#humphrey davy

[wilhelmrotesla]

mop. mop mop mop. nitrous oxide.

[juliehowlin]

Humphrey Davy

Health and safety? What health and safety? Humphry Davy conducted some extremely dangerous experiments with gases which meant he was lucky to live long enough to invent the Davy lamp at all. Part of his experimentation with laughing gas involved breathing in nitric oxide, which formed nitric acid in his mouth, injuring him. On another occasion he breathed in carbon monoxide and had to be removed into the fresh air where he faintly declared, "I do not think I shall die." It did, however, take him several hours to recover.

10 things you might not know about him:

17 December: Sir Humphry Davy

Sir Humphry Davy, a pioneer in science, was born on this date in 1778. Read on to find out something about the man and his discoveries.

[metal-in-the-microwave]

[litscipod]

Science Isn't Separate

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric).

Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.

Listen on Anchor

About this episode:

Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Professor Sharon Ruston (@SharonRuston), Chair in Romanticism at Lancaster University’s Department of English and Creative Writing. Sharon is the author of Creating Romanticism (2013) and Shelley and Vitality (2005) and co-editor of the forthcoming Collected Letters of Sir Humphrey Davy. Sharon talks about her LitSci research on Mary Shelley, describes her MOOC on the nineteenth-century chemist Sir Humphrey Davy, and introduces her current project, crowdsourcing transcriptions for Davy’s notebooks.

Image from letter of Jane Davy to Humphry Davy, 1 March 1829.

At the end of the episode, you can hear Sharon read an extract from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818).

About Professor Sharon Ruston:

Professor Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Sharon is the author of three monographs – Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science, and Medicine of the 1790s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Romanticism: An Introduction (Continuum, 2010); and Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave Macmillan 2005) – and numerous scholarly articles on topics ranging from literature and medicine, literature and chemistry, literature and drugs, literature and science and authors central to the Romantic movement in literature and science including Anna Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Humphry Davy, and William Godwin. Sharon is the creator and instructor of a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on the chemist and poet Sir Humphry Davy. She is co-editor of The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy with Tim Fulford, forthcoming in four volumes from Oxford University Press beginning in 2020 and, following her AHRC Leadership Fellowship focussing on the letters of Humphrey Davy, she has been awarded AHRC Follow-on-Funding for a project to crowdsource transcriptions of Humphrey Davy’s Notebooks, affiliated with the Zooniverse community.

Episode resources (in order of appearance):

Introduction

Alix Nathan, The Warlow Experiment (2019)

Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019)

Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019)

Interview

Helen Edmundson, Mary Shelley (2012)

Sally Frampton, Sarah Chaney and Sarah Punshon, Mind-Boggling Medical History: https://mbmh.web.ox.ac.uk/home

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the British Society for Literature and Science Small Grants scheme, to enable us to make Series 2 of the podcast. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of LitSciPod - we enjoyed making it!

[smartleds-blog]

Who invented the light bulb?

The first electric light was made in 1800 by Humphry Davy, an English scientist. In 1806 Humphrey Davy, demonstrated a powerful electric lamp to the Royal Society. Davy's lamp produced its illumination by creating a blinding electric spark between two charcoal rods.

Much later, in 1860, the English physicist Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914) was determined to devise a practical, long-lasting electric light. He found that a carbon paper filament worked well, but burned up quickly. In 1878, he demonstrated his new electric lamps in Newcastle, England.

In 1874, Canadian inventors Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans filed a patent for an electric lamp with different-sized carbon rods held between electrodes in a glass cylinder filled with nitrogen.

The pair tried, unsuccessfully, to commercialize their lamps but eventually sold their patent to Thomas Alva Edison in 1879.

The inventor Edison experimented with thousands of different filaments to find just the right materials to glow well and be long-lasting.

In 1879, Edison discovered that a carbon filament in an oxygen-free bulb glowed but did not burn up for 40 hours. Edison eventually produced a bulb that could glow for over 1500 hours.

He had an idea of how to solve the problems of the electric incandescent light, but had not yet perfected it. His idea was to enclose a platinum burner in a vacuum.

When other inventors had done this the platinum melted, but Edison thought he had solved that problem by building a temperature-sensitive switch into the bulb that would cut off the current when the temperature got too high.

Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could burn for more than 1,200 hours. Bamboo was used for the filaments in Edison's bulbs until it began to be replaced by longer-lasting materials in the 1880s and early 1900s.

[thrymsusano]

In 1799 Humphrey Davy (later to chair the Royal Society and invent the miner's lamp), experimented on himself with nitrous oxide. 'Laughing Gas' went on to become quite the party drug:

[following his experiment, Davy] ‘stalked majestically’ towards Kinglake ‘with the most intense and prophetic manner’, and attempted to shape the insight that had possessed him. ‘Nothing exists but thoughts!’, he blurted. ‘The world is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!’ 

O, Tom! Such a gas has Davy discovered, the gasoeus oxyd! O, Tom! I have had some; it made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger-tip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name. O, Tom! I am going for more this evening; it makes one strong and so happy, so gloriously happy! O, excellent air-bag! [Robert Southey's letter to his brother Tom]

[truinn-ou]

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles, and kindnesses, and small obligations, given habitually, are what win and preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Humphrey Davy