I have been reading Richard Holmes’ Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, which describes a number of enlightenment era scientific escapades from the standpoint of the inventors and scientists themselves. One of the major scientific figures of this era was Humphry Davy, a British chemist/inventor. Amongst other things, Davy was the first person to discover the effects of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) on human beings. He spent months inhaling ...