(c) People started telling Davy that of all his
discoveries, the best was Faraday himself.
(What does it suggest about Davy's work?)
Answers
Explanation:
Gary Williams: ‘I find the letters to J.G. Children interesting. Children was Davy’s friend and seems to have had a close influence on him. In 1812 Tonbridge Bank, owned by Children’s father, collapsed bankrupting the family. While Children’s fortunes were falling, Davy was on the rise. Children had then started a gunpowder business which, it sounds like, Davy had assisted him to develop. […] The gunpowder business also failed but Davy still helped him obtain the vacant post of assistant librarian in the department of antiquities at the British Museum and later in 1822 helped him to become Director of Zoology over the heads of more deserving candidates.’
It is certainly true that Davy was writing privately – for the most part – in the letters on the lamp, certainly in the letters to John Hodgson and John Buddle, which are among the least guarded of his entire correspondence. Davy also had had previous problems with issues of priority – but priority is an issue for men of science generally at this time (at all times?). As Gary mentions here, on the question of Davy’s intolerance of other rivals and his making of enemies, there was a previous episode in Davy’s career that may be of interest.
In July 1812, Davy signed articles establishing his partnership in a gunpowder manufactory, with his close friend John George Children and another friend, James Burton. It seems that Davy originally intended to be a full partner in the venture; he wrote to his brother John on the matter of money that he had lent him on 15 October 1811: ‘please consider it as a loan which you shall repay when you are a rich physician & I a poor gunpowder merchant’.
In keeping with his sense of himself as a natural philosopher – rather than merely an experimentalist – Davy determined to apply the law of definite proportions to the manufacture of gunpowder. He claimed that this law was ‘perhaps the most important of our science’ because ‘Nature acts by this fixed and immutable law’. In the same source (lectures to the Royal Institution), Davy makes a distinction between the ‘practical and philosophical chemist’. June Fullmer in Young Humphry Davy claims that there is evidence that Davy was at this time intending to profit commercially by means of a patent and that he had not yet arrived at the stage where he would refuse to engage with the idea of taking out a patent for one of his inventions. His marriage to the wealthy socialite Jane Apreece in April 1812 has been proposed as a factor in his decision to reject the idea of monetary gain; her letters and Michael Faraday report of her behaviour towards him suggest she was a social snob who introduced Davy to a world of shooting and hunting parties in various aristocratic mansions.
Davy continued to send Children positive letters: for example, on 14 October 1812 Davy referred to ‘our gunpowder works’. Later in October he visited Children in Tonbridge and received a serious injury to his eye when he managed to prepare the explosive compound nitrogen trichloride for the first time. However in a letter dated 7 April 1813 we see the first glimmers of Davy being unhappy with his association with the gunpowder manufactory. He attempts here and in later letters to dictate exactly what is written on the labels of the canisters. In the course of a few months in Davy’s letters, then, ‘our gunpowder works’ has become ‘your new Manufactory’. By his letter of 21 July 1813, Davy describes himself being ‘much disturbed & vexed by enquiries respecting the price of my gunpowder which from the labels I find is supposed to be sold by me.’ Such enquiries place Davy in the role of a merchant and this demeans him; he continues with ‘it must be understood by the public that I have given my gratuitous assistance & advice only.’ He specifies the form of words that labels must take, and emphasises the care that must be taken. For example, he writes that the words ‘under my directions […] implies that I am a superintendent of the manufactory’.
Davy wrote some more letters in this vein expressing his ‘extreme harass & anxiety’ at the way his ‘name was used’ to Children on 22 July 1813. In the same letter he also stated ‘I have resolved to make no profit of any thing connected with Science — I devote my life to the public in future & I must have it clearly understood that I have no views of profit in any thing I do.’ This is one of a number of such comments that appear in the letters across Davy’s entire career and it seems that this was the moment that he determined henceforth to ‘make no profit’ by his scientific activities. Here we also see his desire to present himself as a servant to the public. On 23 July 1813 still bothered by the wording of the labels he writes: ‘I must not have it supposed that I sell my name I would not do it for millions’.