What do you study? myvidster The Wrights’ approach to personal safety was a signature of the amateur scientist. The early Swedish chemist Carl Scheele, the discoverer of no fewer than eight elements (barium, chlorine, fluorine, manganese, molybdenum, nitrogen, oxygen and tungsten), insisted on sampling a small amount of every substance he used in his laboratory. Unsurprisingly, he died in that laboratory, in 1786 at the age of 43. His British successor, Humphry Davy, was just as keen a self-experimenter, dosing himself on his newly discovered nitrous oxide (laughing gas) with the merry abandon of a Glastonbury festival-goer.