The ladder
of science and technology on which humanity has climbed so high was built upon
the foundations laid in great research laboratories. If one were to list the
most important of these, the first name would have to be the Cavendish
Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Research conducted in this single
laboratory has, to date, earned thirty-one Nobel Prizes.
The
Cavendish Laboratory was established in 1874, when Sir William Cavendish, the
7th Duke of Devonshire, was the Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. This
renowned research laboratory was founded with funds provided by the Cavendish
family—most of which had originally come from their distinguished ancestor, the
18th-century British scientist Henry Cavendish.
The
laboratory was named the “Cavendish Laboratory” not only because it was built
with Henry Cavendish’s fortune, but also to show due respect to this
extraordinarily gifted scientist of the 18th century. Moreover, from the same
family’s endowment, the University of Cambridge established the position of “Cavendish
Professor of Physics.” The world-famous physicist James Clerk Maxwell was the
first to hold this chair.
Who was
this Henry Cavendish?
He was a total scientist, an extraordinary chemist and physicist. He was the
first to separate the components of air, and the first to discover hydrogen gas.
His contributions to physics were also immense. In the 18th century, using
instruments of his own design, he determined the mass and density of the Earth.
He also conducted remarkable studies on the nature of electric current—research
so advanced that, had it been published in time, it would have caused a
revolution in physics.
But Henry
Cavendish was an extremely reclusive man. Because of this, he published barely
one percent of his research. Many years after his death, the scientist James
Clerk Maxwell examined Cavendish’s vast collection of unpublished notes and
realized what extraordinary discoveries he had kept hidden from the world.
Maxwell later edited and published part of Cavendish’s work on electricity.
From this, scientists understood that—had his findings been made public in his
own time—Cavendish would have been regarded as one of the pioneers alongside
Coulomb, Faraday, and Ohm.
To say
that Henry Cavendish disliked publicity would be a great understatement. He
lived his entire life in solitude and seclusion, conducting his research alone.
He never spoke to anyone about anything other than science. He never gave a
lecture anywhere. After studying at the University of Cambridge for four years,
he left without a degree—simply because he would have had to talk to other
people.
In the 20th
century, physicist Paul Dirac was known as an extremely taciturn and socially
withdrawn scientist. Yet Dirac still taught as a professor, gave his Nobel
lecture, and even married and had a family. Henry Cavendish, however, was antisocial
to an extreme degree. He lived entirely alone all his life. After his mother’s
death, he never spoke to, nor even looked at, another woman.
Henry’s
father, Lord Charles Cavendish, was the third son of the 2nd Duke of Devonshire.
His mother, Anne Grey, was the fourth daughter of Henry Grey, Duke of Kent. In honour
of his grandfather, his parents named their first son Henry. Henry Cavendish
was born on October 10, 1731, in Nice, France, where his parents were staying
at the time. A few years later, after giving birth to her second son, Frederick,
Anne Grey passed away. After her death, the two brothers were raised by their
father under the care of household attendants. From childhood, Henry grew up to
be extremely shy and withdrawn.
As the son
of a wealthy aristocrat, he completed his schooling at Hackney Academy, a
well-known private school in London. In 1748, at the age of 17, he entered St
Peter’s College, Cambridge (now Peterhouse), majoring in chemistry and physics.
After three years of study, he left the university in 1753, without sitting for
his final examinations or obtaining any degree.
Coming
from a family of great wealth and status, Cavendish never had to worry about a
career—and he never did. His deep love for scientific research had begun in his
school days, and at Cambridge he learned how to conduct scientific experiments.
Reclusive by nature and utterly friendless, Henry Cavendish avoided direct
conversation with anyone. He spent his days alone in his home laboratory,
deeply absorbed in experiments with his instruments and apparatus.
Henry’s
father, Charles Cavendish, held the title of Lord as the son of a Duke.
He himself was also involved in scientific circles and was a member of the
Royal Society. In 1758, he began introducing his son Henry to other members of
the Royal Society. Although Henry disliked social conversation, he listened
attentively to scientific discussions and enjoyed taking part in the committees
and administrative work of the Society. Gradually, through his active
involvement, Henry Cavendish was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1765.
By that
time, he had already built his own private laboratory at home. In 1764, he
began research on the effects of arsenic. Over the next several years, he
conducted studies related to heat, performing a series of experiments on the condensation
of liquids and gases, through which he compiled a table of specific heats. Yet,
he did not publish any of this work during his lifetime. When part of this
research was finally published in 1783, it became clear that he had been the
first to experimentally determine the specific heats of various gases.
Though he
spent his days and nights absorbed in research for years on end, Cavendish had
little interest in publishing his findings. During his fifty-year scientific
career, he published only about twenty papers. His first paper, published in 1766
in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, dealt with the
properties of gases produced in chemical reactions. For this remarkable work,
he was awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal.
