The Davy Medal is awarded by the
Royal Society of London
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, r ...
"for an outstandingly important recent discovery in any branch of chemistry".
Named after
Humphry Davy
Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet (17 December 177829 May 1829) was a British chemist and inventor who invented the Davy lamp and a very early form of arc lamp. He is also remembered for isolating, by using electricity, several Chemical element, e ...
, the medal is awarded with a monetary gift, initially of £1000 (currently £2000). Receiving the Davy Medal has been identified as a potential precursor to being awarded the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry () is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of chemistry. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895, awarded for outst ...
,
with 22 scientists as of 2022 having been awarded the medal prior to becoming Nobel laureates, according to an analysis by the
Royal Society of Chemistry
The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is a learned society and professional association in the United Kingdom with the goal of "advancing the chemistry, chemical sciences". It was formed in 1980 from the amalgamation of the Chemical Society, the ...
.
History
The medal was first awarded in 1877 to
Robert Wilhelm Bunsen and
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (; 12 March 1824 – 17 October 1887) was a German chemist, mathematician, physicist, and spectroscopist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy and the emission of black-body ...
"for their researches & discoveries in spectrum analysis",
and has since been awarded 140 times.
The medal is awarded annually and, unlike other Royal Society medals (such as the
Hughes), has been awarded without interruption since its inception.
The medal has been awarded to multiple individuals in the same year: in 1882, for example, it was awarded to
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev ( ; ) was a Russian chemist known for formulating the periodic law and creating a version of the periodic table of elements. He used the periodic law not only to correct the then-accepted properties of some known ele ...
and
Julius Lothar Meyer "for their discovery of the periodic relations of the atomic weights";
in 1883 to
Marcellin Berthelot and
Julius Thomsen "for their researches in thermo-chemistry";
in 1893 to
Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff
Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff Jr. (; 30 August 1852 – 1 March 1911) was a Dutch physical chemistry, physical chemist. A highly influential theoretical chemistry, theoretical chemist of his time, Van 't Hoff was the first winner of the Nobe ...
and
Joseph Achille Le Bel "In recognition of their introduction of the theory of asymmetric carbon, and its use in explaining the constitution of optically active carbon compounds";
in 1903 to
Pierre Curie
Pierre Curie ( ; ; 15 May 1859 – 19 April 1906) was a French physicist, Radiochemistry, radiochemist, and a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity, and radioactivity. He shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, ...
and
Marie Curie
Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie (; ; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934), known simply as Marie Curie ( ; ), was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity.
She was List of female ...
"for their researches on radium"
and in 1968 to
John Cornforth and
George Joseph Popják "in recognition of their distinguished joint work on the elucidation of the biosynthetic pathway to polyisoprenoids and steroids".
List of recipients
Source
Royal Society
See also
*
List of chemistry awards
References
;General
*
;Specific
External links
Royal Society official website
{{featured list
1877 introductions
1877 establishments in the United Kingdom
Chemistry awards
1877 in science
Awards of the Royal Society
Awards established in 1877