Potassium and sodium may well have been named potarchium and sodarchium, a new digital platform focusing on the life, times and innermost thoughts of British chemist and inventor Sir Humphry Davy reveals.
The new resource also captures the results of numerous experiments with nitrous oxide he tried out on himself and the exact moment Davy, the very first person to inhale the gas, realised it eased pain. It also points to his huge disappointment in people for their lack of appreciation of his inventions as well as his shopping lists, travel, health and a little 'scurrilous gossip' about his contemporaries.
Now, for the very first time, the public will be able to see Davy's notes made 200 years ago while he discovered elements that changed our understanding of science as we know it.
And, just as amazing, this new digital resource, funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, would not have been possible without the help of thousands of everyday people from around the world who worked to transcribe the notes using the Zooniverse platform of crowdsourcing research.
The project, led by Professor Sharon Ruston, of Lancaster University, working with Zooniverse and the Adler Planetarium, Chicago, University College London, The University of Manchester and the Royal Institution of Great Britain reveals a treasure trove of information about the man who was probably best known to the public for his invention of the miners' safety lamp, otherwise known as the Davy Lamp.
Volunteers have fully transcribed all 129 of Davy's notebooks and sets of lecture notes, the vast majority of which are held at the Royal Institution as part of their internationally significant collection relating to the history of scientific advance in the UK.
In total, including a pilot project that took place in 2019, 3,841 volunteers transcribed 13,121 pages.
They also helped write around 4,500 notes on the people, places, chemical elements and processes, geological terms and many other things that Davy wrote about.
The official launch, on Saturday, October 19, of this free and publicly available, unique digital collection and resource will reveal:
- Information about Davy's first experiments (on himself) with nitrous oxide in 1799 including a note that the gas helped alleviate pain
- Poetry that Davy wrote throughout his life on multiple subjects, including his true feelings about inventions that he felt people did not appreciate as much as they should (for example: the miners' safety lamp which saved tens of thousands of lives)
- The moment when Davy isolated potassium and sodium and the different names he tried out before settling upon these
- His pioneering work on galvanism and electrochemistry
- Davy's reading lists, his shopping lists, scurrilous gossip about his contemporaries, as well as accounts of his travels in Europe, diary entries about his health and sporting pursuits
- Davy's notes for his famous public lectures as a science communicator at the Royal Institution, showing when he would have demonstrated or illustrated his point with an experiment or some other visual aid.
While the notebooks were transcribed on Zooniverse, the project's editorial team reviewed and edited the submitted transcriptions.
They engaged daily with the transcriber community on the project's 'talk boards' discussing particularly tricky or interesting passages in recently transcribed pages, sharing information and insights on the material being transcribed.
Lancaster University Library had a key role in the project, working with the output of the transcriber community and building it into rich, enhanced content on the Lancaster Digital Collections platform. The Davy Notebooks Project has been a significant initiative in the Library's Towards 2025 vision, enabling it to leverage and enhance its capabilities in digital scholarship, and engage as a partner in research.
This work created the repository of useful research that has proved valuable in tracing connections throughout Davy's notebooks and in writing the explanatory notes for the transcriptions. All this information is fully captured on the new digital platform.
"The publication of these notebooks, images of the pages, their transcription and explicatory notes is a beginning rather than the end of a project," said Professor Ruston, the Principal Investigator for the Davy Notebooks Project and author of The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, exploring Davy's influence on Shelley's novel and on the character of Victor Frankenstein.
"Now everyone can read what Davy wrote 200 years ago and, I hope, will make full use of this new resource. A major finding of the project, revealed earlier this year, was the discovery of previously unseen poetry by the chemist.
"The launch event will give us another opportunity to thank the thousands of volunteers who have made this work possible. We could not have made the important advances in Davy scholarship that we have made since 2019 without every one of our volunteers, who gave freely and generously of their time and knowledge and who, hopefully, enjoyed playing such a key role in a large research project."
Dr Samantha Blickhan, Zooniverse Co-Director and Humanities Research Lead, said: "The Davy Notebooks Project is a testament to the incredible things that can happen when you invite the public to contribute to historical research. A shared curiosity, interest in Davy, and commitment to making these notebooks widely available brought thousands of people together who may otherwise have had no reason to connect and communicate."
Professor Frank James, a Co-Investigator and Professor of History of Science at UCL, said: "The notebooks have already proved an invaluable resource for my research into Davy's lecturing and on his 1807 discovery of potassium and sodium including the evolution of those names; I am certain that many more previously unknown aspects of Davy's life will be revealed as the notebooks are increasingly used."
Dr Joanna Taylor, of The University of Manchester, said: "Usually, when we think about nature writing, we mean a certain genre that's focused on personal interpretations of a place. Davy's notebooks reveal a process of thinking about the environments in which he lived, worked, and travelled, and the ways that his experiments and inventions - alongside his less well-known poetry - interacted with those environments in some novel and exciting ways."
You can see the new digital collection, hosted on Lancaster University Library's Lancaster Digital Collections platform.
At the launch (6pm to 7pm BST at the Duke's Theatre, Lancaster), to be held at part of the city's prestigious LitFest, Professor Ruston will discuss highlights of the project's findings. The talk will be illustrated with images from the notebooks. Tickets (for both in-person and online to be watched either simultaneously or at a later date) can be bought on the Dukes' LitFest website.
