Since the beginning of our efforts to transcribe Davy’s notebooks, over one thousand people have joined in, whether to record a few lines or to make regular contributions. Every day freshly transcribed pages become available to the project team, offering opportunities to reassess what we can learn about Davy’s life, work, and contemporaries through his manuscripts.

Any researcher who has sat in an archival reading room will understand the complex challenges presented by working with manuscripts. Unpublished notebooks, diaries, and other original documents are charged objects, offering opportunities to reveal forgotten aspects of the past through discovery or reinterpretation – possibilities that Arlette Farge famously described as the archive’s ‘allure’.[1] However, attempting to extrapolate meaning from manuscripts can often be a lonely business. Squinting to decipher a word partially deleted with heavy ink or a sentence inserted between tightly packed lines often leads researchers to turn to digital tools for help – whether in the form of a camera phone to record and revisit the difficult passage later, or to share with colleagues on Twitter for second opinions.

The consensus-based platform provided by Zooniverse offers a clearer way to resolve such textual mysteries by working together with members of the public. On Zooniverse, lines are transcribed multiple times by volunteers, who are able to build on (or disagree with) the work of others as they interpret the text. The result is a polyvocal interpretation of Davy’s words, drawings, and often-tricky-to-read handwriting. Using ALICE, the app created by Zooniverse to collate and edit the results of transcription projects on the platform, members of the Davy Notebooks Project team then review, contribute to, and finalise the accumulated consensus for each page. An example of the ALICE interface can be seen below in a page from notebook 20B, in which Davy lays out the goals of his pneumatic experiments. The collaborative transcription model afforded by Zooniverse has been shown to produce higher-quality transcription data.[2] When used in conjunction with ALICE for collaborative review, this process can lead to stronger overall interpretations of original manuscript sources. Participants use the project’s online message board (called ‘Talk’) to feedback not only on difficult-to-read words, but to comment on the influences surrounding Davy’s early work – thereby helping our project to map and better understand his social and intellectual world.

Screenshot of ALICE (click to enlarge)

Thanks to our volunteers’ hard work, several notebooks have now been fully transcribed. These cover Davy’s early years and reveal a dynamic new view of his time at the Medical Pneumatic Institution in Bristol (1798–1801), an appointment given to him by the radical chemist Thomas Beddoes. During this period, Davy carried out experiments on the effects of gases, particularly nitrous oxide. The pages of these notebooks are rich with calculations and findings from Davy’s experiments. While Davy’s work at the Medical Pneumatic Institution was intended to produce new treatments for illnesses including consumption, his notebooks reveal how he tested nitrous gases on himself, often in rather unorthodox ways. For instance, in notebook 20B, Davy writes of having ‘breathed after a terrible drunken fit a large quantity of gas 2 bags & two bags of oxygen’, noting that the experiment, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘made [him] sick’.[3]

RI MS HD/20/B, p. 95 (click to enlarge)

Davy also frequently recruited others to serve as test subjects for the effects of the gases, collaborations which he documented in the pages of his notebooks. In April 1799, Robert Southey inhaled the gas, reporting ‘giddiness’.[4] These manuscript records laid the groundwork for Davy to publish his findings in a significant volume entitled Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration (1800).[5] The text integrated personal accounts of the effects of the gas on numerous friends and scientific colleagues, including one given by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge inhaled the gas several times, the experience causing him to stamp his feet, after which he ‘remained motionless, in great extacy’ (Researches, p. 517).

Title-page of Davy’s Researches

Davy’s writing from this period also highlights how he viewed his individual forms of experimentation as being closely linked to the achievements of other chemists and philosophers – itself a form of collaboration. In Researches, Davy noted being indebted to the ‘illustrious fathers of chemical philosophy’ and their earlier attempts at the ‘discovery of truth’, including ‘Priestley’ in this category (Researches, p. xv).

Joseph Priestley’s name is one which frequently appears in the pages of Davy’s notebooks from this period. Priestley was a chemist, theologian, and radical political theorist whose earlier work on gases had inspired Beddoes to set up the Medical Pneumatic Institution. Priestley’s Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1774–86) detailed his preliminary discovery of oxygen and laid significant groundwork by identifying other ‘airs’, including nitrous oxide.[6] Priestley had previously been part of the scientific and intellectual circle surrounding Beddoes, a community which would later provide important patronage to Davy during his early years in Bristol. However, Priestley had been forced to leave England due to his outspoken backing of the French Revolution, having written in support of republicanism through the lens of natural philosophy, provoking public attacks from the likes of Edmund Burke. He settled in Pennsylvania from 1794 onwards.

