Davy published in 1818 a beautiful account of his discovery, On the Safety Lamp for Coal Miners, with Some Researches into Flame. Edited from the series of papers he had sent so hurriedly to the Royal Society, this has some claims to be one of the prose masterpieces of English Romanticism. Davy transformed his feverish, often chaotic work at the Royal Institution laboratory in the winter of 1815-16 into a classic piece of scientific storytelling. The prose is clear, pointed, and sometimes of poetical intensity.
The treatise begins with a dispassionate account of the terrible series of explosion accidents in the mines, the human suffering they had caused over decades, and the way they had terrorised the mining communities in the north of England: ‘The phenomena are always of the same kind. The miners are either immediately destroyed by the explosion, and thrown with the horses and machinery through the shaft into the air, the mine becoming as it were an enormous piece of artillery, from which they are projected; or they are gradually suffocated, and undergo a more painful death, from the carbonic acid and azote [nitrogen] remaining in the mine, after the inflammation of the firedamp; or what, though it appears the mildest, is perhaps the most severe fate, they are burnt or maimed, and often rendered incapable of labour, and of healthy enjoyment of life.’94
Davy then moves to the sequence of experiments he performed in the laboratory in London, producing a narrative as logical and thrilling as a detective story. He describes the previous work of Clanny and Humboldt, his experiences with Faraday in the Apennines,95 his assembling of his laboratory equipment, the meticulous process of chemical analysis (often highly dangerous), the varied appearances of slow flame and violent explosions, and the final triumphant sight of the prototype gauze lamp burning brightly and safely within the huge glass flask of lethal methane.
By relating the human predicament to the scientific solution, Davy produced one of the great demonstrations of scientific ‘Hope’. He showed that applied science could be a force for good previously unparalleled in human society, and might gradually liberate mankind from untold misery and suffering. Deliberately echoing Bacon — as Lavoisier had once done — he claimed that scientific knowledge was a disinterested power for good: ‘The results of these labours will, I trust, be useful to the cause of science, by proving that even the most apparently abstract philosophical truths may be connected with applications to the common wants and purposes of life. The gratification of the love of knowledge is delightful to every refined mind; but a much higher motive is offered in indulging it, when that knowledge is felt to be practical power, and when that power may be applied to lessen the miseries or increase the comforts of our fellow-creatures.’96 This would become the central credo of the next generation of young Victorian scientists, and notably of Michael Faraday.97
But the story of the invention was exemplary of future science in another way. Davy’s high-minded claims produced a bitter priority dispute. In the spring of 1816 the engineer at the Killingworth mine, just north of Newcastle, George Stephenson, challenged Davy’s precedence, and accused him of plagiarising his own ‘Geordie Lamp’. This was a solid glass and metal lamp, conical in shape, using tubes and perforations, of which he had made many practical trials. He had finally tested a working version in the Killingworth colliery on 21 October 1815. When he saw the first premature model of Davy’s ‘tube lamp’, published in the Newcastle papers in November, he naturally suspected plagiarism.
They did indeed look very similar, since Davy’s gauze lamp had not yet been published — or indeed invented. At a meeting of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society on 5 December 1815, at which both Clanny’s bellows lamp and Stephenson’s conical lamp were examined (‘it resembles a wine decanter’, remarked the Newcastle Chronicle jovially), the questions of priority and pirating were first raised.
The Newcastle Society showed its admirable objectivity by presenting examples of the true gauze lamp, as used by Buddle at Walls End, at its meeting of 6 February 1816. It was immediately clear to unbiased observers that the Stephenson and the Davy were very different instruments. But nothing could prevent the major public row now brewing, with letters to the newspapers, polemical pamphlets, and wide controversial comment in the journals. Not all of this was favourable to Davy, and there was a clear evidence of a North-South split as sides were taken.
