Cavendish, Henry

born Oct. 10, 1731, Nice, France

died Feb. 24, 1810, London, Eng.

English physicist and chemist.

A millionaire by inheritance, he lived as a recluse most of his life. He discovered the nature and properties of hydrogen, the specific heat of certain substances, and various properties of electricity. He measured the density and mass of the Earth by the method now known as the Cavendish experiment. He discovered the composition of air, work that led to the discovery that water is a compound rather than an element and to the discovery of nitric acid. He anticipated Ohm's law and independently discovered Coulomb's law of electrostatic attraction. He left his fortune to relatives who later endowed the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge (1871).

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▪ British physicist

Introduction

born Oct. 10, 1731, Nice, France

died Feb. 24, 1810, London, Eng.

 natural philosopher, the greatest experimental and theoretical English chemist and physicist of his age. Cavendish was distinguished for great accuracy and precision in researches 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 the Earth. His experiment to weigh the 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 (Royal Society). 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 (Davy, Sir Humphry, Baronet)'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.

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 (gas) produced in the laboratory. He produced “inflammable air” ( hydrogen) by dissolving metals in acids (acid) and “fixed air” ( carbon dioxide) by dissolving alkalis (alkali) 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 (Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent)'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 (Priestley, Joseph), an English clergyman and scientist, no later than March 1783, but did not publish them until the following year. The Scottish inventor James Watt (Watt, James) 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 original volume of common air.

      In the 1890s, two British physicists, William Ramsay (Ramsay, Sir William) and Lord Rayleigh (Rayleigh, John William Strutt, 3rd Baron), 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 (energy, conservation of)) and even contained the concept (although not the label) of the mechanical equivalent of heat.

Experiments with electricity

      Cavendish worked out a comprehensive theory of electricity. Like his theory of heat, this theory was mathematical in form and was based on precise quantitative experiments. In 1771 he published an early version of his theory, based on an expansive electrical fluid that exerted pressure. He demonstrated that if the intensity of electric force (Coulomb force) was inversely proportional to distance (Ohm's law), then the electric fluid in excess of that needed for electrical neutrality would lie on the outer surface of an electrified sphere; and he confirmed this experimentally. Cavendish continued to work on electricity after this initial paper, but he published no more on the subject.

      Cavendish's electrical and chemical experiments, like those on heat, had begun while he lived with his father, in a laboratory in their London house. Lord Charles Cavendish died in 1783, leaving almost all of his very substantial estate to Henry. Following his father's death, Henry bought another house in town and also a house in Clapham Common, to the south of London. The London house contained the bulk of his library, while he kept most of his instruments at Clapham Common, where he carried out most of his experiments. The most famous of those experiments (Cavendish experiment), published in 1798, was to determine the density of the Earth. His apparatus for weighing the world was a modification of the Englishman John Michell (Michell, John)'s torsion balance. The balance had two small lead balls suspended from the arm of a torsion balance and two much larger stationary lead balls. Cavendish calculated the attraction between the balls from the period of oscillation of the torsion balance, and then he used this value to calculate the density of the Earth. What was extraordinary about Cavendish's experiment was its elimination of every source of error and every factor that could disturb the experiment and its precision in measuring an astonishingly small attraction, a mere 1/50,000,000 of the weight of the lead balls. The result that Cavendish obtained for the density of the Earth is within 1 percent of the currently accepted figure. The combination of painstaking care, precise experimentation, thoughtfully modified apparatus, and fundamental theory carries Cavendish's unmistakable signature. It is fitting that the University of Cambridge's great physics laboratory is named the Cavendish Laboratory.

      Cavendish's electrical papers from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London have been reprinted, together with most of his electrical manuscripts, in The Scientific Papers of the Honourable Henry Cavendish, F.R.S. (1921). Cavendish remained active in science and healthy in body almost until the end.

Trevor H. Levere

Additional Reading

The best biography of Cavendish is Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach, Cavendish: The Experimental Life, rev. ed. (1999), which includes an edition of 118 of Cavendish's letters, most of them, like his life, dealing with science. Also useful, and shorter, is A.J. Berry, Henry Cavendish: His Life and Scientific Work (1960). George Wilson, The Life of the Honorable Henry Cavendish (1851, reprinted 1975), is mainly about the controversy over the composition of water.Trevor H. Levere

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