Dear all,

It’s very exciting to be writing this. In December we were awarded £1 million to continue the project of transcribing all of Sir Humphry Davy’s notebooks, and we are now starting on this huge endeavour. You may have been one of the five hundred people who helped us transcribe five of his early notebooks at the latter end of 2019 in a mere nineteen days. The enthusiasm was such that we were determined after this pilot project to try to transcribe the whole of the surviving notebooks! (You can read the final transcriptions of the pilot project here).

For those of you who don’t know him, Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was the foremost chemist of the early nineteenth century. He isolated more elements than any other individual has before or since, including calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium. He was the first person to inhale nitrous oxide, which has become an important anaesthetic. His popular lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London brought him public fame. The miners’ safety lamp he invented, which became known as the ‘Davy lamp’, was used widely in mines in Britain and abroad. In 1820, he became President of the Royal Society.

RI MS HD/20/C, p. 46 (click to enlarge)

RI MS HD/20/C, p. 50 (click to enlarge)

Davy is now well known as a bridging figure between the ‘two cultures’ of the arts and sciences. He wrote poetry throughout his life, and this survives in his notebooks. The images above show you two pages of a notebook dating from his time in Bristol, before he moved to London and joined the Royal Institution. In the first image, we see Davy writes a poem amongst reports of experiments with nitrous gas and oxygen. It is a lyrical ballad in the style of poet William Wordsworth’s attempts in this new genre and is called ‘As I was walking up the street’. Davy’s poem comes immediately after his trials of nitrous oxide. The poem is not one of Davy’s best: it seems likely that he abandoned it given that it remains unfinished and that he does not seem to have worked on it again after this initial scribble. But it’s fascinating that we see him here at work, in his laboratory, writing lines of poetry among reports of experiments. It could be argued that this shows us how both the poem and the nitrous oxide tests are forms of experiment, and these different methods can be seen to influence each other here.

It is really interesting to see Davy at work in these notebooks, jotting down lines of poetry as they come to him while also – on the same page – carefully recording his chemical experiments. One of the things I’d like to find out more about is this relationship between poetry and science. We’ve set ourselves the difficult question of discovering what the role of poetry was in the development of nineteenth-century science, using Davy as a case study. Did poetry even have a role in science at this time? I’ll be really interested to find out what transcribers think about this question as they work their way through Davy’s notebooks.

We have such discoveries to make! And I’ve no doubt that we’ll find out all kinds of interesting things. Thank you all so much for any time you give us. We really appreciate your efforts.

All best,

Sharon Ruston