Henry Cavendish Facts
Henry Cavendish Facts
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| Interesting Henry Cavendish Facts: |
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| Henry Cavendish was born in Nice to a noble British family. |
| On 24 November 1748, he entered St Peter's College, University of Cambridge, but left three years later. |
| His father, Lord Charles Cavendish, was a member of the Royal Society of London and he took Henry to meetings and dinners where he met other scientists. |
| In 1765 Henry Cavendish was elected to the Council of the Royal Society of London. |
| He was appointed to head the committee to assess the meteorological instruments of both the Royal Society and the Royal Greenwich Observatory. |
| Cavendish's major contributions to chemistry were made in experiments with creating gases. |
| He mixed metals with strong acids and created hydrogen, he combined metals with strong bases and created carbon dioxide and he captured the gases in a bottle inverted over water. |
| He measured gases solubility in water, their combustibility and their specific gravity and his 1766 paper, "Factitous Airs," earned him the Royal Society's Copley Medal. |
| In 1783 he published a paper describing his invention-the eudiometer-for determining the suitability of gases for breathing. |
| In 1773 Cavendish joined his father as a trustee of the British Museum. |
| In 1785 he accurately described the elemental composition of atmospheric air but was left with an unidentified 1/120 part. |
| This physicists William Ramsey and Lord Rayleigh identified Cavendish's gaseous residue as argon 1890's. |
| In 1798 he published the results of his experiments to measure the density of the Earth and remarkably, his findings were within 1% of the currently accepted number. |
| Cavendish did many experiments with electricity but his findings were not published until 1879 and many other researchers had already been credited with his results. |
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