While Davy and Priestley never met, notebook 20A records that Davy conducted ‘Experiments on the Composition of Nitrous Acid’ with assistance from his son in October 1799. Through this and further experiments, Davy built on Priestley’s earlier work on nitrous oxide, seeking to disprove the claims of the American chemist, Samuel Mitchill, who had alleged that inhalation of the gas would be fatal.

RI MS HD/20/A, p. 53 (click to enlarge)

Yet, as notebook 13H shows, Priestley’s radical revolutionary principles, along with those of Beddoes and their contemporaries, may also have held an important influence on Davy’s literary and political ideas during this period. Newly transcribed pages of this notebook reveal Davy’s propensity towards using revolutionary rhetoric in his manuscript poetry. Along with scientific and philosophical notes, notebook 13H includes a ‘Prospectus of a Volume of Poems’.[7] The poems in the ‘Prospectus’ offer a healthy dose of amorous poetry in fair copy, yet numerous other poetic fragments in 13H move in a different direction. These poems draw on the language of freedom, rebellion, and anti-hierarchical principles that were prominent in pro-revolutionary literature of the period. In one poem, ‘the radiance of the sun of truth / […] Calls the world to arms’, awakening ‘liberty’.[8] Elsewhere, ‘the Son of Liberty / uplifts the sword / To cut the chains of nations with the blood / of Tyrants & Slaves to fertilize / The happy earth’.[9]

RI MS HD/13/H, p. 38 (click to enlarge)

While this largely unpublished body of Davy’s writing requires further consideration as a distinct strand of his work, these manuscript poems clearly highlight Davy’s experimentation with radical ideals during his early years. They point to Davy’s engagement with an important form of political and literary thinking specific to the 1790s milieu in which he lived, worked, and experimented – an ideology of revolutionary enthusiasm that would all but disappear from the pages of his notebooks during his later years at the Royal Institution. These poems, alongside his experiments from the same period, display Davy’s collaborative propensities, as well as his ability to build on and extend the ideas of his predecessors, contemporaries, and patrons during his time in Bristol.

As further notebook pages are transcribed by our volunteers each day, countless new connections and important discoveries relating to Davy’s notebooks are coming to light. Every line of text transcribed represents not only an engagement with Davy’s scientific and poetic experiments, but also an act of collaboration between transcribers and researchers.

To join us as a volunteer transcriber for the Davy Notebooks Project, visit our Zooniverse page here.

—

[1] Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l’archive / The Allure of the Archives (1981).

[2] Samantha Blickhan, et al. ‘Individual vs. Collaborative Methods of Crowdsourced Transcription’, Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities, Episciences.org (2019).

[3] The quoted text was transcribed by Zooniverse volunteers. Here and hereafter, we are grateful for their contributions.

[4] Quoted text transcribed by Zooniverse volunteers.

[5] Humphry Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration (London: Joseph Johnson, 1800).

[6] Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1774–86).

[7] Quoted text transcribed by Zooniverse volunteers.

[8] Quoted text transcribed by Zooniverse volunteers.

[9] Quoted text transcribed by Zooniverse volunteers.

Click here to view this post on the K-SAA website.

Dear all,

We’re very pleased to announce that our project will soon be live on Zooniverse. Below is a short piece on Davy’s early life – the period we concentrated on during the pilot project in 2019 – focusing largely on notebook RI MS HD/13/C. It recounts some of the findings of the pilot, as well as looking forward to the full project that will be launching in the coming days.

We’re always very keen to hear from anyone who’s interested in our project, or Davy, or literature and science and/or the history of science more generally. If you’d like to get in touch with the project team, please see our Contact page. You can also join the discussion through our Talk pages on Zooniverse.

Best wishes, and happy transcribing!

Andrew Lacey

* * *

Davy at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century and Now

Portrait of Davy by Thomas Phillips, 1821 (National Portrait Gallery, NPG 2546. Reproduced under the terms of CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

In 1801, Humphry Davy was in his early twenties. In September 1800, hinting at the start of the rise that would see him, eventually, occupy the President’s chair of the Royal Society, he wrote to his mother, reassuringly, ‘my future prospects are of a very brilliant nature’. By the spring of the following year, he had been appointed lecturer at the recently founded Royal Institution (RI), where, over the next decade, he would undertake his most important chemical work.

