Henry Cavendish

Henry Cavendish (born October 10, 1731, Nice, France—died February 24, 1810, London, England) was a natural philosopher, the greatest experimental and theoretical English chemist and physicist of his age. Cavendish was distinguished for great accuracy and precision in research into the composition of atmospheric air, the properties of different gases, the synthesis of water, the law governing electrical attraction and repulsion, a mechanical theory of heat, and calculations of the density (and hence the weight) of Earth. His experiment to weigh Earth has come to be known as the Cavendish experiment.

Education

Cavendish, often referred to as “the Honourable Henry Cavendish,” had no title, although his father was the third son of the duke of Devonshire, and his mother (née Ann Grey) was the fourth daughter of the duke of Kent. His mother died in 1733, three months after the birth of her second son, Frederick, and shortly before Henry’s second birthday, leaving Lord Charles Cavendish to bring up his two sons. Henry went to the Hackney Academy, a private school near London, and in 1748 entered Peterhouse College, Cambridge, where he remained for three years before he left without taking a degree (a common practice). He then lived with his father in London, where he soon had his own laboratory.

Lord Charles Cavendish lived a life of service, first in politics and then increasingly in science, especially in the Royal Society of London. In 1758 he took Henry to meetings of the Royal Society and also to dinners of the Royal Society Club. In 1760 Henry Cavendish was elected to both these groups, and he was assiduous in his attendance thereafter. He took virtually no part in politics, but, like his father, he lived a life of service to science, both through his researches and through his participation in scientific organizations. He was active in the Council of the Royal Society of London (to which he was elected in 1765); his interest and expertise in the use of scientific instruments led him to head a committee to review the Royal Society’s meteorological instruments and to help assess the instruments of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Other committees on which he served included the committee of papers, which chose the papers for publication in the Philosophical Transactions, and the committees for the transit of Venus (1769), for the gravitational attraction of mountains (1774), and for the scientific instructions for Constantine Phipps’s expedition (1773) in search of the North Pole and the Northwest Passage. In 1773 Henry joined his father as an elected trustee of the British Museum, to which he devoted a good deal of time and effort. Soon after the Royal Institution of Great Britain was established, Cavendish became a manager (1800) and took an active interest, especially in the laboratory, where he observed and helped in Humphry Davy’s chemical experiments.

Cavendish was a shy man who was uncomfortable in society and avoided it when he could. He conversed little, always dressed in an old-fashioned suit, and developed no known deep personal attachments outside his family.

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Research in chemistry

About the time of his father’s death, Cavendish began to work closely with Charles Blagden, an association that helped Blagden enter fully into London’s scientific society. In return, Blagden helped to keep the world at a distance from Cavendish. Cavendish published no books and few papers, but he achieved much. Several areas of research, including mechanics, optics, and magnetism, feature extensively in his manuscripts, but they scarcely feature in his published work.

His first publication (1766) was a combination of three short chemistry papers on “factitious airs,” or gases produced in the laboratory. He produced “inflammable air” (hydrogen) by dissolving metals in acids and “fixed air” (carbon dioxide) by dissolving alkalis in acids, and he collected these and other gases in bottles inverted over water or mercury. He then measured their solubility in water and their specific gravity and noted their combustibility. Cavendish was awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal for this paper. Gas chemistry was of increasing importance in the latter half of the 18th century and became crucial for Frenchman Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier’s reform of chemistry, generally known as the chemical revolution.

In 1783 Cavendish published a paper on eudiometry (the measurement of the goodness of gases for breathing). He described a new eudiometer of his own invention, with which he achieved the best results to date, using what in other hands had been the inexact method of measuring gases by weighing them. He next published a paper on the production of water by burning inflammable air (that is, hydrogen) in dephlogisticated air (now known to be oxygen), the latter a constituent of atmospheric air. (See phlogiston.) Cavendish concluded that dephlogisticated air was dephlogisticated water and that hydrogen was either pure phlogiston or phlogisticated water. He reported these findings to Joseph Priestley, an English clergyman and scientist, no later than March 1783, but did not publish them until the following year. The Scottish inventor James Watt published a paper on the composition of water in 1783; Cavendish had performed the experiments first but published second. Controversy about priority ensued. In 1785 Cavendish carried out an investigation of the composition of common (i.e., atmospheric) air, obtaining, as usual, impressively accurate results. He observed that, when he had determined the amounts of phlogisticated air (nitrogen) and dephlogisticated air (oxygen), there remained a volume of gas amounting to 1/120 of the volume of the nitrogen.

In the 1890s, two British physicists, William Ramsay and Lord Rayleigh, realized that their newly discovered inert gas, argon, was responsible for Cavendish’s problematic residue; he had not made an error. What he had done was perform rigorous quantitative experiments, using standardized instruments and methods, aimed at reproducible results; taken the mean of the result of several experiments; and identified and allowed for sources of error. The balance that he used, made by a craftsman named Harrison, was the first of the splendid precision balances of the 18th century, and as good as Lavoisier’s (which has been estimated to measure one part in 400,000). Cavendish worked with his instrument makers, generally improving existing instruments rather than inventing wholly new ones.

Cavendish, as indicated above, used the language of the old phlogiston theory in chemistry. In 1787 he became one of the earliest outside France to convert to the new antiphlogistic theory of Lavoisier, though he remained skeptical about the nomenclature of the new theory. He also objected to Lavoisier’s identification of heat as having a material or elementary basis. Working within the framework of Newtonian mechanism, Cavendish had tackled the problem of the nature of heat in the 1760s, explaining heat as the result of the motion of matter. In 1783 he published a paper on the temperature at which mercury freezes and in that paper made use of the idea of latent heat, although he did not use the term because he believed that it implied acceptance of a material theory of heat. He made his objections explicit in his 1784 paper on air. He went on to develop a general theory of heat, and the manuscript of that theory has been persuasively dated to the late 1780s. His theory was at once mathematical and mechanical; it contained the principle of the conservation of heat (later understood as an instance of conservation of energy) and even contained the concept (although not the label) of the mechanical equivalent of heat.