The Age of Wonder (47 page)

In June 1800 Davy published his first individual work,
Researches Chemical and Philosophical chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration.
It was issued in London by Joseph Johnson, the radical publisher of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Davy thus joined an author list which was largely literary and philosophical in character, and with a strong radical reputation.
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‘Ten months of incessant labour were employed in making them,’ he wrote of the
Researches,
‘and three months in detailing them.’ Crisply divided into four ‘Research’ sections, the historic monograph described the entire range of his gas experiments, presenting the previous history of gases (Research 1); his own chemical analysis and decompositions of nitrous oxide (Research 2); his examination of the whole phenomenon of respiration (Research 3); and finally eighty pages of detailed accounts of the individual inhalation sessions (Researches 4). It was these that caused the sensation among general readers.

Humans were not Davy’s only subjects. The section ‘Research 3’ contains multiple gas experiments (nitrous oxide, hydrogen and carbon monoxide) on live animals, including dogs, cats, birds and rabbits. He also immersed fish in de-oxygenated water; and butterflies, bees and house flies in mixtures of the gases. Many of these subjects died in convulsions, and were calmly dissected. None of his scientific reviewers remarked on the problematic nature of this research, but Davy became more and more uneasy at the pain he was causing, and Coleridge would later call his attention to pain as a phenomenon in itself.

Davy’s style is plain, discursive and never sensational. He presents himself throughout as the objective narrator of each experiment, the calm man of science who can observe an animal asphyxiating without emotion, and can still take his own pulse when he thinks he himself is dying. In this sense the book invents a scientific persona, the unflinching teller of true tales. The
Researches
were dedicated to Dr Thomas Beddoes, as ‘pledges of more important labours’. Yet Davy carefully avoided drawing any general conclusions, and in particular made no medical claims at all about the therapeutic value of gas treatments at the Pneumatic Institute.

In an important Preface Davy described how his new, empirical approach to scientific investigation had altered over the last eighteen months.
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As a result of the critical reception of his highly speculative early essay ‘On Light and Heat’, he had begun an extensive reappraisal of his own scientific methods at Bristol. In his notebooks of late 1799 there are humiliating confessions critical of his own premature ‘pursuit of speculations and theories’, and of the ‘dangers of false generalization’. He now believed, not entirely convincingly, that ‘the true philosopher’ avoided ‘theories’ altogether. He upbraided himself fiercely: ‘It is more laborious to accumulate facts than to reason concerning them; but one good experiment is of more value than the ingenuity of a brain like Newton’s.’
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In the published Preface, these self-criticisms are only slightly modulated. Self-criticism itself was now becoming an effective part of Davy’s scientific style: ‘I have endeavoured to guard against sources of error; but I cannot flatter myself that I have altogether avoided them. The physical sciences are almost wholly dependent on the minute observation and comparison of properties of things not immediately obvious to the senses…I have seldom entered into theoretical discussion, particularly concerning light, heat and other agents…Early experience has taught me the folly of hasty generalization. We are ignorant of the laws of corpuscular motion…Chemistry in its present state, is simply a partial history of phenomena, consisting of many series more or less extensive of accurately connected facts.’
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Here was, apparently, the sobered scientific empiricist who would appeal to Banks and the Committee of the Royal Institution.

It was vital to Davy how his first publication would be received. In July 1800, anxiously awaiting news, he took himself off on a long summer walking tour into Wales with the painter Thomas Underwood, a rich and bohemian young man who had scientific interests. Underwood also happened to be one of the proprietors of the newly formed Royal Institution in London, but they restricted their conversation to the benefits of sunlight, starlight and fishing.

First reactions to the book were very mixed. Preliminary accounts of the experiments had already been unguardedly described by Beddoes in a pamphlet,
Observations made at the Medical Pneumatic Institution,
published at the end of 1799. Though circulated in Bristol, this unwittingly prepared the way for scandal in London.
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The polemicist Richard Polwhele quickly published a nimble poem, ‘The Pneumatic Revellers’ (1800), a satirical attack on the nitrous oxide experiments which used suggestive dialogue and innuendo to imply that the Bristol laboratory witnessed scenes of intoxication, hysteria and even sexual debauchery.
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The experimenters and their subjects were mocked with glee:

And they cried, everyone, ‘twas a pleasure ecstatic
To drink deeper drafts of the mighty Pneumatic!

Davy and Beddoes were also attacked, as Banks had feared, in an anonymous pamphlet,
The Sceptic
(1800). They were described as a pair of ‘Bladder conjurors and newfangled Doctors pimping for Caloric’. In a word, they had used gas to seduce their female subjects when unconscious. By putting female subjects ‘in a state of gas’, they insidiously ‘gained admittance to their lovely persons’. In a fantasy sequence, the pamphlet describes how the dastardly Dr Caloric ‘warms their snowy bosoms; blows up the latent spark of soft desire; explores each hidden source of human bliss; and unsuspected riots in their Charms!’ One ‘fair patient’ was even rumoured to have been made pregnant under nitrous oxide.
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Such attacks were still continuing four years later, when Robert Harrington published his polemic essay entitled ‘The Death Warrant of the French Theory of Chemistry’ (1804). The new chemistry was dismissed as charlatanism, and linked to the craze for ballooning. ‘This is supposed to be the age of
airial
philosophy; I wish it were the age of common-sense for at present it has taken an airial flight; and unfortunately, candour and justice have flown away with it!’ Beddoes and Davy were described as ‘aerial flying chemists’ pursuing ‘ecstatic, lunatic and Laputatic sensations’.
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The
Anti-Jacobin
magazine made a more general link between radical politics, inhaling gas, flying balloons and mesmerism. But eventually these attacks were to prove far more damaging to Beddoes in Bristol than to Davy once he was established professionally in London.
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Davy was already growing restless with Beddoes’s regime of gas treatments. Secretly, he believed he had come to a dead end. He was becoming more and more interested in galvanism, and the experimental possibilities of the new electrical pile or ‘battery’ invented by Alessandro Volta of the University of Como. This had been described in a paper published by Banks in the Royal Society’s
Philosophical Transactions
that summer of 1800. The voltaic battery could produce an electrical charge by purely chemical means, and hold it for many hours.

