Short answers, pulled from the story.
Humphry Davy was a British chemist and inventor who lived from 1778 to 1829. He isolated several elements for the first time using electricity, including potassium and sodium in 1807 and calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron the following year. He also showed that chlorine and iodine are elements, and invented the Davy lamp and an early form of arc lamp.
Humphry Davy was born in Penzance, Cornwall, England, on the 17th of December 1778. He was the eldest of the five children of Robert Davy, a woodcarver, and his wife Grace Millett.
Humphry Davy nicknamed nitrous oxide laughing gas in 1799 after experimenting with it and being astonished at how it made him laugh. He breathed sixteen quarts of it for nearly seven minutes and said it absolutely intoxicated him, and he wrote about its potential as an anaesthetic to relieve pain during surgery.
The Davy lamp was a safety lamp for coal miners that enclosed the flame in iron gauze, preventing methane burning inside from igniting firedamp in the surrounding air. Davy developed it after returning to England in 1815, refused to patent it, and was awarded the Rumford medal in 1816 for the invention.
Humphry Davy hired Michael Faraday as a co-worker after a nitrogen trichloride accident in 1812, particularly to help with handwriting and record keeping. Davy is supposed to have claimed Faraday as his greatest discovery, but he also accused Faraday of plagiarism as early as 1821, and Faraday went on to become the more famous scientist.
Humphry Davy died on the 29th of May 1829 in a room at L'Hotel de la Couronne in Geneva, Switzerland, after suffering a stroke in 1826 and another on the 20th of February 1829. His will asked for no post-mortem and a delay before burial to ensure he was not merely comatose, but the city's ordinances did not allow the interval he wanted, and he was buried on the 1st of June in the Cimetiere des Rois.