Special talk in Lancaster to shed new light on one of Britain’s famous chemists

Since 2019, a team of Lancaster University researchers, working with volunteers from all over the world, have been working hard on the Humphry Davy Notebooks Project to transcribe more than 11,000 pages of the 75 notebooks of the famous nineteenth-century chemist.

More than 3500 volunteers from across the globe have helped and soon the notebooks will be published on the University’s Lancaster Digital Collections site.

Professor Sharon Ruston, from Lancaster University’s Department of English Literature and Creative Writing who has led the project team, will explore some of the highlights of the research at the event on June 25 (7pm to 8pm) at The Storey in Lancaster.

“We were able to identify the very moment when Davy realised that he had isolated potassium, and the page in which he played around with different terms to describe what he had found,” she explains.

“The notebooks also demonstrate Davy’s commitment to inhaling nitrous oxide in an effort to work out its therapeutic potential and his efforts to record his experiences while under the influence of the gas.”

The notebooks also reveal the full extent of the poetry that Davy wrote, the vast majority of which remained unpublished in his lifetime; poetry written in his laboratory while at his chemical work. They also detail the work that he and Michael Faraday did developing the miners’ safety lamp that came to be known as the Davy lamp.

“The talk promises to be full of new and interesting insights to a fascinating character,” adds Professor Ruston.

Please book your free seat here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/prof-sharon-ruston-what-did-humphry-davy-write-in-his-notebooks-tickets-770867313887.