The Davy Letters
The Davy Letters project, funded by the British Academy, the Wellcome Trust, the British Society for the History of Science, and the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, went live in February 2011. of the first-ever edition of the Collected Letters of Humphry Davy and his Circle, edited by a team of Davy scholars.
These letters, over 200 of which are held in the Royal Institution archives, document Davy's work on electrochemistry and electromagnetism, mineralogy and geology, and his collaborations with other chemists such as J. G. Children and W. H. Pepys. They illuminate the controversy that initially followed his identification of chlorine as an element and his experiments on fluorine and iodine. The experimental work leading to the development of the safety lamp and the subsequent dispute concerning credit for that invention is also covered.
The Collected Letters reveals much about Davyhimself, his wife and brother, and the milieu in which they lived.
The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, co-edited by Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston, was published in four volumes by Oxford University Press in 2020. It is also available online on Oxford Scholarly Editions.
Humphry Davy’s notebooks and lecture notes have been transcribed and annotated and can now be viewed and searched at https://digitalcollections.lancaster.ac.uk/.