Furious pamphlets were written against him by a Sunderland lawyer and journalist, J.H. Holmes, who had been writing about mining accidents to the Morning Chronicle since July 1815. The Director of Mines at Seaton colliery, James Heaton, gave a demonstration to the Society of Arts at which he made a ‘Davy’ explode by repeatedly throwing handfuls of coal dust at its gauze.98 There was also a good deal of general mockery of rival ‘inventors’, and anonymous letters to the papers signed with provocative pseudonyms like ‘Aladdin Lamp’ and ‘Simple Wire Gauze’.99
In 1817 Stephenson published two pamphlets calmly setting out his claims, and showing detailed illustrations of both lamps. He said that his was the result of ‘mechanical principles’, while Davy’s depended on ‘chemical’ ones — a fair distinction. He also pointed out that he did not have the expensive facilities or ‘beautiful instruments’ of Sir Humphry’s London laboratory, perhaps a further sign of North-South rivalry and class bitterness. Stephenson signed himself defiantly ‘Inventor of the Capillary Tube Lamp’.100
George Stephenson (1781-1848) was a gifted, self-educated engineer, and later the designer of the early railway steam engine, the famous ‘Stephenson Rocket’ which brought him international fame. He was an inventor of genius, an honest man and no fraud. He was to be the hero of one of Samuel Smiles’s outstanding industrial biographies in 1859. It is clear that he was genuinely misled by the premature November announcements of Davy’s prototype lamp. He admitted later that he never understood the scientific analysis of methane, or the principles behind the final iron gauze Davy Safety Lamp. He merely maintained that his tube lamps were the result of practical (‘mechanical’) trial and error, had been introduced before Davy’s, worked safely, were cheap and robust, and had been loyally adopted by many Newcastle miners who fondly referred to them as home-grown ‘Geordies’.
In private, Davy reacted very bitterly to these claims. In February 1817 he wrote to Buddle complaining of Stephenson’s ‘miserable pilfering lying & equivocating pamphlet’.101 After he had seen one of Stephenson’s lamps, he dismissed it contemptuously: ‘there is no analogy between his glass exploding machine, and my metallic tissue, permeable to light and air, and impermeable to flame’.102 He had several rival lamps sent to the Royal Institution in 1816, and stored as evidence in the basement (where they still remain).103 But he made no attempt to get in touch with Stephenson himself, and he never acknowledged that the over-hasty publication of his early prototypes had caused much of the problem.
Davy’s intense anxiety to establish scientific priority, already witnessed in France over the iodine débâcle, fuelled much of this debate. He showed no professional generosity towards Stephenson. Above all he demonstrated his driving desire to be seen as the miners’ sole saviour. As he proclaimed publicly in Newcastle in September 1817: ‘the highest ambition of my life has been to deserve the name of friend to humanity’.104
The dispute also became politicised. Lord Lambton, the Whig mine-owner who had been a pupil of Dr Beddoes and had known Davy in Bristol, enthusiastically supported him. But local Tory mine-owners decided to back Stephenson, and presented him with £1,000 in cash and an engraved silver tankard. Many local Newcastle miners also supported Stephenson as ‘one of them’.♣
Faraday, who knew more about the actual sequence of Davy’s discoveries than anyone else, always remained staunchly loyal to his patron’s priority and originality. If he disguised anything, it may have been his own role in writing up the experiments, and creating Davy’s dedicated team at the Royal Institution.105 But this can never be known, as, almost uniquely for a major piece of research, Davy left no original laboratory notes.106 However, he
did acknowledge Faraday’s contribution in the Introduction to his published account of 1818. ‘I am myself indebted to Mr. Michael Faraday for much able assistance in the prosecution of my experiments.’ This was the first, historic, mention of Faraday in print, and it effectively launched his scientific career.107
In October 1817, at the height of this drama, Davy received a triumphant reception at the Queen’s Head Hotel, Newcastle. He was given a banquet, a presentation of silver plate worth over £2,500, and a commemorative portrait. In an effusive speech Lambton praised his ‘brilliant genius’ and the ‘immortal fame’ of his discovery. Carefully balancing his words, he said that science had secured both ‘the property of the coal owner’ and the ‘safety of the intrepid miner’. For two years Davy’s lamps had protected ‘hundreds of miners in the most dangerous recesses of the earth’ without a single fatality. (Except, it appeared, one ‘foolhardy’ miner who had tried to light his pipe through the gauze.108)
Davy gave a heartfelt speech in reply, trying — not altogether successfully – to appear the soul of modesty. ‘I am overwhelmed by these reiterated proofs of your approbation. You have overrated my merits. My success in your cause must be attributed to my having followed the path of experiment and induction discovered by philosophers who have preceded me … It was in pursuing those methods of analogy and experiment, by which mystery had become science, that I was — fortunately — led to the invention of the Safety Lamp.’109
Yet he could not help also referring to his bitterness about Stephenson and his supporters, and here his feelings rang completely true. ‘It was a new circumstance to me that attempts to preserve human life, and to prevent human misery, should create hostile feelings in persons who professed to have similar objects in view.’110 It was also perhaps an ill omen of a different kind that Jane did not travel with him to Newcastle at this controversial time, but retreated with her own friends to Bath, and read about events in the newspapers.
