On November 6 he still worked on the gas. His notes say ‘on the combustion of sodagen and potagen with oxygen.’
‘Potagen certainly sublimes unaltered at a temperature below red heat. It is twenty times lighter than mercury.’
On November 13 he wrote to his friend Mr. Pepys:
I have decomposed and recomposed the fixed alkalies and discovered their bases to be two new inflammable substitutes very like metals, but one of them lighter than ether and infinitely [more] combustible; so that there are two bodies decomposed and two new elementary bodies found.
The Bakerian lecture was read on November 19, only four days before Davy was obliged to take to his bed by illness. The first sketch of this famous paper was thus made in the Laboratory Book:
‘The substance is analogous to some of those imagined to exist by the alchemical visionaries.
‘Possessing all the physical properties of metals except high specific gravity, it seems to combine with all of them, and form with them truly metallic amalgams; but in all cases it is capable of being separated from them by its greater facility of oxidation.’
Then he gives the action on water and ice.
The theory of its operation upon water is extremely simple.