Party like it’s 1799
One of my all-time favorites, The Age of Wonder lingers in my mind in a way few other books do. Five years since stumbling upon it, I am still drawn back to revisit bits and pieces.
At the turn of the 19th century, the word ‘scientist’ did not yet exist. Philosopher clubs like the Royal Society in London were the closest thing to modern research organizations. The naturalist Joseph Banks, back home from the Endeavour’s epic voyage to South America and the Pacific islands, presided there for 41 years over a colorful assembly of polymaths and tinkerers.
Similar to their “Lake poet” contemporaries, these individuals held in common a burning search for truth and beauty. Their journals and letters, which Richard Holmes draws heavily on to reconstruct their lives, are inflected by the style that marked the romantic period: idealistic, manic, and a shade overwrought.
Among all the chapters, one of the most bizarre and cinematic is the story of the young chemist Humphry Davy and his nitrous oxide experiments. In 1799, Davy was 20 years old, newly hired to administer quack-ish gas medicine treatments at Dr Beddoes’ Pneumatic Institute in Bristol. A few months after settling in, Davy began inviting his neighborhood hipster poet pals to be test subjects for his investigation on the effects of the new “laughing gas.”
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A 27-year-old Samuel Coleridge was one of these volunteers. After inhaling a silk bag of gas through a wooden mouthpiece, Coleridge recalled:
…an highly pleasurable sensation of warmth over my whole frame, resembling what I remember once to have experienced after returning from a walk in the snow into a warm room.
The reaction of another Lake poet and friend of Coleridge, Robert Southey, was a little more over the top:
Such a gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxide. Oh, Tom! I have had some; it made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger-tip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure, for which language has no name. Oh, Tom! I am going for more this evening! It makes one strong and happy! So gloriously happy!
But, they weren’t all happy customers.
Miss J breathed this morning six quarts…in about a minute she suffered the bag to drop. She then began to sob most violently, then cried and laughed alternately. She used most vivid muscular actions and appeared to be perfectly delirious in about ten minutes.
By today’s standards, these experiments were reckless beyond belief. Like much of the laboratory work from this era, safety was the last concern, and Davy injured himself on the job a few times over the years. There are some passages I still cannot make it through without flinching.
At two in the afternoon he began to inhale four quarts of ‘pure hydrocarbonate’…On inhaling the third quart he collapsed.
I seemed sinking into annihilation, and had just power enough to drop the mouthpiece from my unclosed lips…I faintly articulated, “I do not think I shall die.”
He lay there for the rest of the day, suffering from ‘nausea, loss of memory, and deficient sensation’. He vomited, and was then overcome by ‘excruciating pain’ between his eyes.
…
Normally the gas was taken in laboratory conditions, with Dr Kinglake as his assistant, while rigorous notes were taken. But some times Davy returned in the evening, apparently alone…on the evening of 5 May 1799 Davy prepared to subject himself to a special session, to see what the psychological effects might be of a deliberately excessive dose.
I lost consciousness; it was, however, quickly restored, and I endeavored to make a bystander acquainted with the pleasures I experienced by laughing and stomping.
He continued experimenting on himself until July, usually three or four times daily, and sometimes in the evening after drinking wine or brandy…
On one December night in the laboratory, Davy drank an entire bottle of wine ‘as fast as possible that it might produce its full effects.’ The gas did not prevent ‘complete intoxication’ in less than an hour, but it helped his hangover the next morning.…
It was in this same month that Davy first used a portable gas chamber especially designed by James Watt. This device allowed a much longer total exposure…it was a narrow, dark, boxed chamber…There is a vivid account of Davy’s first use of this faintly sinister machine, on 26 December 1799. Naturally he tried it himself first…Over a precisely agreed time of seventy-five minutes, Kinglake pumped in (‘threw in’) exactly eighty quarts of nitrous oxide. Davy’s pulse rose to 124, his temperature to 106, and his cheeks went bright purple. But amazingly, he remained conscious…
Toward the end of the chapter, Holmes dwells on a tantalizing near-breakthrough that could have been, if Davy had pursued one insight:
As nitrous oxide in its extensive operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations…
The next year, Davy left the laughing gas behind, moving to London to start new projects that would win him fame: applying electric currents to break apart compounds and catalog seven new chemical elements. With no one leading the charge to put nitrous oxide to practical use, the inhalation experiments at the Pneumatic Institute remained an odd footnote. All kinds of surgeries remained extremely painful and traumatic throughout most of the 19th century. It was not until the 1840s that an American dentist first used nitrous oxide as an anesthetic, and still years later before it gained widespread usage.
