Notes of pioneering chemist Humphry Davy made public for first time

Volunteers transcribed 13,000 pages of notebooks and lecture notes, uncovering new insights into the man best known to the public for his invention of the miners’ safety lamp, otherwise known as the Davy Lamp.

The notes reveal, for instance, that potassium and sodium may well have been named potarchium and sodarchium, and capture the moment Davy realised that nitrous oxide eased pain (he was the first person to inhale the gas), although he failed to follow through on the medical implications.

The new digital resource, funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, was made possible thanks to 3,841 volunteers who used the Zooniverse citizen science website to transcribe all 129 of Davy’s notebooks and sets of lecture notes, the majority of which are held at the Royal Institution as part of their collection relating to the history of scientific advance in the UK.

The volunteers also helped write around 4,500 notes on the people, places, chemical elements and processes, geological terms and many other things that Davy wrote about.

The official launch, on Saturday, October 19, of this free digital collection and resource will reveal:

• Information about Davy’s first experiments (on himself) with nitrous oxide in 1799 including a note that the gas helped alleviate pain
• Poetry that Davy wrote throughout his life on multiple subjects, including his true feelings about inventions that he felt people did not appreciate as much as they should (for example: the miners’ safety lamp which saved tens of thousands of lives)
• The moment when Davy isolated potassium and sodium and the different names he tried out before settling upon these
• His pioneering work on galvanism and electrochemistry
• Davy’s reading lists, his shopping lists, scurrilous gossip about his contemporaries, as well as accounts of his travels in Europe, diary entries about his health and sporting pursuits
• Davy’s notes for his famous public lectures as a science communicator at the Royal Institution, showing when he would have demonstrated or illustrated his point with an experiment or some other visual aid.

While the notebooks were transcribed on Zooniverse, the project’s editorial team reviewed and edited the submitted transcriptions, engaging daily with transcribers.

Professor Frank James (UCL Science & Technology Studies), who is researching and writing a biographical study about Davy focussing on his practical work, the safety lamp and his efforts to unroll the Herculaneum papyri, is a Co-Investigator for the Davy Notebooks Project.

He said: “The notebooks have already proved an invaluable resource for my research into Davy’s lecturing and on his 1807 discovery of potassium and sodium including the evolution of those names; I am certain that many more previously unknown aspects of Davy’s life will be revealed as the notebooks are increasingly used.”

Principal Investigator Professor Sharon Ruston, from the University of Lancaster, said: “The publication of these notebooks, images of the pages, their transcription and explicatory notes is a beginning rather than the end of a project.

“Now everyone can read what Davy wrote 200 years ago and, I hope, will make full use of this new resource. A major finding of the project, revealed earlier this year, was the discovery of previously unseen poetry by the chemist.

“The launch event will give us another opportunity to thank the thousands of volunteers who have made this work possible. We could not have made the important advances in Davy scholarship that we have made since 2019 without every one of our volunteers, who gave freely and generously of their time and knowledge and who, hopefully, enjoyed playing such a key role in a large research project.”

Dr Samantha Blickhan, Zooniverse Co-Director and Humanities Research Lead, said:  “The Davy Notebooks Project is a testament to the incredible things that can happen when you invite the public to contribute to historical research. A shared curiosity, interest in Davy, and commitment to making these notebooks widely available brought thousands of people together who may otherwise have had no reason to connect and communicate.”

Dr Joanna Taylor, of The University of Manchester, said: “Usually, when we think about nature writing, we mean a certain genre that’s focused on personal interpretations of a place. Davy’s notebooks reveal a process of thinking about the environments in which he lived, worked, and travelled, and the ways that his experiments and inventions – alongside his less well-known poetry - interacted with those environments in some novel and exciting ways.”

The project also involved the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

Links

• Davy Notebooks
• Launch event
• Professor Frank James’s academic profile
• UCL Science & Technology Studies
• UCL Mathematical & Physical Sciences

Images

• Sir Humphry Davy and pages of his notes. Courtesy of the Royal Institution.

Media contact

Mark Greaves

m.greaves [at] ucl.ac.uk

+44 (0)20 3108 9485

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