Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet, FRS (17 December 1778 – 29 May 1829) was a British chemist and physicist. He was born in Penzance, Cornwall, United Kingdom and both his brother John Davy and cousin Edmund Davy were also noted chemists. Berzelius called Davy's 1806 Bakerian Lecture "On some Chemical Agencies of Electricity" "one of the best memoirs which has ever enriched the theory of chemistry." This paper was central to any chemical affinity theory in the first half of the ninteenth century.