Owing to the continuing crisis, meetings of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry have had to be suspended for the foreseeable future. We have therefore decided to run a series of hour-long on-line Zoom seminars on the history of alchemy and chemistry beginning on 21 July at 4pm BST (5pm CEST, 11am EDT, 8am PDT). The format will be a talk of 20-30 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion of half an hour. Anyone, member of SHAC or not, may register to attend the seminar by e-mailing meetings@ambix.org; they will be sent a link to the seminar the day before. (If having registered you do not receive a link the day before please check your junk folder’).

The first speaker, to mark the publication of Humphry Davy’s letters by OUP, will be Tim Fulford, Professor of English at De Montfort University.

“The greatest chemist that has ever appeared?”: Humphry Davy as Revealed in His Correspondence

The publication in June this year of Davy’s Collected Correspondence gives us many new perspectives on Davy himself and on the culture of scientific enquiry in which his work was produced and consumed.  In this talk, Tim Fulford, one of the editors, will present a selection of the letters and discuss, for example, the changing role of patronage, the cultivation of reputation, the institutionalisation of chemical investigation, the role of correspondence networks, relationships between poetic and scientific experimentation, and Davy’s interactions with Ampère, Banks, Beddoes, Berzelius, Dalton, Faraday and Watt.