In 1801 Davy was appointed assistant lecturer in chemistry at the Royal Institution (Albemarle Street, London), which had been founded from philanthropic motives by Count Rumford in 1799. Its aim was to promote the application of science to the common purposes of life. Its founder desired while benefiting the poor to enlist the sympathies of the fashionable world. Davy, with a zeal for the cause of humanity and a clear recognition of the value of a knowledge of chemistry in technical industries and other daily occupations, lent himself readily to the founder's plans. His success as a public expositor of science soon won him promotion to the professorship of chemistry in the new institution, and through his influence an interest in scientific investigation became the vogue of London society. His popularity as a lecturer was so great that his best friends feared that the head of the brilliant provincial youth of twenty-two might be turned by the adulation of which he soon became the object. "I have read," writes his brother, "copies of verses addressed to him then, ... anonymous effusions, some of them displaying much poetical taste as well as fervor of writing, and all showing the influence which his appearance and manner had on the more susceptible of his audience."
His study of the tanning industry (1801-1802) and his lectures on agricultural chemistry (1803-1813) are indicative of the early purpose of the Royal Institution and of Davy's lifelong inclination. The focus of his scientific interest, however, rested on the furtherance of the application of the electrical studies of Galvani and Volta in chemical analysis. In a letter to the chairman of managers of the Royal Institution Volta had in 1800 described his voltaic pile made up of a succession of zinc and copper plates in pairs separated by a moist conductor, and before the end of the same year Nicholson and Carlisle had employed an electric current, produced by this newly devised apparatus, in the decomposition of water into its elements.
In the spring of the following year the _Philosophical Magazine_ states: "We have also to notice a course of lectures, just commenced at the institution, on a new branch of philosophy--we mean Galvanic Phenomena. On this interesting branch Mr. Davy (late of Bristol) gave the first lecture on the 25th of April. He began with the history of Galvanism, detailed the successive discoveries, and described the different methods of accumulating influence.... He showed the effects of galvanism on the legs of frogs, and exhibited some interesting experiments on the galvanic effects on the solutions of metals in acids." In a paper communicated to the Royal Society in 1806, _On Some Chemical Agencies of Electricity_, Davy put on record the result of years of experiment. For example, as stated by his biographer, he had connected a cup of gypsum with one of agate by means of asbestos, and filling each with purified water, had inserted the negative wire of the battery in the agate cup, and the positive wire in that of the sulphate of lime. In about four hours he had found a strong solution of lime in the agate cup, and sulphuric acid in the cup of gypsum. On his reversing the arrangement, and carrying on the process for a similar length of time, the sulphuric acid appeared in the agate cup, and the solution of lime on the opposite side. It was thus that he studied the transfer of certain of the constituent parts of bodies by the action of electricity. "It is very natural to suppose," says Davy, "that the repellent and attractive energies are communicated from one particle to another particle of the same kind, so as to establish a conducting _chain_ in the fluid. There may be a succession of decompositions and recompositions before the electrolysis is complete."