Mrs. Eddy Mentioned Them May 22, 1954 Issue

Sir Humphry Davy, 1778–1829

[Mentioned in Science and Health, p. 152]

Sir Humphry Davy's invention in 1815 of a safety lamp for English coal miners made his name known in the humblest homes. He refused to patent the Davy, as the lamp was called, to make money out of it, because he said, "I have never received so much pleasure from any other of my chemical labors." He was already known in the social and scientific world as a brilliant lecturer at the Royal Institution. Coleridge, who said that Davy might well have been the "first poet of his age," attended the lectures to increase his metaphors.

Yet Davy's formal education had stopped when he was fifteen. Then in Truro and afterwards in Penzance he was apprenticed to a surgeon, but he was much more interested in the experiments he carried on by himself in the garrets of his masters than in what he was supposed to be learning. Penzance, his boyhood home, also provided him fields to roam and rocks out of which to hammer specimens.

An essay containing his theory of light and heat attracted the attention of Dr. Beddoes, founder of a Pneumatic Institution at Bristol for determining the medical properties of different gases. Beddoes made him at the age of nineteen his superintendent. On one occasion a patient with paralysis caught some of Davy's enthusiasm for the efficacy of nitrous oxide. When Davy placed a thermometer under his tongue, the patient, thinking that the treatment had begun, exclaimed that he "felt the effects of its benign influence through his whole body." The temptation was too great for Davy, who asked him to return the next day, when the same thing was done. This was repeated every day for a fortnight, at which time the patient was cured.

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Sir Humphry Davy, 1778–1829

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