Edmund Davy Edmund Davy Edmund Davy FRS (1785 – 5 November 1857) was a professor of Chemistry at the Royal Cork Institution from 1813 and professor of chemistry at the Royal Dublin Society from 1826. He discovered acetylene, as it was later named by Marcellin Berthelot. He was also an original member of the Chemical Society, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Edmund Davy was a cousin of Humphry Davy, the famous chemist who invented the Davy lamp for the safety of miners. Edmund, the son of William Davy, was born in Penzance, Cornwall, and lived there throughout his teen
Safety lamp copper coated with a fusible metal. If the lamp gets too hot the metal melts and closes up the air holes, extinguishing the lamp. The lamp has been tested and according to Lupton ""successfully resisted every effort to explode it up to a velocity of more than 100 feet per second"". It was not until tungsten filaments replaced carbon that a portable electric light became a reality. An early pioneer was Joseph Swan who exhibited his first lamp in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1881 and improved ones in subsequent years. The Royal Commission on Accidents in Mines set up in