The accounts of Davy’s first electrical experiments appear in a notebook headed ‘Clifton 1800, from August to November’.
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He had read a paper about the crucial experiment by Nicholson and Carlisle, who used a voltaic pile to ‘decompose’ water, and wrote breathlessly to Davies Giddy in Penzance: ‘an immense field of investigation seems opened by this discovery: may it be pursued so as to acquaint us with the laws of life!’
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To Beddoes’s dismay, troughs of voltaic batteries, with their rows of square metal plates and pungent smell of oxidising acids, began to replace the glass gas tanks and silken bags in the Institute’s laboratory.

Davy wrote to Coleridge in November: ‘I have made some important galvanic discoveries which seem to lead to the door of the temple of life.’
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Extensive correspondence continued between them about the ‘hopeful’ and progressive nature of science, the theory of chemistry, and the physiology of pleasure and pain, throughout the rest of the year.
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Coleridge followed Davy’s publications eagerly, and wrote with delight when he saw the title of one of his new galvanic essays advertised in the
Morning Post:
‘Upon my soul, I believe there is not a letter in those words, round which a world of imagery does not
circumvolve:
your room, the garden, the cold bath, the Moonlit Rocks…and dreams of wonderful Things attached to your name!’
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Coleridge’s own notebooks began to show a new, scientific precision in the observation of plants, water and weather at this time. ‘River Greta near its fall into the Tees-Shootings of water threads down the slope of the huge green stone.-The white Eddy-rose that blossom’d up against the stream in the scollop, by fits and starts, obstinate in resurrection.-It
is the Life
that we live. Black round spots from 5 to 18 in the decaying leaf of the Sycamore.’
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He felt that the new poetry and the new science were so closely entwined that they must somehow merge, and invited Davy to move north and establish a chemistry laboratory in the Lake District. Coleridge announced: ‘I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.’
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But could they really combine? Southey was one of the first of the Romantic poets to suggest that there might be a profound difference between the scientific and the artistic temperament. This was a subject he would pursue with Coleridge, who did not entirely agree. In February 1800 Southey was already writing to his friend William Taylor: ‘Davy is proceeding in his chemical career with the same giant strides as at its outset…Chemistry, I clearly see, will possess him wholly and too exclusively: he allows himself no time for acquiring other knowledge. In poetry he will do nothing more: he talks of it, and that is all; nor can I urge him to perform promises which are perhaps better broken than kept. In his own science he will be first, and the high places in poetry have long been occupied.’
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Despite Southey’s doubts about Davy’s literary interests, Davy did see through the press both the second edition of the
Lyrical Ballads,
and Southey’s
Thalaba,
in 1800, and agreed to help edit a third volume of the
Annual Anthology.
He also privately continued writing poetry about Anna Beddoes, and his own memories and visions. Eighteen months later, in August 1801, Southey was confidently informing Coleridge: T wish it were not true, but it unfortunately is, that experimental philosophy always deadens the feelings; and these men who “botanize upon their mothers’ graves”, may retort and say, that cherished feelings deaden our usefulness;-and so we are all well in our way.’ Here Southey was quoting from a poem by Wordsworth, ‘The Tables Turned’. But Coleridge still had different ideas on the matter.
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Not all Davy’s Bristol friends agreed that a great poet had been lost. Gregory Watt was glad Davy had not gone on contributing to the
Annual Anthology.
He later mocked poetry as an ‘exquisitely insidious’ form of delusion, and described most poets as ‘sporters with the feelings of the world’, whose effusions deserved to be burnt by the public hangman. ‘You, my dear philosopher,’ he reassured Davy, ‘have wisely relinquished the stormy Parnassus, where transient sunshine only contrasts the cloudy sky, for the mild and unvarying temperature of the central grotto of science.’ Then, serious for a moment, he urged Davy to remain in his calm laboratory and be ‘guided by the light of your own creation’.
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But Davy had not relinquished Parnassus, though he chose never to publish his poems after 1800. For the rest of his life he filled his laboratory notebooks with drafts and fragments of poetry, which were afterwards faithfully collected by his brother John, and scattered posthumously throughout his
Memoirs of Sir Humphry Davy.
Most of these would be travel pieces (‘Fontainbleau’, ‘Mont Blanc’, ‘Athens’, ‘Canigou’), loose forms of descriptive verse-diary, which show great sensitivity to seasons and landscape-especially rivers and mountains. They are exactly what you would expect of a meditative fisherman who had read Coleridge and Wordsworth, and also Izaak Walton. Yet they are surprisingly conventional in language and feeling.

However, there are a number of striking confessional pieces, of much greater intensity, in which Davy tried to work through some of his strange metaphysical ideas about death, fame and hope. The style is plain, often rather awkward, but here the thought is often highly original.
^♣
It is difficult to imagine what other writer of the period (except perhaps Caroline Herschel) would have imagined the dead Lord Byron touring the universe on a comet, saluted by extraterrestrial beings, and accelerating towards the speed of light.

Of some great comet he might well have been
The habitant, that thro’ the mighty space
Of kindling ether rolls; now visiting
Our glorious sun, by wondering myriads seen
Of planetary beings; then in a race
Vying with light in swiftness, like a king
Of void and chaos, rising up on high
Above the stars in awful majesty.
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