Here are some facts about Humphry Davy.
- Humphry Davy was born on 17th December 1778 in Penzance, Cornwall.
- He went to Truro Grammar School.
- In 1794 his father died and Humprhy Davy was apprenticed to John Bingham Borlase, a surgeon from Penzance.
- As an apprentice, Humphry became interested chemistry and carried out experiments in John Tonkin’s house, where he was boarder.
- As a young man, Humphry Davy wrote poetry and painted landscapes.
- In 1798, Davy became a member of the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol.
- In Bristol he became friends with James Watt and his son Gregory, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey.
- In 1804, Davy became a Fellow of the Royal Society. His lectures often involved dangerous experiments with different types of gas.
- Humphry Davy was a key pioneer in the use of electrolysis to split compounds. He isolated several new elements, including potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, boron and barium.
- In 1810, Humphry Day named chlorine, after proving that it didn’t in fact contain oxygen and was element.
- Davy damaged his eyesight in an experiment with nitrogen trichloride. He hired Michael Faraday as a co-worker, as a result.
- He was knighted as Sir Humphry Davy in 1812.
- In 1813, he demonstrated that iodine was an element, and he showed that diamond is made of pure carbon.
- He visited Alessandro Volta in Milan, Italy in 1814.
- Davy designed his version of the safety lamp for use in coal mines. It used wire gauze to enclose the lamp’s flames, preventing the methane in the mines from igniting. The Davy Lamp worked well at first, but the gauze rusted very quickly in the mines, making it unsafe to use after a while.
- In 1820, he was named President of the Royal Society.
- He died in 1829 in Geneva, Switzerland. He is buried in Plainpalais Cemetery in Switzerland. There is a memorial tablet for him in Westminster Abbey, London.
- A lunar crater has been named after him.
- There is a Humphry Davy statue in Penzance, Cornwall.
- He enjoyed fly-fishing and wrote a book on the subject called Salmonia.
- Humphry Davy was addicted to nitrous oxide (laughing gas).
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