Henry cavendish biography summary of harry

References

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• Alba, Rene, ed. He has been characterised as extremely shy, struggling to speak in front of strangers, while being rigidly adherent to his routines.

  Henry never married and had limited close acquaintances, despite his correspondence with many leading scientists of the age, including Benjamin Franklin and William Herschel.

  In doing so, he discovered the reversible reaction between calcium carbonate and carbon dioxide to form calcium bicarbonate, the cause of temporary hardness of water. As a youth he attended Dr. Newcomb's Academy in Hackney, England.

  Early years

  Henry Cavendish was born in Nice, France, on October 10, 1731, the oldest son of Lord Charles Cavendish and Lady Anne Grey, who died a few years after Henry was born.

  The charity funds the preservation, restoration and cataloguing of these papers, sharing the findings to advance our understanding of historical figures, events and places, and to make them available to anyone conducting research for academic or personal reasons.

  Notes

  1. ↑Bill Bryson, The Size of the Earth: A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003).
  2. ↑A.

     They are said to have come to an amicable agreement that Cavendish published the discovery first. Variations from the period on the plain would show the attraction put out by the mountain, from which the density of its substance could be figured out.

     Despite being examined by other scientists after his death and used in some biographies, Henry’s papers are largely uncatalogued.

     

     Cavendish also approached the subject in a more fundamental way by determining the force of attraction of a very large, heavy lead ball for a very small, light ball. His first paper, Factitious Airs, appeared 13 years later.

     Early life

     When Cavendish was two, his mother died soon after the birth of his brother, leaving only his father to care for him.

     These papers added greatly to knowledge of the formation of "inflammable air" (hydrogen) by the action of dilute acids (acids that have been weakened) on metals. New York: Scribner. He founded the study of the properties of dielectrics (nonconducting electricity) and also distinguished clearly between the amount of electricity and what is now called potential.

     This mistake has been pointed out by several authors although it appears in most of the physics textbooks.

     Legacy

     While Cavedish left none of his fortune to finance scientific research, his relative by descent, William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire (Chancellor of the University from 1861 to 1891), donated money that was used to endow the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in the 1870s.

     The current best estimate for the Earth's mass is 5.9725 billion trillion tons, a difference of only about 1 percent from Cavendish's measurements.

     Because of his asocial and secretive behavior, he often avoided publishing his work, and much of his findings were not even communicated to his fellow scientists.