When he had recovered and returned to his work, the Royal Institution
provided him with a voltaic battery of six hundred double plates of four
inches square, four times as powerful as any that had been constructed,
and not long after, one of two thousand plates. Scientific papers were
constantly coming from his pen. He soon decomposed boracic acid with the
battery. By heating boron in oxygen, it burnt, and was reconverted into
boracic acid. In his experiments with muriatic acid gas he found
chlorine to be a simple substance, and discovered euchlorine, a compound
of chlorine and oxygen.
He had already been made a fellow of the Royal Society at twenty-five,
and at twenty-nine one of the secretaries. His lectures were crowded, as
ever, by a thousand people. The Dublin Society now invited him to give
courses of lectures in 1810 and 1811, which he did, ticket-holders each
paying ten dollars for a course. So difficult was it to gain admission
to the lectures that many offered from fifty to a hundred dollars for a
course ticket!
He writes these facts to his mother, and adds, "This is merely for your
eye: it may please you to know that your son is not unpopular or
useless. Every person here, from the highest to the lowest, shows me
every attention and kindness.
"I shall come to see you as soon as I can. I hear with infinite delight
of your health, and I hope Heaven will continue to preserve and bless a
mother who deserves so well of her children."
Trinity College, Dublin, conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of
Civil Law. Cuvier said of him: "Davy, not yet thirty-two, in the opinion
of all who could judge of such labors, held the first rank among the
chemists of this or of any other age." The National Institute of France
had awarded him the prize given by Napoleon to the greatest discovery by
the means of galvanism.
And yet all this fame and honor had been won by incessant labor. He
writes to his mother: "At present, except when I resolve to be idle for
health's sake, I devote every moment to labors which I hope will not be
wholly ineffectual in benefiting society, and which will not be wholly
inglorious for my country hereafter; and the feeling of this is the
_reward_ which will continue to keep me employed."
His brother John, who had been for three years at the Royal Institution,
now went to Edinburgh to study medicine. Davy writes him: "Let no
difficulties alarm you, you may be what you please. Trust me, I know
what your powers are. Preserve the dignity of your mind, and the purity
of your moral conduct. You set sail with a fair wind on the ocean of
life. You have great talents, good feelings, and an unbroken and an
uncorrupted spirit. Move straight forward on to moral and intellectual
excellence. Let no example induce you to violate decorum,--no ridicule
prevent you from guarding against sensuality or vice. Live in such a way
that you can always say, the whole world may know what I am doing."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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