Dear blog,

The programme and application form for Event 5 of the LitSciMed training programme is now online at http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/event5. The deadline for applications is Tuesday 1st March.

I’ve been in Woodhorn Museum (http://www.experiencewoodhorn.com/) since Tuesday, working in the Northumberland archives where there are 54 letters from Humphry Davy to the Reverend John Hodgson. These letters have never been published before, which is very exciting, though they have been read and used in articles and books (including Frank James’s excellent article on the Davy lamp in the Transaction of the Newcomen Society in 2005).

The museum is an odd place; it’s on the site of, and retains many of the buildings of, the coal mine at Woodhorn, which once employed 2000 miners but stopped working in 1981. A new building on the site now houses exhibitions relating to this and the Northumberland archives, which were, as with those at Newcastle, busy with people searching for their family histories when I was there.

One of the Davy letters was in an autograph book (I looked at one of these in Durham University archives too, but that had a lock and key!). This one held letters by Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli (it was organised alphabetically), a certificate for a course of lectures on surgery signed by Matthew Baillie; a letter from Lord Eldon (the Chancellor), Pierce Egan (the journalist), the Duchess of Devonshire; lawyers, politicians, naval officers, artists, and aristocracy. It was interesting to see how many of these figures I knew, who had been considered worth collecting at the time and who was still well-known now.

The rest of the Davy letters were collected within a single book; they were often long and complex and all concerned the miner’s safety lamp that Davy devised and his subsequent battle to persuade people that he had invented it and not George Stephenson. It ranged, then, much the same ground as those that I had read in Newcastle to John Buddle. It was great to be immersed in similar topics and feel like I was getting a handle on at least this one episode in Davy’s life.

I think one of the letters has been mis-ordered and that it is January rather than June 1816. The evidence is that the postmark looks more to me like a JA than a JU plus there’s a superscript ‘y’ in the date given by Davy at the top of his letter. Also, it fits in terms of subject matter, the letter promised in a note of 15th Jan. If so, this is the first reference to Stevenson’s lamp. This was potentially a big discovery for me and it doesn’t appear to have been picked up by others.

Here are some nuggets from these letters that give you a sense of how Davy felt about Stevenson; on the 8 Feb 1816 [which really was 1817!], Davy writes: ‘His present lamp is clearly pilfered directly from wire gauze safe lamp which He has seen.’; ‘He is so ignorant that I doubt if now he has made a safe lamp.’; ‘Depend upon it Stevenson is not a man whose testimony is worth any thing. — The persons who have read his pamphlet here vote him a thief & not a clever thief. —‘; ‘I never heard of Stevenson till sometime in Jan y 1816 when one morning Sir Jos: Banks referred me to a paper in the Monthly Magazine (Mr Ws account of Stevenson’s lamp) & said “Here’s a fellow who has stolen your lamp.”’ Stevenson is always just called Stevenson (very rarely even Stephenson); he gets no title, unlike the others who get called Mr. The only others who get no title are instrument makers.

I was amused and intrigued to see that in the corrections he requested for a newspaper article on the subject Davy wrote (Sept 1816): ‘I think two or three expressions may be altered as rather too poetical for the society’ ‘“with flickering and roaring” should be altered to with violence and noise.’ In the end, the ‘poetical’ expressions went in as they were but it’s interesting to see that Davy, who is usually thought of as writing science in rather a poetical manner, was trying to remove this.

I’ve had a thoroughly enjoyable week; back to work and teaching tomorrow though I’ve been thinking up ideas for training sessions where the examples would be Davy letters. It would be good to keep moving ahead with the letters.

All best,

Sharon