could dull surgical pain. Within a decade Humphry Davy was splitting compounds with electric current, isolating potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium and more, and effectively founding electrochemistry.
Davy was born in Penzance on 17 December 1778, eldest of five children of a woodcarver. His brother John later described their town as credulous about the supernatural and fonder of cockfighting than science. At Truro Grammar School his headmaster admitted he could not spot the talents that later made Davy famous. After his father died in 1794, his guardian apprenticed him to a Penzance surgeon, and Davy began experimenting at home; his sister complained his chemicals were ruining her dresses.
He taught himself widely. Learning French from a refugee priest in 1797, he read Lavoisier's textbook, and much of his later work reads as a reaction against French chemistry. He wrote more than 160 poems, publishing only eight, and painted views of Mount's Bay. The engineer Davies Giddy, finding him swinging on a gate, opened his library to him. That connection led in October 1798 to a post supervising experiments at Thomas Beddoes's Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, set up to test the medical powers of artificially produced gases, where he soon filled rooms with voltaic batteries.
Electricity became his great tool. In 1807 he isolated potassium and sodium, and the next year calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron. He showed that chlorine and iodine are elements, studied the forces behind these separations and is credited with discovering clathrate hydrates. Jöns Jacob Berzelius praised his 1806 Bakerian Lecture on the chemical effects of electricity as among the best memoirs ever to enrich chemical theory. He also invented the Davy lamp and an early arc lamp.
Honours followed: a baronetcy, the presidency of the Royal Society and membership of learned bodies from Cornwall to America. In later years, as his health and career declined, his poems turned to death and immortality. He died on 29 May 1829.
Source: Humphry Davy
