Free webinar focuses on life of safety lamp pioneer
A webinar focusing on the life of Sir Humphry Davy has been organised by The Lunar Society.
The webinar, happening on Wednesday, 22 February from 6 to 8 pm will explore four key periods of Davy's life. It will be conducted by Dr Andrew Lacey.
Sir Humphry Davy is best remembered today for his invention, in 1815-17, of a miners' safety lamp, which saved many lives below ground and, in the following decades, transformed Britain's industrial capability.
But there's much more to Davy than the lamp: he was the first to inhale nitrous oxide (laughing gas) when to do so was thought of as fatal; he was also a poet, moving in the same circles as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth; and he isolated seven chemical elements (including sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium) during his time working at the Royal Institution in London - a total that hadn't been surpassed before, and hasn't been surpassed since.
Davy had several Lunar Society connections: he met both James Keir and James Watt Sr (and corresponded with the latter); he was influenced, especially in his work on gases and pneumatic medicine, by Joseph Priestley's discovery of oxygen.
His employer at the Medical Pneumatic Institution (MPI) in Bristol, Thomas Beddoes, corresponded with Erasmus Darwin, and Darwin employed pneumatic treatments developed by Beddoes on his patients.
The course of this talk will explore four key periods of Davy's life: his early years at the MPI, where he carried out experimental work on the therapeutic use of gases, his years at the Royal Institution during which he made his ground-breaking chemical discoveries and became a scientific celebrity of his age, the period during which the 'safety lamp controversy ', and his last years, when he toured Europe, writing philosophical dialogues and revelling in the grandeur of the sublime scenery he visited.
Dr Andrew Lacey (pictured) is senior research associate in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, UK.
He is currently working on the Davy Notebooks Project, which is producing an annotated digital edition of the c. 70 manuscript notebooks of Sir Humphry Davy.
Prior to this, he was senior research associate on the Davy Letters Project, the culmination of which was the publication, in four volumes with Oxford University Press, of 'The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy' in 2020.
He said: “I'm delighted to have the opportunity to speak to the Lunar Society on Davy and the Davy Notebooks Project. Davy had significant connections to several prominent Lunar Society members, including James Watt Sr, Joseph Priestley, and Erasmus Darwin, and work on the Davy Notebooks Project is helping to shed new light on Davy's relationships with those and other prominent figures of the interrelated scientific and literary cultures of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
“It's always very exciting to share our latest findings with an interested audience, and to gain their insights on what we've done so far and what we might do next. ”
To register for the event please click here