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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.
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Henry Cavendish was born on 10 October 1731 in Nice, where his family was living at the time. His mother was Lady Anne de Grey, fourth daughter of Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Kent, and his father was Lord Charles Cavendish, the third son of William Cavendish, 2nd Duke of Devonshire.
At the age of 18 (on 24 November 1748) he entered the University of Cambridge in St Peter's College, now known as Peterhouse, but left three years later on 23 February 1751 without taking a degree (at the time, a common practice). He then lived with his father in London, where he soon had his own laboratory.
Lord Charles Cavendish spent his life firstly in politics and then increasingly in science, especially in the Royal Society of London.
In 1758, he took Henry to meetings of the Royal Society and also to dinners of the Royal Society Club.
In 1760, Henry Cavendish was elected to both these groups, and he was assiduous in his attendance after that. He took virtually no part in politics, but followed his father into science, through his researches and his participation in scientific organisations. He was active in the Council of the Royal Society of London to which he was elected in 1765.
His interest and expertise in the use of scientific instruments led him to head a committee to review the Royal Society's meteorological instruments and to help assess the instruments of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. His first paper, Factitious Airs, appeared in 1766. Other committees on which he served included the committee of papers, which chose the papers for publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and the committees for the transit of Venus (1769), for the gravitational attraction of mountains (1774), and for the scientific instructions for Constantine Phipps's expedition (1773) in search of the North Pole and the Northwest Passage.
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In 1773, Henry joined his father as an elected trustee of the British Museum, to which he devoted a good deal of time and effort. Soon after the Royal Institution of Great Britain was established, Cavendish became a manager (1800) and took an active interest, especially in the laboratory, where he observed and helped in Humphry Davy's chemical experiments.
Although others, such as Robert Boyle, had prepared hydrogen gas earlier, Cavendish is usually given the credit for recognising its elemental nature.
In 1777, Cavendish discovered that air exhaled by mammals is converted to fixed air (carbon dioxide), not phlogisticated air as predicted by Joseph Priestley. Also, by dissolving alkalis in acids, Cavendish produced carbon dioxide, which he collected, along with other gases, in bottles inverted over water or mercury. He then measured their solubility in water and their specific gravity, and noted their combustibility. He concluded in his 1778 paper General Considerations on Acids that respirable air constitutes acidity.
Cavendish was awarded the Royal Society's Copley Medal for this paper. Gas chemistry was of increasing importance in the latter half of the 18th century, and became crucial for Frenchman Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's reform of chemistry, generally known as the chemical revolution.
Cavendish's electrical and chemical experiments, like those on heat, had begun while he lived with his father in a laboratory in their London house. Lord Charles Cavendish died in 1783, leaving almost all of his very substantial estate to Henry. Like his theory of heat, Cavendish's comprehensive theory of electricity was mathematical in form and was based on precise quantitative experiments.
Cavendish died at Clapham on 24 February 1810 (as one of the wealthiest men in Britain) and was buried, along with many of his ancestors, in the church that is now Derby Cathedral. The road he used to live on in Derby has been named after him.
The University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory was endowed by one of Cavendish's later relatives, William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire (Chancellor of the University from 1861 to 1891).
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he established the proportions of the constituents of the air;
he occupied himself with the quantitative study of the laws of heat;
and lastly, he demonstrated the nature of water
and determined its volumetric composition.
Earth, air, fire, and water
-each and all came within the range of his observations.
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