Banks now intervened on Davy’s behalf, and wrote a thunderous public letter to The Times and other papers, dating it from Soho Square, 20 November 1817. The letter was countersigned by the three leading chemists of the Royal Society, William Wollaston, Charles Hatchett and Thomas Brande. It stated that they had examined all Stephenson’s published claims, and his lamps, followed the entire course of Davy’s experimental work, and his lamps, and concluded that there could be no doubt whatever that Davy was the sole inventor, ‘independent of all others’, of the safety lamp. This authoritative judgement of his peers, clearly intended to silence all further debate ex cathedra, gave huge satisfaction to Davy. He described it as ‘heavy artillery used to destroy bats and owls’.111 But it would have been no surprise to the ageing Banks, now a past master of scientific diplomacy, that after a brief respectful pause the controversy grumbled on, and has never really ended.112
The Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, true to its impressive standards of objectivity, refused simply to back their local man, but in a noble attempt to smooth the waters, unanimously elected both Davy and Stephenson as Honorary Members, simultaneously, on 2 December 1817.113
The tough, sceptical Yorkshireman John Buddle remained Davy’s fiercest supporter, and became a lifelong friend. Whenever he came to London from Newcastle he stayed at Grosvenor Street. Twenty years after his first meeting with Davy he was the star witness at the historic Parliamentary Select Committee on Mining Accidents of 1835.114 George Stephenson was also there, and gave strong and moving evidence, though no longer accusing Davy of plagiarism. In fact the Committee refused to rule on absolute priority, but suggested various new and positive perspectives. In their view, it was undoubtedly the gauze Davy Lamp, unrestricted by patent, which had become the model for all later improvements, such as the big Upton Roberts Lamp (which combined a glass chamber with a gauze chimney).115 It was also the genius of Davy which had first championed a wholly new way of applying pure science to industry. But the safety lamp itself they regarded as, in some senses, a joint discovery. They framed this opinion with great diplomacy, if not entirely scientifically: ‘The principle of its construction appears to have been practically known to the witnesses, Clanny and Stevenson [sic], previously to the period when Davy brought his powerful mind to bear upon the subject, and produced an instrument which will hand down his name to the latest ages.’116
There were other surprises in this Parliamentary Report. Not the least was the revelation that small ‘Davy boys’ were now put in charge of the lamps, to save them from harsher physical labour in the coal seams. The Committee were appalled to learn that these labouring children were often under eight years old. So Davy’s lamps were now saving children in a different way. They began to cast a new and wholly unexpected kind of light, and the Victorian movement to ban child labour in the mines began with this Committee.117
6
Exhausted by this mixture of triumph and controversy, Davy decided to embark on a two-year European tour with Jane. In part this was a last-ditch attempt to save their marriage. Success and celebrity had put a new kind of strain on their increasingly tempestuous relationship, which had degenerated into a series of well-publicised dinner-party feuds and jealous scenes. Sydney Smith wrote cattily of the chemical ‘decomposition’ of their marriage despite plentiful ‘crucible money’ provided by Lady Davy, and her evident ‘disappointment and fury’ at Davy’s lack of personal ‘powers of chemistry’. Even Walter Scott shook his head over their behaviour. ‘She has a temper and Davy has a temper, and these two tempers are not one temper, and they quarrel like cat and dog, which may be good for stirring up the stagnation of domestic life, but they let the world see it, and that is not well.’ Then he added: ‘But then, pour soul, she is not happy.’118
Davy’s loyal brother John was no longer on hand to help them, now being based in Corfu. Yet even he came to feel that their marriage had been based on a delusion: ‘it might have been better for both if they had never met’. Neither had domestic virtues or easy temperaments. At home Jane was irritable, highly strung and demanding: ‘her ample fortune made her perhaps too independent and self-willed’. In society she was vivacious, generous with friends, and savagely witty. But she would never be, thought John, the ‘placens uxor’ – the soothing wife.
