The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Author:Richard Holmes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-04-02T21:58:31+00:00

By the end of 1800 Davy’s Researches, and his early papers on galvanism in Nicholson’s Journal, were rousing serious interest in London. He began receiving unofficial approaches from Sir Joseph Banks and Benjamin Thompson, and there was talk of a professorship in chemistry. In February 1801 he again visited London, and was officially interviewed by the Committee of the Royal Institution-Banks, Thompson and Henry Cavendish-who had been considering offering him an initial post as Assistant Chemical Lecturer, with a possible professorship to follow. He then had the decisive Soho breakfast with Banks, who quickly determined to poach him from Beddoes, and capture him for the Institution. His first shrewd move was to send him on to have informal drinks with Benjamin Thompson, an altogether different kind of patron.112

Thompson (1753-1814) was a strange and remarkable man, with none of Sir Joseph’s diplomatic bonhomie, but with equal energy and an even more ruthless drive. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was an American citizen from Boston, but had been knighted by the British government and then appointed Count Rumford by the Elector of Bavaria, an unusual combination of honours. In the course of his extraordinary, picaresque life, Rumford was variously a professional soldier, an inventor and man of science, a Minister of State, a philanthropist and a philanderer. His tall, thin, imposing figure, permanently stooped, combined with large, bright, attentive eyes and a spectacular Roman nose, gave him the appearance of some powerfully beaked and faintly sinister bird of prey about to pounce-an appearance much loved by cartoonists such as James Gillray. As the inventor of various heating and lighting appliances, and propounder of a correct theory of heat (proving Lavoisier’s ‘caloric’ to be a product of friction), Thompson instantly recognised young Davy’s potential-and duly pounced.

Attractive terms of employment were mooted (though not agreed), and Davy was already writing to Davies Giddy on 8 March 1801 about the wonderful prospects held out by Banks and Thompson, his imminent move to London, and the promise of fresh funding for his work on galvanism. He acknowledged Beddoes’s plans at Clifton for ‘a great popular physiological work’ on therapeutic gases, but this, he had to admit, was a work on which he would not be collaborating after all. It might, in fact, be a dead end. At all events, science now called him elsewhere.

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