Scalpels Through The Ages

In a few days, Davy successfully isolated sodium. His voltaic pile also gave him the alkaline earths barium, strontium, calcium, and magnesium. (Lavoisier correctly identified their oxides as compounds but could not isolate the metals.) 

During this period Davy proved that chlorine gas (first isolated by Scheele in 1774) did not contain oxygen. Thus, hydrochloric acid did not contain oxygen, disproving Lavoisier s hypothesis that all acids contained oxygen. 

The Norton History of Chemistry, Norton, New York, 1993, pp. 147-153. 

Until the middle of the twentieth century, Humphry Davy held the record for discovering the most chemical elements six. He succeeded because he was the first kid on the block to apply a new type of scalpel systematically (the voltaic pile or battery) to chemical problems. He very modestly attributed his discoveries to the instruments rather than to his own brilliance  

The active intellectual powers of man in different times are not so much the cause of the different successes of their labours, as the peculiar nature of the means and artificial resources in their possessions. 

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