John said less about his brother’s evident shortcomings: that Davy was difficult, short-tempered, obsessed with his scientific work, and overfond of aristocratic parties and endless field sports. He had also become dangerously hungry for praise and recognition. John did however remark on their childlessness, as something sad for them both. He thought wistfully (but perhaps wrongly) that the marriage would have been happier with children, ‘For he was of a loving disposition, and fond of children, and required the return of love — required (who does not?) to be beloved, to be happy.’ This wistful remark may also have relevance to certain events towards the end of Davy’s life.119
It is clear that Davy hoped that being away from London, and distracted by a mixture of travel, sight-seeing and social engagements, he and Jane might regain their marital equilibrium. He also had a number of scientific projects up his sleeve, including the commission to find a chemical method of unrolling and deciphering a number of calcinated papyri from Herculaneum. He intended to give this period of reconciliation a proper trial. The Sun Fire Office (Guildhall) holds a special insurance policy taken out to cover their house at 23 Grosvenor Street during a prolonged absence, dated 4 June 1818.120
Davy and Jane left on 26 May 1818, again in their own carriage but now without Michael Faraday in attendance. Instead, Jane firmly took her own maid, who had no scientific ambitions. This time they took the easterly route into Italy, travelling by easy stages along the Rhine and down through the Austrian Alps. They were the honoured guests at several mines in Flanders and Germany, where Davy’s lamp and fame had preceded him. Davy was also testing a theory about water temperature, and why mists form over river waters, which allowed him to spend much time alone on every available riverban
k.
Jane persuaded Davy to remain for several weeks in Vienna. But eventually they pushed further south into the Austrian Tyrol, and Davy was able to continue his exploration of the Austro-Italian border country called Illyria and Styria. The magical names, half-remembered from Shakespearian romances, were strangely enchanting to him. He found a remote and beautiful land of alpine meadows, deep wooded valleys and fine wild rivers like the Traun, where he could ride and shoot and fish to his heart’s content. Yet his fame had reached even here, for on passing through Aussee (in Styria) he was called to a local salt works where several miners had recently been killed by an underground explosion. Davy summoned the local engineer, and personally supervised the construction of several gauze safety lamps for immediate use. They were received ‘with gratitude and surprise’, and no further explosions occurred.121
This remote region of the Balkans, lost between Austria, Italy and Slovenia, was to become Davy’s favourite retreat. Its little provincial capital, Laibach (the modern Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia) on the river Sava, was surrounded by deep forests and mountains. It also had an excellent sportsman’s inn run by the Dettela family, and few English visitors to bother Davy. For Jane there was the society centred on a small baroque opera house, and an elegant concert hall built in 1701. They remained here for several weeks, happily enough it would seem, until Davy was gradually overcome by a mysterious and curiously haunting fixation.
The Age of Wonder Page 51
