Henry Cavendish

English natural philosopher, and scientist (1731–1810)

AI overview

Henry Cavendish was an English scientist and natural philosopher who lived from 1731 to 1810 and made important contributions to the study of chemistry and physics. His work helped establish fundamental scientific principles, though he was known for being reclusive and published little during his lifetime, with many of his discoveries only becoming widely known after his death.

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Person · Open Library

Born: 1731
Died: 1810
Works: 23

Top works

Expériences sur l'air
[Collection of extracts from Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, on air and electricity.]
The electrical researches of Henry Cavendish, F. R. S.
The electrical researches of the Honourable Henry Cavendish, F.R.S., written between 1771 and 1781
Tables for Facilitating the Calculations of Nautical Astronomy: And Particularly of the Latitude ...

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Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Group
Origin: Brisbane

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Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Welcome to the Tidyverse
· 2019 · cited 20,450x
The empirical mode decomposition and the Hilbert spectrum for nonlinear and non-stationary time series analysis
· 1998 · cited 19,801x
Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019
· 2020 · cited 15,961x
ROBINS-I: a tool for assessing risk of bias in non-randomised studies of interventions
· 2016 · cited 15,445x
Nonparametric Tests Against Trend
· 1945 · cited 14,296x

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Quotes

“Young people must break machines to learn how to use them; get another made!”
“By factitious air, I mean in general any kind of air which is contained any in other bodies in an unelastic state, and is produced from thence by art.”
“By fixed air, I mean that particular species of factitious air, which is separated from alcaline substances by solution in s or by calcination and to which Dr. Black has given that name in his treatise on quicklime.”
“All that needed for its apprehension, more than the pure intellect, or required the exercise of fancy, imagination, affection, or faith, was distasteful to Cavendish. An intellectual head thinking, a pair of wonderfully acute eyes observing, and a pair of very skilful hands experimenting or recording, are all that I realise in reading his memorials.”
“His brain seems to have been but a calculating engine; his eyes inlets of vision, not fountains of tears; his hands instruments of manipulation which never trembled with emotion, or were clasped together in adoration, thanksgiving, or despair; his heart only an anatomical organ, necessary for of the circulation of the blood.”
“Yet, if such a being, who reversed the maxim nihil humani me alienum puto [nothing human is foreign to me], cannot be loved, as little can he be abhorred or despised. He was, in spite of the atrophy or non development of many of the faculties which are found in those in whom the "elements are kindly mixed," as truly a genius as the mere poets, painters, and musicians, with small intellects, and hearts and large imaginations, to whom the world is so willing to bend the knee.”

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Encyclopedic overview

Henry Cavendish (/ˈkævəndɪʃ/ KAV-ən-dish; 10 October 1731 – 24 February 1810) was an English experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist. He is noted for his discovery of hydrogen, which he termed "inflammable air". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper, On Factitious Airs. Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendish's experiment and gave the element its name.

A shy man, Cavendish was distinguished for great accuracy and precision in his 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 mass) of the Earth. His experiment to measure the density of the Earth (which, in turn, allows the gravitational constant to be calculated) has come to be known as the Cavendish experiment.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Henry Cavendish” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.