Davy’s achievements while at the RI, which took as its mission ‘diffusing the knowledge, and facilitating the general introduction, of useful mechanical inventions and improvements, [and] teaching, by courses of philosophical lectures and experiments, the application of science to the common purposes of life’, were significant and numerous. Alongside giving the lectures for which he became renowned, he isolated seven chemical elements (magnesium, calcium, potassium, sodium, strontium, barium, and boron), and established the elemental status of chlorine and, shortly after resigning from his professorship at the RI, iodine. Later, as the foremost man of science in Britain, he would, in 1812, be knighted by George, the Prince Regent. Still later, in 1818, Davy would be made a baronet in recognition for his work (from 1815 onwards) on the miners’ safety lamp.

So far, so brilliant, we might say. But when Davy first arrived in London, there was some consternation as to his suitability for the lecturing role he had been recommended for, as a newly published biographical account, probably written by Davy’s friend Thomas Richard Underwood, explains:

The Count [Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford; founder, with Sir Joseph Banks, of the RI] and the Managers were struck most unfavourably with [Davy’s] infantine face, natural awkwardness, & Cornish accent … All [that Davy’s friends, who had recommended him for the role] could obtain was that he should deliver a lecture on Galvanism in a comparatively small room on the ground floor of the Royal Institution …

This room, by the exertions of the party, was crowded to suffocation & graced by the presence of many of the youthful females of that party and among them several of the highest rank in the country; they were captivated by his pretty face, simplicity of manner, and most romantic poetical language. While the men were struck with the novelty of the subject (it being the first lecture on Galvanism ever given in London) and of which he evinced himself completely master.

The RI building on Albemarle Street, c. 1838, by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (in public domain)

Rumford’s and the Managers’ early doubts quickly evaporated, as Underwood confirms: ‘[Davy’s] success was such that he was instantly engaged at a higher salary than his friends had demanded & desired to repeat the lecture the next day … From that moment he became the most popular lecturer ever heard in London’. The young Davy, though no doubt flushed with success, had not yet become vain and arrogant, charges levelled against him (quite fairly, in some cases) in later years: in his private correspondence, Davy records that he was ‘was very much flattered to find the theatre overflowing…’ in January 1802, and candidly observes, in June of the same year, that ‘my labours in the theatre of the Royal Institution have been more successful than I could have hoped…’.

The early years of the nineteenth century were, by any measure, golden ones for Davy. His mind teemed with new ideas, theories, and experiments, intermixed with the new impressions of the ‘great hot-bed of human power’ (letter to Thomas Charles Hope, June 1801) of the capital, and he relished all of the new experiences (and, as we can also glean from his letters, temptations) that had opened up to him as a rising star in the metropolis. His notebooks of the period grant us a privileged, intimate insight into his private thoughts. One such notebook, RI MS HD/13/C, held in the archives of the RI and recently transcribed in full, for the first time, by volunteers of Zooniverse, the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research, shows us the activity and, perhaps most strikingly, the fluidity of Davy’s mind at the time.

There are several poems in this notebook, such as ‘On Breathing the Nitrous Oxide’, which details Davy’s self-experimentation with what, since his first inhalation of it at a time when doing so was thought to be fatal, has commonly become known as ‘laughing gas’ (‘My bosom burns with no unhallowed fire / Yet is my cheek with rosy blushes warm / Yet are my eyes with sparkling lustre filled…’), and ‘The Spinosist’, a reflection, engaging with the ongoing debates, drawing on classical sources, on atomism of the period, on the cyclical nature of life (‘All, all is change, the renovated forms / Of ancient things arise and live again…’), that, as generally discrete and coherent works, are gradually becoming more well-known.

Other poems exist in this notebook in tantalising outline plan form only, such as Davy’s projected experiment in the Oriental tale, ‘Moses’ (‘Moses in wandering in the desart / falls down the cataract meets / with Miriam, she tells him of / a light of glory surrounding his / body believes himself under / the immediate inspiration of / the deity…’). Although only the skeleton of the (presumably intended to be epic) poem ‘Moses’ exists, it at least demonstrates the young Davy’s poetic ambition, which was seldom lacking.

