Dear blog,
This week I’ve been working in Tyne and Wear Archive Services, Durham County Record Office and Durham University Library. All three places were hugely busy: the first two with people looking up their family histories and the latter with academics. The business made me more determined to try to increase accessibility to the University of Salford’s archives. It would be so brilliant to have a vibrant, busy reading room in which to read the unique materials we have.
I’ve mainly been reading letters from Davy to a mining engineer in Wallsend called John Buddle about the controversy over the so-called ‘Davy lamp’. George Stephenson claimed to have invented a miner’s safety lamp first (I’ve found out that this was nick-named the ‘Geordie’), before Davy. Explosions in mines were a huge problem at the beginning of the nineteenth century and Davy had been asked to take a look into what could be done because by then he had secured his reputation as one of the foremost chemists of the day.
Our letters edition will make many of these letters available for the first time to the public, though they have been read by some scholars, notably the Head of Collections at the Royal Institutions, Frank James, who was kind enough to lend me his notes. My time at the Tyne and Wear Archive was remarkably stress-free because the Davy letters had been copied in a fair hand, meaning that I didn’t have to squint and sweat over Davy’s often very difficult to read handwriting.
In an early letter, John Buddle speaks of the ‘nibbling envy and mischievous insinuations of the philosophical Empirics’ to Davy (15/6/1816). Davy himself is far less subtle in his condemnation of those who favoured Stephenson’s claim to the invention. He speaks of their conduct as being ‘marked by indelicacy as well as impropriety’ in a letter of 31/10/1816. His anger rises as the letters and months pass by until I read in a letter from Davy to Buddle dated 10/11/1817: ‘It is even said by them that no hostile measure is intended towards me; but that the object is to raise a fund for a poor ingenious man (or a thief and a liar) —— whose reward ought to be the Pillory.’ This is pretty strong stuff; Stephenson is denounced an impostor by Davy and the full force of Davy’s institutional influence is brought to bear on proving that Stephenson’s early models for the lamp would not have worked.
The whole episode left a rather nasty taste in my mouth, I suppose; with hindsight, Stephenson is such an important part of our national heritage and Davy in these letters often refers to him as illiterate and with the suggestion that he is beneath him in terms social class and scientific reputation. It’s been odd because I’ve walked past Stephenson’s statue in Newcastle every day that I’ve walked to the archive. Writing to Buddle on 3 March 1818, claiming that this is the last word on the subject, Davy write that: ‘In the scientific world [Stephenson’s] claims have met the most sovereign contempt’. This is an interesting choice of adjective.
Whatever the truth of the matter, and I need to find out more about what’s been written on this subject, there are many assertions of the life-saving properties of Davy’s lamp. I don’t know when the lamp first acquired its eponymous name but the lamps are referred to as ‘Davys’ in a letter of Buddle’s (1 Jan 1824), where he also describes how each pit has a ‘Davy Man’ to ‘keep the lamps clean and in good repair’.
The letters have been fascinating to read and I hope that when they’re published they will shine a new light on this debate and controversy, even if Davy doesn’t come off so well by these means. I’m nearly at the end of my British Academy grant now – only one archive trip left. It’s been hard work but immensely interesting and rewarding.
We are working hard on the programme for event five in the LitSciMed training programme at the moment too, and I’ll let you know when the application forms are available online.
Best,
Sharon