The young chemist soon discovered that his lectures drew crowds, even created a great and extraordinary sensation. In imagination we can picture the lecture-room, the crowded audience—all sorts and conditions, from lovers of science, ladies of fashion, men of rank, to the threadbare-coated student—eagerly watching the experiments, and all drinking in his words as the young lecturer, fired with his subject, animated with all the charm of which he was so complete a master the dry bones of geology with life and breath, or again brought the study of chemistry, hitherto unget-at-able and out of reach, down to their level. The audience hung on his lips spellbound.
The young popular lecturer was caressed and made much of.
“Davy, covered with glory,” writes a friend at this time, “dines with me to-day.”
Soon they made him Professor of Chemistry to the Institution. Promotion followed promotion, but each year was a spur to greater exertion. Time would fail to enumerate the steps in his triumphs. A continuous sun seemed to shine upon him. And his strength seemed equal to all demands. Money had never been of much account to him. Now, indeed, he might have had it in abundance had he chosen, by helping forward manufactures with his scientific knowledge, but that was not his aim. His ambition was scientific glory.
“To be useful to science and mankind was the pursuit in which he gloried.”
The years that followed were years full of hard work. In 1812 he was knighted. It seemed as if almost everything he touched were like a gold mine which yielded some new treasure to him.
“Science,” he said once to a young man anxious to pursue it, “is a harsh mistress, and repays one poorly.” But for him she surely rather had “full measure pressed down and running over.”
And now, when he was about thirty-seven, his thoughts were first turned to the great triumph of his life, the invention that was to make his name famous.
There was in England, especially in the north and midland counties, a great and crying evil—the danger in which our miners and their families lived, as these brave men daily and hourly carried their lives in their hands. Constantly the newspapers were filled with terrible accounts of accidents in our coal-pits—mines exploding, men and boys and horses being blown to pieces or buried alive—and always from the same cause—the want of a safety lamp. A great quantity of gas got cooped up, in spite of contrivances for leading pure air into the murky passages of the mines, and these gases, directly they came in contact with a naked flame, exploded. There had been old days in which men worked by a feeble light borrowed from the phosphorescence of decaying fish-skins or “steel mills,” which gave out fitful gleams or sparks when a piece of flint was struck against them; but these days had passed, and accidents multiplied. And though men were startled and shocked when they read of them, still the wholesale slaughter went on. The gas exploded, bursting up everything near, killing the miners, erupting great masses of coal and dust and mangled men and horses. And not only this, but it blew down the trap-doors, leaving men to die of “after-damp,” the more horrible death of suffocation, because lingering and slow.
To remedy this crying evil Davy bent the whole force of his brilliant intellect, and after much thought invented the Safety Lamp. He surrounded the flame of his lamp with wire gauze. The gas entered and exploded within it, but the explosion did not pass outward.