RI MS HD/13/C, p. 17: ‘Moses: Book I’ (click to enlarge)

In notebook 13C, poems jostle for space with prose, much of it philosophical. In his manuscript, Davy sketches out a plan (which might put us in mind of Wordsworth, whom Davy first met in 1804) to write on the nature of genius (‘description of the / infant [?organised] so as to be / capable of genius…’), the state of chemical knowledge of the day (‘All our classifications are in fact artificial / nature does not know them & in fact / will not submit to them. but it is / of use to form analogies…’), and, perhaps most significantly, on the role that the sciences and the arts might play together in accomplishing ‘great’ objects, such as the ‘prosperity’ of nations:

we may hope
that a new spirit has
arisen that a new feeling
has pervaded the public
mind; it now seems to
be generally felt that
great & powerful exertions
in the sciences & the arts
can only be produced by
a spirit that may
be called national…

Davy’s reflections on the need for the free exchange of ideas, for collaboration across disciplinary boundaries (however real or imagined they may be), and for joined-up critical thinking among all who seek to earnestly enquire into the nature of the world remain, in this age of climate emergency, rapidly developing global health crises, and the proliferation of easily accessible misinformation, startlingly relevant.

Davy’s turn, in 13C, to a discussion of ‘national superiority’ hints at some of the more troubling content to be found in his notebooks – eight of which have so far been transcribed by Zooniverse volunteers – such as his use of crude racial stereotypes in the earliest of the pilot notebooks, RI MS HD/13/F, which dates from 1795-6.

Davy’s rash, prejudicial speculations, such as those on the relative influence of the climate on ‘the Regions of Ignorance & [?Barbarity]’ as contrasted with ‘the More enlightened & polished Nations of Europe’, stand in stark contrast to the careful, methodical approach he took to his chemical work, evidence of which nestles, sometimes jarringly, alongside fragments of his poetry and prose. Results of his laboratory work of the period, notes and figures, mainly relating to galvanism and tanning, compete for page-space with sketches of chemical apparatus, technical diagrams, and curiously disembodied faces in profile.

Despite his ‘mastery’ of the public lecture form, Davy’s notebook also contains reminders that, as a young man finding his feet in a strange new world, his self-confidence – which, later, would occasionally boil over into high-handedness and general unpleasantness, such as in his epistolary assessments, only very recently brought to light, of his main safety-lamp rival, the Northumberland-born mechanic George Stephenson – was still, in parts, fragile.

At one point in notebook 13C, Davy drafts a letter to be sent back home to an M. Dugart in Penzance, a French immigrant and teacher, whom he wishes to teach his younger brother, John. (Davy’s father, Robert, had died in 1794, leaving the family in debt, and, as oldest son, Davy often found himself playing the role of father to his siblings; in John’s case at least, Davy did a fine job, as his brother became an eminent army doctor, and a Fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh).

RI MS HD/13/C, p. 116 (inverted): ‘My dear Sir, / The little boy / who brings you this letter is / my brother…’ (click to enlarge)

At another point, Davy drafts an appreciative letter to his former guardian, and a crucial formative influence in Cornwall, Dr John Tonkin. The older, more confident Davy seldom felt the need to draft letters; a notable exception is the letter he wrote (but perhaps never sent) to the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, in 1815, in which, seemingly stoked with nationalistic fervour, he railed against the French after Waterloo, apparently thirsty for harsher treatment of the ‘enemy’:

I am convinced that there will be a most severe disappointment, a great fermentation in the public mind; & a state of feeling dangerous to the government & to the tranquillity of the country; if the glorious fortune of the present moment is not applied in giving permanent peace to Europe by destroying the military power of France diminishing their territory & resources.

Davy’s collected letters have recently been published in an authoritative edition (The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, published in four volumes by Oxford University Press), long in the making. Already, our understanding of Davy has been reconfigured by this work: the previously unpublished letters on the so-called ‘safety lamp controversy’ clearly show a far more prickly, insecure side to Davy than more selective biographical work to date has allowed. His notebooks, however, remain a largely untapped resource. This will change, as the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Davy Notebooks Project is due to launch, in full format, in June 2021.

Building on the successful pilot project (also funded by the AHRC), the Davy Notebooks Project will crowdsource full transcriptions, using Zooniverse, of the remaining seventy-or-so Davy notebooks held in the RI and Kresen Kernow (‘Cornwall Centre’). Anyone can contribute a transcription, however short, and, eventually, this work will lead to the full publication online, on the free and open-access Lancaster Digital Collections platform, of all of Davy’s notebooks. The project team also know of the existence of three ‘lost’ notebooks, containing material on fish and angling; whether they can be located within the three-year project timeframe remains to be seen.

Enticingly, the pilot project findings suggest that Davy may well be a little more unguarded in his notebooks than in his letters: a letter, after all, always presupposes a second reader; the same does not necessarily apply to a notebook. When the transcription and editing of the collected notebooks is complete, our understanding of Davy – the most effective experimentalist and most popular public communicator of science of the early nineteenth century in Britain, but a man of complex, and, at times, distinctly flawed, character – will be reconfigured once again.

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