Davy, Humphry

Entry updated 18 November 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1778-1829) English scientist and author famous for inventing the miner's safety-lamp in 1815; knighted 1812, baronet 1818, President of the Royal Society 1820. In his youth he was an acquaintance of the romantic poets of the day: a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he helped correct the proofs of Coleridge's and William Wordsworth'sLyrical Ballads (coll1798), and some of his own poems were included in an anthology edited by Robert Southey. His last work,Consolations in Travel; or, The Last Days of a Philosopher (1830), published posthumously, is a series of dialogues interrupted by dreams and meditations. The work hinges on the narrator's conversion from sceptic to a believer in God, a conversion chiefly inspired by a revelatory dream which is recounted with notable elements of scientific fantasy. During the course of the vision the narrator travels in time (seeTime Travel) to watch the birth of civilization and its advance, primarily throughTechnology; he also travels in space to observe the inhabitants of Saturn (seeOuter Planets) – giant beings who owe something, in size at least, toVoltaire'sMicromegas (inLe Micromégas de Mr. de Voltaire ..., coll1752; trans anon1753) – and of a "cometary system", who appear to be aflame. The message of this dream journey is that mankind must advance, through scientific and intellectual endeavour, to a finer and more ethereal level of existence. [PKi]