At Bristol Humphry Davy came into companionship with Coleridge and Southey, who were then also at the outset of their career, and there are poems of his in the Poetical Anthology then published by Southey.  But at the same time Davy contributed papers on “Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light,” on “Phos-Oxygen and its Combinations,” and on “The Theory of Respiration,” to a volume of West Country Collections, that filled more than half the volume.  He was experimenting then on gases and on galvanism, and one day by experiment upon himself, in the breathing of carburetted hydrogen, he almost put an end to his life.

In 1799 Count Rumford was founding the Royal Institution, and its home in Albemarle Street was then bought for it.  The first lecturer appointed was in bad health, and in 1801 he was obliged to resign.  Young Davy was now known to men of science for the number and freshness of his experiments, and for the substantial value of his chemical discoveries.  It was resolved by the managers, in July, 1801, that Humphry Davy be appointed Assistant-Lecturer in Chemistry, Director of the Chemical Laboratory, and assistant-editor of the journals of the Royal Institution.  His first remuneration was a room in the house, coals and candles, and 100 pounds a year.  Count Rumford held out the prospect of a professorship with 300 pounds a year, and the certainty of full support in the use of the laboratory for his own private research.  His age then was twenty-three.  He at once satisfied men of science and amused people of fashion.  His energy was unbounded; there was a fascination in his personal character and manner.  He was a genial and delightful lecturer, and his inventive genius was continually finding something new.  A first suggestion of the process of photography was dropped incidentally among the records of researches that attracted more attention.  Davy had been little more than a year at the Royal Institution when he was made its Professor of Chemistry.  After another year he was made a Fellow.  Dr. Paris, his biographer, says that “the enthusiastic admiration which his lectures obtained is at this period scarcely to be imagined.  Men of the first rank and talent—­the literary and the scientific, the practical, the theoretical—­blue-stockings and women of fashion, the old and the young, all crowded—­eagerly crowded—­the lecture-room.”  At the beginning of the year 1805 his salary was raised to 400 pounds a year.  In May of that year the Royal Society awarded to him the Copley Medal.  Within the next two years he was elected Secretary of the Royal Society.  Since 1800 he had been advancing knowledge by experiments with galvanism.  The Royal Institution raised a special fund to place at his disposal a more powerful galvanic battery than any that had been constructed.  The fame of his discoveries spread over Europe.