Humphry Davy
The facts available for Humphry Davy name no single work to open with, which requires adapting the structural recipe to its closest possible form given the evidence. What the record does show is a career marked by three significant honors, and those awards serve as the organizing thread.
Humphry Davy was a chemist and physicist who conducted his work in the English language, and who received the Royal Society Bakerian Medal, the Rumford Medal, and the Copley Medal — a gathering of honors that places him among the recognized scientific figures of his time.
He was born on 17 December 1778 in Penzance, a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. His formal education took place at Truro Cathedral School, and it was from that Cornish beginning that he went on to work as both a chemist and a physicist, producing the body of scientific output that the three medals reflect.
The Copley Medal, the Rumford Medal, and the Bakerian Medal together mark the span of a working life that the facts record without further elaboration on specific discoveries or publications. What can be said is that Davy earned all three, and that the accumulation points to sustained engagement with scientific questions across the years of his career. He died on 29 May 1829 in Geneva, having been born in Penzance and educated in Truro — the Copley Medal, the concrete final honor the facts name, remaining as the last fixed point in the record of his life.
Quotes by Humphry Davy
In the present state of our knowledge, it would be useless to attempt to speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy... its relation to chemical affinity is, however, sufficiently evident. May it not be identical with it, and an essential property of matter?
You are now in a state in which a fly would be whose microscopic eye was changed to one similar to that of man: and you are wholly unable to associate what you see with your former knowledge.
When two elements combine and form more than one compound, the masses of one element that react with a fixed mass of the other are in the ratio of small whole numbers.
The wealth and prosperity of the country are only the comeliness of the body, the fullness of the flesh and fat; but the spirit is independent of them; it requires only muscle, bone and nerve for the true exercise of its functions. We cannot lose our liberty, because we cannot cease to think.
Profound minds are the most likely to think lightly of the resources of human reason, and it is the superficial thinker who is generally strongest in every kind of unbelief.
Experimental science hardly ever affords us more than approximations to the truth; and whenever many agents are concerned we are in great danger of being mistaken.
The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown.