Edward Davy was an English physician, scientist, and inventor who played a prominent role in the development of telegraphy, and invented an electric relay. Davy was born in Ottery St Mary, Devonshire, England, son of Thomas Davy. Edward Davy was educated at a school run by his maternal uncle in Tower Street, London.
Edward Davy, physician, chemist, and inventor who devised the electromagnetic repeater for relaying telegraphic signals and invented an electrochemical telegraph (1838).
Davy, who wrote an Experimental Guide to Chemistry (1836), emigrated in 1839 to Australia, where, in addition to practicing medicine, he worked as an editor, farmer, and factory manager. He was a prominent Adelaide citizen from 1839 to 1852. His election to the municipal council and his interest in improving the city’s water supply and in other civic affairs made him an appropriate, if temporary, editor of the Adelaide Examiner in June and July 1842; although his editorials were striking they showed little evidence of literary style. His interest in science remained, and in 1843 he experimented successfully with the production of starch from wheat, then at a low price.With the development of copper mines in South Australia, Davy established an experimental kiln for smelting copper ore using charcoal from local forests, a process for which he was given a South Australian patent in September 1849. In December 1845 he smelted ore to produce about 50 per cent copper. In December 1847 the Adelaide Smelting Co. was established near Alberton. In October 1854, he took up farming near Malmsbury, Victoria. He was not successful and soon moved into Malmsbury where he practised as a physician for the rest of his life. Here again he became active in local affairs, was three times mayor, and for more than twenty years an active justice of the peace and health officer. Before leaving Great Britain he sold the patent for his telegraph; the purchasers never exploited the invention commercially, and for several decades Davy’s contributions were ignored. His work was reviewed nearly fifty years later by J. J. Fahie, who claimed that Davy, at least equally with his rivals and contemporaries, Cooke and Wheatstone, was the inventor of the electric telegraph. Certainly Davy gave many lectures and wrote papers on this subject. He developed the electromagnetic repeater, which consisted of a relay to pick up and magnify electrical signals, in about 1836.