[HN Gopher] Sir Humphry Davy's unpublished poetry found in noteb...
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       Sir Humphry Davy's unpublished poetry found in notebooks
        
       Author : whycome
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2023-12-30 18:09 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
        
       | whycome wrote:
       | > He is famous for discovering elements of the periodic table,
       | for inventing a lamp in 1815 that would save the lives of
       | hundreds of thousands of miners and as an electrochemical
       | pioneer. But it is the unpublished poetry of the British chemist
       | Sir Humphry Davy - and the intriguing connections between his
       | poems and scientific breakthroughs - that is now electrifying
       | academics.
        
       | libraryofbabel wrote:
       | In a previous (pre-tech) life I was a historian and believe it or
       | not, actually looked at these notebooks in the Davy archives
       | during my PhD. It's cool to see this turn up on hacker news.
       | Although, I'm sorry to say, Davy wasn't really a very good poet -
       | even if florid romanticism is to your taste.
       | 
       | Minor gripe: the poetry wasn't really "discovered" in the
       | notebooks. Historians already knew Davy wrote poetry and that
       | this stuff was in there. What is happening is that this is being
       | properly transcribed and made widely available for the first
       | time, which is awesome. It's a shame that every popular
       | journalist writing about historians' work has to sex it up as
       | some kind of dramatic archival discovery. (In the business we
       | used to joke about how every so often a journalist would write
       | about a "discovery" that Isaac Newton was into alchemy, when that
       | had been known for over a century.) In fact, you can perfectly
       | well do brilliant and novel historical work with archival sources
       | that people have looked at many time before.
        
       | matthewmorgan wrote:
       | Sir Humphry Davy abominated gravy. He lived in the odium of
       | having discovered sodium. --Clerihew
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-30 23:00 UTC)