Sir Humphry Davy From Classic Encyclopedia 1911 SIR HUMPHRY
DAVY, Bart. (1778-1829), English chemist, was born on the 17th
of December 1778 at or near Penzance in Cornwall. During his
school days at the grammar schools of Penzance and Truro he
showed few signs of a taste for scientific pursuits or indeed of
any special zeal for knowledge or of ability beyond a certain
skill in making verse translations from the classics and in
story-telling. But when in 1794 his father, Robert Davy, died,
leaving a widow and five children in embarrassed circumstances,
he awoke to his responsibilities as the eldest son, and becoming
apprentice to a surgeonapothecary at Penzance set to work on a
systematic and remarkably wide course of self-instruction which
he mapped out for himself in preparation for a career in
medicine. Beginning with metaphysics and ethics and passing on
to mathematics, he turned to chemistry at the end of 17 9 7, and
within a few months of reading Nicholson's and Lavoisier's
treatises on that science had