Humphry Davy quotes
Humphry Davy was a British chemist and inventor, renowned for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline earth metals. His pioneering experiments with electricity and chemical reactions advanced the field of electrochemistry. He also invented the Davy lamp, which greatly improved safety in coal mines. Here are 21 of his quotes:
Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply, - there are always new worlds to conquer.
Humphry Davy
These grand discoveries, which some ascribed to the 'enormous batteries which were placed in his hands,' were the result of his intellectual powers, not of fortuitous circumstances. His voltaic battery was within the reach of many of the chemists of Europe; and consisted, in fact, of three different batteries united, one of 24 plates of copper and zinc, 12 inches square, another of 100 plates of 6 inches, and another of 150 plates of 4 inches.
Humphry Davy
I breakfasted this morning with Sir Humphry Davy, of whom we have heard so much in America. He is now about thirty-three, but with all the freshness and bloom of five-and-twenty, and one of the handsomest men I have seen in England. He has a great deal of vivacity,-talks rapidly, though with great precision, and is so much interested in conversation, that his excitement amounts to nervous impatience, and keeps him in constant motion.
Humphry Davy
After breakfast Sir Humphry took me to the Royal Institution, where he used to lecture before he married a woman of fortune and fashion, and where he still goes every day to perform chemical experiments for purposes of research. He showed me the library and model-room, his own laboratory and famous galvanic troughs, and at two o'clock took me to a lecture there, by Sir James Smith, on botany,-very good and very dull.
Humphry Davy
Four days after this was given to the world he took to his bed, and he remained there for nine weeks. Such a blow following hard on the heels of such a triumph aroused the liveliest sympathy. The doors of the Royal Institution were beset by anxious inquirers, and written reports of his condition at various periods of the day had to be posted in the hall.
Humphry Davy
The general properties and chemical activities of potassium and sodium are so very similar that as a matter of commercial production that metal which can be most economically obtained is necessarily the one most largely manufactured, and of the two that metal is sodium. To-day, sodium is made by thousands of tons, and by a process which in principle is identical with that by which it was first made by Davy, i.e., by the electrolysis of fused caustic soda.
Humphry Davy
The modern method of production of sodium is based, therefore, as regards principles upon the conjoint labours of Davy and Faraday. ...These principles took their present form of application at the hands of... Hamilton Y. Castner... It is by Castner's process that all the sodium of to-day is manufactured.
Humphry Davy
