Humphry Davy

Humphry Davy was a British chemist whose work touched both early electric lighting and the safety of coal mining, the fuel that powered the Industrial Revolution. Around 1802 he demonstrated an early electric arc light at the Royal Institution, striking a brilliant arc between two charcoal rods connected to a large voltaic battery, a demonstration usually credited as the first form of electric lighting, decades before any commercially practical light bulb existed. In 1815 he invented the Davy lamp, a safety lamp enclosed in fine wire gauze that let miners work by lamp light without igniting the flammable firedamp gas that had caused frequent fatal explosions in coal mines, a design rapidly adopted across British coalfields.