Henry
Cavendish was the first scientist to conduct systematic research on the
properties of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and several other gases. He studied
hydrogen so extensively that he is credited with its discovery. In his
laboratory, Cavendish produced and collected various gases in bottles. By
dissolving metals in acids, he generated hydrogen gas—though he never named it.
Observing its flammable nature, he simply referred to it as “inflammable air.”
In 1783,
the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier named this gas hydrogen and claimed full
credit for the discovery. Cavendish also produced carbon dioxide by dissolving
alkalis in acids and examined the properties of many different gases. His
experiments effectively founded the study of gas chemistry, though the credit
for this, too, was later claimed by Lavoisier.
From
around 1770 onward, Cavendish performed extensive experiments on electric
current, continuing for several decades. However, he published very little of
these findings. In 1781, while passing electricity through water, he discovered
that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen—a fact unknown to anyone at that
time. Yet even this momentous discovery failed to excite him enough to publish
immediately.
Three
years later, in 1784, he finally presented his results to the Royal Society,
confirming that water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. But by then, James
Watt had already published similar results. Although Cavendish had made the
discovery earlier, his delay in publication led to suspicions among scientists
that he might have copied Watt’s findings. Cavendish, however, was indifferent
to fame or recognition—so he cared little about what others said or thought of
him.
In 1785, Henry
Cavendish calculated the percentage composition of air. His meticulous
measurements showed that, after accounting for the proportions of oxygen and
nitrogen, there was still a small fraction of air unaccounted for—indicating
the presence of another gas besides oxygen and nitrogen. However, the identity
of this mysterious component remained unknown for more than a century.
In 1890,
British scientists William Ramsay and Lord Rayleigh discovered that the air
also contains helium, argon, and other noble gases. Cavendish had lacked the
kind of advanced instruments needed to detect these inert gases, which is why
he could not identify them in his time.
During
Cavendish’s era, Newton’s laws of motion formed the foundation of scientific
research. By applying Newtonian mechanics, Cavendish deduced that heat is
generated by the motion of particles.
In 1783,
he published a paper on the temperature of mercury condensation, through which
the concept of latent heat was first recognized. He was also the first to
demonstrate the principle of conservation of energy in the context of heat.
Cavendish’s
most important research was published in 1798, where he determined the density
of the Earth. For this work, he constructed an extremely sensitive balance—a
remarkable instrument that is still preserved today in the Cavendish Laboratory
at Cambridge.
Having no
personal relationships of any kind, Cavendish chose science as his sole pursuit
and passion. He worked silently on several committees of the Royal Society, was
a member of the Royal Society of Arts, a trustee of the British Museum, and a foreign
member of the National Institute of France. He handled all official matters entirely
on his own, and at committee meetings he rarely spoke—when he did, it was in one
or two brief words. He never looked directly at anyone’s face while speaking.
In his personal
life, Henry Cavendish was so eccentric that, from early youth until his death,
he wore only one style of clothing. His tailor had standing instructions to
make him an identical set of garments once a year on a fixed date. He never
allowed anyone to paint his portrait. The only portrait of him that exists
today—preserved in the British Museum—was secretly painted by an artist who observed
him from a distance.
Cavendish
was extremely conservative and reserved regarding women. After his mother died
when he was just two years old, he never again spoke to a woman. To avoid even
encountering the maids in his household, he built a separate staircase for them
to use. He communicated with his assistants only in writing, never by speech.
During his
experiments on electric currents, he initially conducted low-voltage electrical
tests on himself, carefully recording his sensations. Later, he began
experimenting on his servants, which terrified many of them into quitting.
On one
occasion, when an American scientist visited his laboratory out of curiosity,
Cavendish proposed—again, in writing—to pass electricity through him as part of
an experiment. Horrified, the visitor fled and later remarked,
“If a
British scientist ever came to America, we would never offer to make him a
guinea pig!”
After
living a solitary and monotonous life, Henry Cavendish’s wealth had grown to over
one million pounds by the year 1800—an amount equivalent to about one hundred
million pounds today. In his will, he left all his fortune to his relatives and
assistants. He passed away on February 24, 1810.
From the
inheritance of his relatives, a large portion of that money was later used—sixty-four
years after his death—to establish the Cavendish Laboratory, which continues to
honour his legacy. From this single laboratory have come some of the greatest
scientific discoveries in history: the electron, the neutron, the structure of
DNA, pulsars, radio astronomy, cosmic rays, and many more to come.
References:
- John West, American Journal
of Lung Cell and Molecular Physiology, Vol. 307, 2014.
- Euan James, Remarkable
Physicists, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Russell McCormmach, The
Personality of Henry Cavendish, Springer, 2014.
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