Humphrey Davy is archetypal short man

It appears I can't read a book without a serious short man issue coming up. Okay, most of the books I read are about Napoleon, but aside from that, these issues do arise with unseemly regularity.

I've just finished reading The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, an elegantly written survey of British scientific achievements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. One of the central characters in the books is Humphrey Davy. He was the inventor of the miners' safety lamp, which has its place in the Making the Modern World gallery at the Science Museum and is regarded by the curators there as one of the most important inventions of all time.

Apart from the safety lamp, I knew little about Davy. It turns out that he was 5ft 5ins and in many ways the archetypal brilliant short man.

Holmes, in what must be one of the most perceptive descriptions of a short man ever written, describes the great chemist thus:

"Davy was small, volatile and bursting with energy and talk...he was impulsive, charming and arrogant. Though physically small, he had huge intellectual ambitons. He was a solitary man who was also an incorrigible flirt."

I'm sure every man under 5ft 7ins can identify with that. Davy was a man who was eager to please, eager to prove himself socially - whilst being isolated from it - and eager to gain paramountcy in his profession. He was brilliant and wanted the world to know it. I'm sure that while London 'society' minded that he was a bit boastful, provincial (from Cornwall) and small, the many thousands of miners across the world whose lives he made safer wouldn't have minded one bit.

My only quibble in this masterly description is the sentence, 'Though physically small, he had huge intellectual ambitions.' This betrays the fact that Holmes lacks true insight into the make-up of the short man. He implies that being short puts a natural cap on one's ambitions.

I would say quite the opposite. The short man - assumed to be of inferior stock to the plodding man of middle height - is naturally inclined towards ambitions, particularly of an intellectual nature. I would immodestly suggest to Richard Holmes that he would have been better off saying,

"Davy was small, and therefore had huge intellectual ambitions."

That would be more accurate. Goes to show that the short man makes history; the middling man writes it.

More on Humphrey Davy soon.