David Marcus Knight

"In this illuminating and entertaining biography David Knight makes use of Humphry Davy's poetry, notebooks and informal writings to introduce us to one of the first professional scientists."--BOOK JACKET. "Davy is best remembered for his work on laughing gas, for the arc lamp, for isolating sodium and potassium, for his theory that chemical affinity is electrical and, of course, for his safety lamp. His lectures on science made the fortunes of the Royal Institution in London and he taught chemistry to the young Faraday. However, as well as making a career in science he is recognized for his poetry and was the friend of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Byron."--BOOK JACKET. "By investigating Humphry Davy's life David Knight shows what it was like to be a creative scientist in Regency Britain, demonstrating the development of science and its institutions during this crucial period in history."--BOOK JACKET.

"Facsimile reproductions of famous scientific papers"--Book jacket.

In 1492 Columbus set out across the Atlantic; in 1776 American colonists declared their independence. Between these two events old authorities collapsed, Luther's Reformation divided churches, and various discoveries revealed the ignorance of the ancient Greeks and Romans. A new, empirical worldview had arrived, focusing now on observation, experiment, and mathematical reasoning. This book takes us along on the great voyage of discovery that ushered in the modern age. The author, a historian of science, locates the Scientific Revolution in the great era of global oceanic voyages, which became both a spur to and a metaphor for scientific discovery. He introduces the well-known heroes of the story (Galileo, Newton, Linnaeus) as well as lesser-recognized officers of scientific societies, printers and booksellers who turned scientific discovery into public knowledge, and editors who invented the scientific journal. He looks at a wide array of topics, from better maps to more accurate clocks, from a boom in printing to medical advancements. He portrays science and religion as engaged with each other rather than in constant conflict; in fact, science was often perceived as a way to uncover and celebrate God's mysteries and laws. -- From publisher's website.

Of all the inventions of the nineteenth century, the scientist is one of the most striking. In revolutionary France the science student, taught by men active in research, was born; and a generation later, the graduate student doing a PhD emerged in Germany. In 1833 the word "scientist" was coined; forty years later science (increasingly specialised) was a becoming a profession. Men of science rivalled clerics and critics as sages; they were honoured as national treasures, and buried in state funerals. Their new ideas invigorated the life of the mind. Peripatetic congresses, great exhibitions, museums, technical colleges and laboratories blossomed; and new industries based on chemistry and electricity brought prosperity and power, economic and military. Eighteenth-century steam engines preceded understanding of the physics underlying them; but electric telegraphs and motors were applied science, based upon painstaking interpretation of nature. The ideas, discoveries and inventions of scientists transformed the world: lives were longer and healthier, cities and empires grew, societies became urban rather than agrarian, the local became global. And by the opening years of the twentieth century, science was spreading beyond Europe and North America, and women were beginning to be visible in the ranks of scientists. This book brings together the people, events, and discoveries in the field of science for this period in history.