Cavendish

[] Biography Henry Cavendish was born in Nice, France, on October 10, 1731, eldest son of Lord Charles Cavendish and Lady Anne Grey. His mother, died just a few years after Henry was born. As a boy he was a student at Dr. Newcomb's Academy in Hackney, England. He attended college in 1749 at Peterhouse, Cambridge, but left without taking a degree after just three years. Cavendish returned to London to live with his father. There, he built a laboratory and workshop by himself. When his father died in 1783, Cavendish moved both himself and the laboritory to Clapham Common, where he had also been living for some of the year. He never became married and was so reclusive that there is little record of him having any type of social life except occasional meetings with other friends also in the science field. He was terribly scared of women, and any communication with his female servants was through letters. Cavendish was a chemist and physicist who performed quantitative experiments with gases and determined the mean density of the earth. In his “Experiments on Factitious Air.” Which he presented before the Royal Society in 1766, he described the preparation of “inflammable air from the metals” (hydrogen). In 1783 he proved that the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen in the atmosphere is constant. In his “Experiments on Air,” published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1784 and 1785, he demonstrated the chemical composition of water and nitric acid. On passing electric sparks through a mixture of common air and excess oxygen in presence of alkali in 1785 he found that 1/120 of the volume of nitrogen was not oxidized and absorbed. This observation was confirmed in 1894 by the discovery of argon by Lord Rayleigh and William Ramsay. Henry Cavendish died February 24, 1810 in London, England. **Sources**  **[]**   **[]**   **Conceptual Chemistry Third Edition, John Suchocki**