Nitrous oxide was the hot party drug for writers in the early 1800s
Literature and laughing gas during the Enlightenment
It should come as no surprise that a substance that inclines those who inhale it toward giggling fits, feelings of weightlessness, and languid, dreamy lazing, would inspire artists. Such was the case with nitrous oxide, better known as “laughing” gas.
After he first synthesized N2O in 1772, chemist and philosopher Joseph Priestley (incidentally, also the god who invented seltzer) published the results of his experiments in a book titled Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air. The gas, however, wasn’t popularized for another quarter century, when Dr. Thomas Beddoes continued Priestley’s research into its therapeutic properties.
In 1799, Humphry Davy, a 20-year-old chemist, was working as a lab assistant at the Pneumatic Institution in Hotswells, England — a “downmarket cluster of cheap clinics and miracle-cure outfits,” according to medical historian Mike Jay. Davy was assisting Beddoes and his partner, James Watt, who had developed an apparatus to better deliver anesthetic gases to patients. Being the juniormost of the three, Davy was the guinea pig. The magical, sweet-tasting substance was administered, appropriately, via a large, green silk bag; the user would suck the gas from a tube while holding his nose.
Its effect was profound. Over the course of their early experiments, Davy got deliciously, extravagantly high. He recorded feeling a “pleasurable thrilling in the chest and extremities.” Of one experience, he writes, “My senses were more alive to every surrounding impression. I threw myself into several theatrical attitudes […] my mind was elevated to a most sublime height.”
So altered was he by the experience that he began enlisting his friends to come try it, too. The first of them, poet Robert Southey, wrote to his brother afterward with the zeal of a freshly converted Burning Man returnee. “Oh Tom! such a gas has Davy discovered!” he wrote. “Oh Tom! I have had some. It made me laugh & tingle in every toe and finger tip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name. Oh Tom! I am going for more this evening — it makes one so strong & so happy! So gloriously happy! & without any after debility but instead of it increased strength & activity of mind & body — oh excellent air bag. Tom I am sure the air in heaven must be this wonder working gas of delight.”
To read descriptions of the experience Davy and his friends were having is to appreciate not only the power of the “delectable air,” but also how novel the sensations it produced were. More than one participant in the research suggested that existing language simply couldn’t accommodate the experience of ingesting the gas. And many of their attempts sound abstract, even ridiculous. “Nothing exists but thoughts!” Davy exclaimed to a nearby doctor after one series of inhalations. “The universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!”
Within a year, Davy had written a 580-page book celebrating the gas’s scientific and poetic value, and chronicling his and others’ experiences and his research on N2O’s impact on animals.
He wasn’t the only writer who found inspiration in nitrous oxide’s fuzzy embrace. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose exploits with opium are better chronicled, was another pal of Davy’s. For him, the feeling of nitrous was like “returning from a walk in the snow into a warm room.” Coleridge’s drug experiments fueled both his poetry and the theories of the unconscious mind that he was then developing.
The feeling of euphoria brought on by nitrous oxide can also, of course, be described as painlessness, and Beddoes and Davy predicted early on that the gas could quite successfully be put to medical use. But first, the gas became a staple on the carnival circuit. In his introduction to ‘Oh Excellent Air Bag:’ Under the Influence of Nitrous Oxide, 1799–1920, Mike Jay writes that by 1824, N2O was first called “laughing gas” and was part of a London theater program called “Uncommon Illusions, Wonderful Metamorphoses, Experimental Chemistry, Animated Paintings etc.”
At the time, Enlightenment values — rationalism, empiricism — dominated the sciences, but the influence of romanticism and philosophical inquiry into the natural world and the limits of human experience were growing. At traveling fairs and carnivals, particularly in America, people gathered to get high — or watch others get high — on nitrous beneath tents and banners bearing some of Humphry Davy and Robert Southey’s original exclamations about the drug.
After attending one of these popular “laughing gas shows” in 1844, hosted by temperance crusader Gardiner Quincy Colton (who used the gas in a cautionary capacity), Connecticut dentist Horace Wells had the idea to help a wounded performer with nitrous oxide. And then, a lightbulb: perhaps it could help dental patients. Colton promptly dropped his carnival gig and opened a dental clinic. According to Mike Jay, it was another 20 years before professional dentists adopted it as their anesthetic of choice. (Patients, of course, loved it from the start.)
Laughing gas went on to be used in other surgical procedures, and is still administered to women in labor. It’s also had a raucous recreational life — whip-its, anyone? — and remains known in many circles as “hippie crack.”
