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Sir Humphry Davy, a British chemist, isolated calcium oxide in 1808. This substance was popularly known as lime, quicklime, or unslaked lime. Davy demonstrated this lime would produce a brilliant white light when heated to incandescence. Thomas Drummond took advantage of this fact to devise a new type of light for theatrical purposes. In 1816, he placed such a cylinder of lime, heated by a flame, in two different arrangements: behind a lens and in front of a reflector. At first, this new form of illumination was called the "Drummond light," but gradually it became known as limelight.