Date Place

Birth 17.12.1778 England

Death 25.5.1829 Switzerland
HUMPHERY DAVY

Baptized at Penzance

Davy's education was hopelessly neglected; in after-years he

declared that this had proved to be to his advantage, for he had learned, not from books,
but from nature and from observation.

Poems: Essays:

‘The Sons of Genius’ G ‘Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light’ H

‘On the Mount's Bay’ B ‘Phos-oxygen and its Combinations’ P

‘St. Michael's Mount’ M ‘Theory of Respiration’ R

Published: ‘Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, chiefly concerning Nitrous Oxide and
its Respiration’

Acquired a taste for experimental science due to a member of the Society of Friends

(Robert Dunkin)

Abandoned poetry for science

2 October 1798 Foreign member--- Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

President---Royal Society

Superintendant---Medical Pneumatic Institution in Bristol

Founding Fellow--- Zoological Society of London

Joined ‘Pneumatic Institution’ at Bristol

Pioneer---field of Electrolysis

(Royal Super Zoo P.E)

Discovered: Magnesium Strontium (M/B SC)

Calcium Barium

Davy’s lamp-- using iron gauze to enclose a lamp's flame, and so prevent the
methane burning inside the lamp from passing out to the general atmosphere.

Suggested: Acids substances containing replaceable hydrogen

Bases substances that reacted with acids to form salts and water

Showed the effect of the inspiration of nitrous oxide upon the blood and upon the products
of respiration.

Submitted blood previously saturated with nitrous oxide to the action of oxygen

Found that the blood became oxygenated

Though it appeared that no nitrous oxide was lost from the blood

Basis of gas anaesthesia

Worked out the quantity of nitrous oxide absorbed in a given number of respirations
and the volume given off by the lungs.

Hypothesis

Air was decomposed in the blood stream

Nitrogen being carried by the serum oxygen by the red corpuscles

The oxygen was combined with "charcoal" in the red corpuscles

releases

Carbon dioxide Nitrogen

Exhaled in air
Regarded nitrous oxide: "Analogous" to the ordinary stimulants
Increase the force of circulation
Produce pleasurable feeling
Alter the condition of the organs of sensation
Most extensive action destroy life

Davy's work lies in his finding that nitrous oxide alters "the condition of the organs of
sensation"

Noticed that

Patient suffering from a painful rheumatic affection

Made to inhale nitrous oxide

Pleasurable feeling was induced and the pain disappeared

did not recur until few minutes after inhalation had been discontinued

Depression did not follow stimulation with nitrous oxide

Smaller quantity of nutritive matter may be required than in ordinary stimulation

Therefore exhaustion from deficiency may not result

Davy damaged his eyesight in a laboratory accident with nitrogen trichloride. So he made
Michel Faraday his assistant

Cornish playwright Nick Darke wrote Laughing Gas (2005) a comedy script about the life of Sir
Humphry Davy

Davy died in Switzerland due to heart disease inherited from his father's side of the family