Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), the foremost British chemist of the 19th century, is best known now for his invention of the miner's safety lamp; he also isolated more chemical elements than any other individual has before or since, including chlorine, magnesium, and potassium. What is now less well known is that Davy wrote poetry throughout his life. A friend of the Romantic poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron, like them Davy wrote poems about nature, the imagination, and the sublime. Davy also began a medical career: he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon in his native Penzance, but was released from his indentures to join Thomas Beddoes, a chemist who courted controversy, at the Pneumatic Institute at Clifton in Bristol in 1799. |t was there that Davy made his name, experimenting with nitrous oxide gas and recording its effects in his notebooks, letters, poetry, and in a published book. This was a time before the arts and sciences had divided into two cultures and Davy saw a role for poetry within this medical research.
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