This originality of thought and love of experiment for its own sake were to be chief characteristics of the future scientist.
His school education was finished when he was fifteen, and he returned home, where he studied French in a desultory fashion, and devoted most of his time to fishing, of which he was always very fond. His father’s death made him realize that as the eldest of the sons he must shoulder the responsibility for the family’s support, and, all his natural tastes lying in that direction, he decided to become a physician.
A practicing surgeon and apothecary of Penzance, Bingham Borlase, was willing to take Davy as an apprentice, and the youth began work and study in his office. But the boy was no ordinary apprentice. He became almost at once an omnivorous student and writer. He laid out a plan of study that included theology, astronomy, logic, mathematics, Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew, and he wrote essays, remarkably mature and well-phrased, in a series of note-books that he kept in the office. Poetry he wrote also, filled with love of the sea that circled his native Cornwall, and the great cliffs and moorlands that make that part of England one of the most picturesque spots in the world.
His work with Mr. Borlase brought him into the field of chemistry when he was nineteen. It was a field of magic to him. He read two books, Lavoisier’s “Elements of Chemistry,” and Nicholson’s “Dictionary of Chemistry,” and rushed from them to experiment for himself. His bedroom was his laboratory. His tools were old bottles, glasses, tobacco-pipes, teacups, and such odds and ends as he could find. When he needed fire he went to the kitchen. The owner of the house, Mr. Tonkin, was an old friend of the Davy family, and very fond of Humphrey, but the amateur experiments were almost too much for him. Said he, after he had watched some more than usually noisy combustion at the fire, “This boy, Humphrey, is incorrigible. Was there ever so idle a dog? He will blow us all into the air.” But Humphrey minded no arguments nor objections; he was studying the effects of acids and alkalies on vegetable colors, the kind of air that was to be found in the vesicles of common varieties of seaweed, and the solution and precipitation of metals. The work was all-engrossing; it occupied every spare moment of his time and thought.
If any greater stimulus to scientific study had been needed it would have been supplied to young Davy by his acquaintance with Gregory Watt, the son of the inventor James Watt. Gregory came to board at Mrs. Davy’s house when he was twenty-one, and Humphrey nineteen. He was a splendid companion, and possessed of a remarkably brilliant mind. In a short time the two youths had become inseparable friends, experimenting together, and taking walks to the mines and quarries in the neighborhood of Penzance in search of minerals for study. It was an ideal friendship, incomparably valuable for Davy. But Gregory Watt died when he was twenty-eight. “Gregory was a noble fellow,” Davy wrote to a friend, “and would have been a great man.”
In the meantime the young physician’s apprentice had been lured away from Penzance. Dr. Beddoes had established what he styled a Pneumatic Institution at Clifton, the object of which was to try the medicinal effects of different gases on consumptive patients. Davy, only twenty, had been offered the position of director, and had accepted. His old friend Mr. Tonkin, who had thought to see Humphrey become the leading physician of Penzance, was so much put out with this change of plan that he altered his will and revoked a legacy he had intended for Davy.
Filled with the ardor of research Davy went on with his experiments at Clifton. He discovered silica in the epidermis of the stems of weeds, corn, and grasses. He experimented with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) for ten months until he had thoroughly learned its intoxicating effects. Often he jeopardized his life, and once nearly lost it, by breathing carburetted hydrogen. He published the results of his more important experiments. When he was twenty-one he issued his “Essays on Heat and Light.” He experimented with galvanic electricity, and increased the powers of Volta’s Galvanic Pile. Moreover he outlined and partly drafted an epic poem on the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt. The total is a surprising catalogue of industries for the young Clifton Director.
His ardor had worn him out, and he was forced to take a holiday at Penzance. His reputation as a rising scientist had reached the little Cornish town, and he was given a hearty welcome. He loved his own country and never lost his delight in her natural beauties. Nor did he ever forget his own days in the grammar school, and in his will he directed that a certain sum of money should be paid to the master each year “on condition that the boys may have a holiday on his birthday.”
Davy had already made influential friends, and one of them, Dr. Hope, the professor of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, was to give him his next step forward. Dr. Hope knew Davy’s works on heat, nitrous oxide, and galvanic electricity, and he recommended the young scientist to Count Rumford for the professorship of chemistry in the Royal Philosophical Institution in London, which Count Rumford had been instrumental in founding. Davy wrote to his mother that this was “as honorable as any scientific appointment in the kingdom, with an income of at least five hundred pounds a year.”
He went to London in 1801, and there he had the great satisfaction of meeting many scientific men whose names and work were well known to him. Six weeks after he arrived he began his first course of lectures, taking for his subject the history of galvanism, and the various methods of accumulating galvanic influence. The Philosophical Magazine said of the new lion, “The sensation created by his first course of lectures at the Institution, and the enthusiastic admiration which they obtained, is at this period hardly to be imagined. Men of the first rank and talent,—the literary and the scientific, the practical and the theoretical,—blue-stockings and women of fashion, the old and the young, all crowded, eagerly crowded, the lecture-room. His youth, his simplicity, his natural eloquence, his chemical knowledge, his happy illustrations and well-conducted experiments, excited universal attention and unbounded applause. Compliments, invitations, and presents were showered upon him in abundance from all quarters; his society was courted by all, and all appeared proud of his acquaintance.”