Life Beyond the Lamp

Raymond Lamont-Brown. Humphry Davy: Life Beyond the Lamp. Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2004. xxiii + 199 pp. $39.25

Reviewed by George B. Kauffman

Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829) was my first scientific hero. The rags-to-riches saga of this poor Cornish youth and his meteoric rise to become a professor of the Royal Institution, a popular science lecturer par excellence, a darling of London society (especially the ladies), a knight, and president of the Royal Society—the highest position in British science—made an indelible impression on my adolescent mind. What a role model for a young person determined to devote himself to “the central science”!

I emulated my hero in many ways. Like Davy’s, my first experiments were pyrotechnical; I followed his dangerous example by testing the physiological effects of various substances on myself; I tried unsuccessfully to duplicate Davy’s electrolytic preparation of metallic potassium; and, like Davy, I wrote poetry. Later I devoted considerable time to preparing lectures and demonstrations—activities in which Davy and Michael Faraday, his “greatest discovery” and protégé, excelled. Thus I have long had a personal and professional interest in any books or articles about the fascinating man who aspired to become the Isaac Newton of his day—and succeeded.

Little in Davy’s plebian background presaged his future reputation. Born on 17 December 1778 in Penzance, Cornwall, Davy was the first of five children. His father was an often-unemployed woodcarver who died when Davy was 16. His mother supported the family by operating a millinery shop.

Davy seemed destined to become a physician. He was apprenticed at 16 to an apothecary-surgeon. In 1798
Thomas Beddoes appointed him his assistant at his Pneumatic Institute at Clifton, near Bristol, where he analyzed the oxides of nitrogen, providing John Dalton with data to support his law of multiple proportions. Davy’s 1800 study on the physiological effects of nitrous oxide aroused considerable popular as well as scientific attention and made inhaling laughing gas a fashionable fad.

Davy forged a career in science at a time when only the Astronomer Royal could be described as a professional scientist. He was motivated throughout his relatively short life by an urge to understand nature and to apply this knowledge to useful purposes. His practical inventions included the carbon arc light, the miner’s safety lamp (the “lamp” in Raymond Lamont-Brown’s title), and cathodic protection to prevent corrosion of the copper hulls of warships. In 1802 he became a professor at the Royal Institution. His zeal and showmanship in popularizing his experimental discoveries in chemistry, electrochemistry, agriculture, geology, and catalysis brought him the patronage of influential people, and the money people paid to attend Davy’s public lectures helped make the Royal Institution Britain’s premier research institution.

Davy’s marriage in 1812 to the bluestocking widow and heiress Jane Apreece marked his entrance into the upper tiers of a class-conscious Regency society. Their marriage was childless and unhappy. The couple
aroused considerable hostility and jealousy for their snobbery and propensity for name dropping and social climbing, but Lamont-Brown carefully discounts false anecdotes about their actions.

In 1813, at the pinnacle of his career, Davy resigned his professorship and spent the next two years traveling
the continent accompanied by Faraday, his wife, and two chests of apparatus. In France he elucidated the true nature of iodine, identifying it as an element. In Italy he carried out some of the earliest analyses of the pigments used in ancient paintings and ignited a diamond to prove that it was identical to graphite. Davy was elected president of the Royal Society in 1820 and again in 1826. After 1820 his health deteriorated; he died on 28 May 1829 in Geneva.

In recounting these events Lamont-Brown, a freelance writer and former lecturer at Dundee and St. Andrews
universities, has drawn extensively on previous biographies of Davy as well as Davy’s published work, notebooks, poetry, prose, and letters in archives and libraries in Cornwall and elsewhere. The book includes numerous excerpts, some as long as two pages, from these documents. Every quotation is meticulously acknowledged in the endnotes and an annotated four-page bibliography is provided. A four-page index
facilitates location of material. I especially liked the chronology of Davy’s life and family trees of Davy and his
wife, which I haven’t seen in other Davy biographies.

Life Beyond the Lamp is intended for a nonscientific audience and does not include formulas or equations. As Lamont-Brown comments: “Much of the modern material on Davy dwells on his chemical background, or has been prepared as study material for a scientific audience. So this volume attempts to look more clearly at Davy the man; to bring him once more to the forefront of public recognition as a brilliant communicator of difficult science; and to dispel as many myths about him as possible” (p. xxii).

Lamont-Brown vividly captures the social, political, and cultural context of the greatest creative scientist in
Regency Britain—a crucial historical period in the development of science and its institutions. This engaging and meticulously researched biography is an excellent introduction for both scientist and nonscientist, and its extensive references will guide the reader who wishes to know more.