Humphry Davy was a star. Buckles flew, stays popped, and the ostrich feathers worn by some of those who came to show themselves off in the crush at the Royal Institution lectures were apt to end the event as bedraggled zigzags. That, at least, is the impression given by Gillray’s 1802 engraving of a lecture-demonstration at the Royal Institution. One thousand and more men and women crammed the theatre at 21 Albemarle Street, a converted eighteenth-century townhouse, when Davy was billed to lecture on geology, agriculture or tanning leather.1 These were exciting subjects – the new knowledge about the nature and material of the earth and how to harvest it efficiently was beginning to broaden people’s horizons – and when the young and handsome Humphry Davy took the stand, ladies and gentlemen of society were hot, breathless, early and hushed. Celebrated actors like Young or Kemble had the coveted asterisk printed beside their names on theatre bills, and were Humphry Davy a professional actor – though a distinguished performer he was nonetheless – he too would have merited the star.
Michael Faraday knew all about Davy’s reputation. He had written up some of Davy’s ideas in his ‘Philosophical Miscellany’; Tatum spoke of Davy, and the word on the street would have intrigued a boy so engaged by science. The puzzle is why he left it so long to take steps to attend Davy’s lectures. Albemarle Street is much nearer to Weymouth Street than is Fleet Street, so distance was not a factor. The reason may have been financial: Tatum’s series at a shilling a time was perhaps all the Faraday family could afford. But more than that, there was a wide social gulf between the apprentice bookbinder and the great and the good who flocked to the Royal Institution, and Faraday may have been reluctant to cross it. Stories emerged about how Davy packed the Royal Institution lecture theatre to the rafters, how the audience hung on his every word and clapped and cheered him when he exploded a model volcano, or filled the theatre with thick, stinking smoke from a bubbling retort, or – best of all – took a man from the audience and gave him the new Laughing Gas, nitrous oxide, from a silk bag and tube and made him chuckle and jump about, and cry with intoxicated pleasure.2 News of the Laughing Gas had followed Davy from Bristol, where he had first made his name, and where he had carried out vivid experiments with it. The poet Robert Southey had reported that when he breathed a bagful of the gas in the laboratory in Bristol, ‘I immediately laughed. The laugh was involuntary but highly pleasurable, accompanied by a thrill all through me; and a tingling in my toes and fingers, a sensation perfectly new and delightful.’3
The antiquary Henry Wansey could only compare the sensations he had felt when breathing the gas with ‘some of the grand choruses in the Messiah’, played on ‘the united power of 700 instruments’.4 Other reports spoke of staggering, running about laughing, happiness, vertigo and a longing for more, so it is no wonder that London audiences were agog to try it, or see it in action. Gillray’s engraving Scientific Researches! – New Discoveries in PNEUMATICKS! …, which shows nitrous oxide being administered, suggests that the gas also made the patient fart spectacularly, but that may just have been Gillray’s personal contribution to scientific research.
Davy had youth, simplicity of manner, a natural lilting eloquence with a soft Cornish burr which had been in his voice since his childhood in Penzance. He had a piercing eye that held an audience as if it were one person, and a fresh-faced healthy look about him which charmed his listeners. ‘He was generally thought naturally graceful,’ wrote the tanner Thomas Poole, who had known Davy in Bristol, ‘and the upper part of his face was beautiful.’5 He had a winning smile, and when off the podium his conversation was buoyant, animated, cheerful, happy; because of this he was eagerly sought for soirées and dinners in town and country.
The portrait painter Martin Archer Shee RA, who was deeply involved in Royal Academy politics, was one of Davy’s hosts. Another was Sir George Beaumont, a powerful art patron and arbiter of taste, whose strongly-expressed opinions influenced the policies of the Royal Academy and the Royal Institution. Others who entertained Davy included Lord de Dunstanville, the Cornish mine-owner and patron of art and science, and William Smith, MP for Norwich, a Unitarian and a campaigner for political reform. With hosts at this level of society, Davy had arrived, and despite his provincial background he became so popular that receptions were considered incomplete without him. Joseph Farington, whose social and political connections ran like veins through the establishment, met Davy on the circuit, and in his diary he recreated the ebb and flow of the conversations. Gossip flowed freely. At a dinner with the Beaumonts in November 1806 the host complained of Canon Sydney Smith’s ‘levity and indifference in his manner’.6 Sydney Smith, a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, who lectured on Moral Philosophy at the Royal Institution, made jokes and throwaway remarks which, Beaumont felt, were ‘ill-suited’. Beaumont may also have been giving a veiled warning to Davy, encouraging him to adopt a formal, even seemly manner of lecturing, not the wild antics that Gillray had satirised in the widely circulated Scientific Researches engraving. Davy responded by further criticising Smith, whose Whig allegiances irked Beaumont’s Tory table: ‘Smith is not reckoned to have much reading,’ Davy offered, ‘or extensive information, but [he] has talent and is now well received at Holland House and may probably be a Bishop.’ As the subjects changed, Davy went on to chat about Josephine Bonaparte, Empress of France, and her fortune-teller’s warning that she would suffer a violent death. Recalling years later Davy’s first appearances in London society, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon reported a feeling that ‘High Life’ had ruined Davy, and the ambitious young lawyer Henry Brougham remarked that Davy ‘had the supreme folly of giving up [his] original and natural liberal opinions for love of Lords and Ladies’.7 But this was 1806; the ruination had not yet set in.
Even in the far north of England, at Cockermouth in the Lake District, when Farington stayed with the newly-created Lord Lonsdale, talk turned to that ‘ingenious young man’ Humphry Davy. The Bishop of Carlisle, Samuel Goodenough, was present, and he, complaining of Richard Watson, who besides being non-resident Bishop of Llandaff was a Fellow of the Royal Society and had invented an improved type of gunpowder, said that Davy had ‘more chemical knowledge in his little finger than Watson had in his whole body’.8
Davy careered through accepted wisdom in science in the first ten years of the nineteenth century, and when that decade was out he had transformed human understanding of chemistry and its applications. His first great triumphs were his discoveries in electrolysis, which he expounded to his fellow scientists at the Royal Society in the Bakerian Lecture, the most prestigious annual lecture in science, in November 1806. This caused excitement far afield, and led the Institut de France in Paris to award him the following year its medal, and three thousand francs, for the most progressive work in electricity. The driving force behind this prize, open to scientists of all nations, was the Emperor Napoleon himself; but because of the war with France, Davy could not collect it until 1813. Davy went on to isolate and identify potassium (1807), and to show that chlorine was an element (1810), thus setting two of the foundation stones in chemistry which had to be laid before there could be any semblance of progress into a modern world.
In his late twenties, Davy was naturally considered a young man by all the ancient insiders whom he met at social gatherings, and he became part of their gossip. When he fell seriously ill in 1807 Farington expressed his concern in his diary: ‘Davy of the Royal Institution is in a dangerous state, a low fever, pulse 120, drinks a bottle of wine a day. Has lately discovered in Chemistry what oversets Lavoisier’s System.’9
Concern for Davy’s health was also shown by many of the thousands of people who had been led towards enlightenment by his teaching, and to keep them informed the Royal Institution Managers published regular bulletins at 21 Albemarle Street on the progress of the Professor’s illness.
Despite his exposed public persona, Davy saw the lectures he gave as a distraction from his main purpose as a researcher into natural philosophy.10 Nevertheless, he prepared them in great detail,