Humphry Davy Davy's laboratory assistant, Michael Faraday, went on to enhance Davy's work and would become the more famous and influential scientist. Davy is supposed to have even claimed Faraday as his greatest discovery. Davy later accused Faraday of plagiarism, however, causing Faraday (the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry) to cease all research in electromagnetism until his mentor's death. Of a sanguine, somewhat irritable temperament, Davy displayed characteristic enthusiasm and energy in all his pursuits. As is shown by his verses and sometimes by his prose, his mind was highly imaginative; the poet Coleridge declared that if he "had not been the
Pneumatic Institution medical treatment would be carried out side by side. In March 1798, the curiosity of Humphry Davy was aroused by dramatic statements made in Samuel Latham Mitchell's "Remarks on the gaseous oxyd of nitrogen and its effects (1795)" that nitrous oxide had disastrous effects whether inhaled or in contact with the skin, that it was indeed the very "principle of contagion". Davy joined the "Pneumatic Institution" in 1798 as the laboratory operator, largely through the recommendation of Davies Giddy, and it was here that he undertook experiments that included himself inhaling nitrous oxide, which he called "laughing gas" for its