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Humphry Davy
Also known as Sir Humphy Davy, Sir Humphry Davy
British chemist
AI overview
Humphry Davy was a British chemist who made important discoveries about chemical elements and their properties during the late 1700s and early 1800s. His work laid foundational knowledge for modern chemistry and helped scientists understand the composition of matter.
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Person · Open Library
- Works
- 9
Top works
- Conversations on chemistry, in which the elements of that science are familiarly explained and illustrated by experiments and plates
- Decomposition of the Fixed Alkalies and Alkaline Earths
- Salmonia - Days of Fly Fishing. in a Series of Conversations. with Some Account of the Habits of Fishes Belonging to the Genus Salmo
- Salmonia - or, Days of Fly Fishing with Some Account of the Habits of Fishes Belonging to the Genus Salmo
- Conversations on Chemistry...
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Music · MusicBrainz
- Type
- Person
- Gender
- Male
- Origin
- United Kingdom
- Active from
- 1945-12-30
- Active to
- 2012-02-29
Discography
Works in European collections
7 objects attributed to Humphry Davy, held across European museums, libraries & archives · via Europeana
~40 min read
Article
Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet (17 December 1778 – 29 May 1829) was a British chemist and inventor who invented the Davy lamp and a very early form of arc lamp. He is also remembered for isolating, by using electricity, several elements for the first time: potassium and sodium in 1807 and calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron the following year, as well as for discovering the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine. Davy also studied the forces involved in these separations, inventing the new field of electrochemistry. He is credited with discovering clathrate hydrates.
In 1799, he experimented with nitrous oxide and was astonished at how it made him laugh. He nicknamed it "laughing gas" and wrote about its potential as an anaesthetic to relieve pain during surgery. Davy was a baronet, President of the Royal Society (PRS), Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA), a founder member and Fellow of the Geological Society of London, a member of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Berzelius called Davy's 1806 Bakerian Lecture "On Some Chemical Agencies of Electricity" "one of the best memoirs which has ever enriched the theory of chemistry."
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1778 births1829 deaths18th-century English chemists18th-century English male writers18th-century English poets18th-century English writers19th-century agronomists19th-century British chemists19th-century British inventors19th-century English writersBariumBaronets in the Baronetage of the United Kingdom
