Abstract
This chapter is about the ways Henry Cavendish was principally known: as an aristocrat, and as a natural philosopher. His years were 1731–1810. He was the grandson of English dukes, the highest rank of the peerage: on his mother’s side, Henry de Grey, duke of Kent; on his father’s side, William Cavendish, second duke of Devonshire. His great grandfather, another William Cavendish, had been a principal actor in the Glorious Revolution of 1689–89, which deposed the Stuart King James II and replaced him with King William III (of Orange) – for his services, he was elevated from earl to duke of Devonshire – and which shifted the balance of power in the nation from the court to the aristocracy. His descendants remained politically active in support of the Revolutionary Settlement and generally of the Whig cause. Henry Cavendish’s father Lord Charles entered politics, as expected, but after representing three constituencies as a Member of Parliament, he left politics to devote his time and energy to several organizations, the most important of which was the national scientific society, the Royal Society of London. As an aristocrat, as a capable experimental natural philosopher, and as an able and willing administrator, he was highly valued within the Royal Society. His son Henry forewent a political career, for which he was ill-suited, but he otherwise followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a highly valued member of the Royal Society for the same reasons, and with regard to original scientific investigations he went beyond his father.
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Notes
- 1.
John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 6, 175, 179.
- 2.
Ibid., 3, 10, 15, 34–35.
- 3.
William Cavendish, The Devonshire Diary: William Cavendish, Fourth Duke of Devonshire, Memoranda on State of Affairs, 1759–1762, eds. P. D. Brown and K. W. Schweizer, Camden Fourth Series, vol. 27 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1982), 19.
- 4.
Ibid., 19–21.
- 5.
John Pearson, The Serpent and the Stag: The Saga of England’s Powerful and Glamorous Cavendish Family from the Age of Henry the Eighth to the Present (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), 122–23. Lady Sarah Spencer quoted in Hugh Stokes, The Devonshire House Circle (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1917), 315.
- 6.
Francis Bickley, The Cavendish Family (London: Constable, 1911), 202.
- 7.
Henry Brougham, Lives of Men of Letters and Science Who Flourished in the Time of George III, 2 vols. (London, 1845–46); Vol. 1 (Philadelphia, 1845), 250. Henry Brougham, who was first baron Brougham and Vaux, was known as Lord Brougham.
- 8.
Richard Kirwan to Joseph Banks, 10 January 1789, British Museum (NH), DTC 6: 122–24.
- 9.
30 November 1765, Journal Book, Royal Society 25: 656.
- 10.
30 November 1757, ibid. 23: 638.
- 11.
Charles Hutton, A Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary …, 2 vols. (London, 1795–96) 2: 139.
- 12.
Thomas Young, “Life of Cavendish,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Supplement (1816–24); reprinted in Henry Cavendish, The Scientific Papers of the Honourable Henry Cavendish, 2 vols., ed. E. Thorpe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921) 1: 435–47, on 435. Hereafter Scientific Papers.
- 13.
[John Robison], “Physics,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3d ed. (Edinburgh, 1797) 14: 637–59, on 647. William Lewis, Commercium Philosophico-Technicum; or, The Philosophical Commerce of Arts: Designed as an Attempt to Improve Arts, Trades and Manufactures (London, 1763), iii–iv. Crosbie Smith, “‘Mechanical Philosophy’ and the Emergence of Physics in Britain: 1800–1850,” Annals of Science 33 (1976), 3–29, on 8.
- 14.
E.g., Thomas Young, A Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy (London, 1802).
- 15.
J. A. Deluc, An Elementary Treatise on Geology: Determining Fundamental Points in That Science, and Containing an Examination of Some Modern Geological Systems, and Particularly of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, trans. H. De la Fite (London, 1809), 26.
- 16.
Henry Cavendish, “Three Papers, Containing Experiments on Factitious Air,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 56 (1766): 141–84. Hereafter PT. The article is reprinted in Scientific Papers 2: 77–101. Edward Thorpe, “Introduction,” in Cavendish, Scientific Papers 2: 1–74, on 14–15.
- 17.
Thorpe, “Introduction,” 23. Cavendish gave the experimental “proof,” but his interpretation was expressed in the language and concepts of the phlogiston theory. Thorpe noted that it is impossible to tell from Cavendish’s statements if he regarded water as a compound substance. Ibid., 35. Wilson differed; he thought that Cavendish interpreted water as a compound of dephlogisticated air and inflammable air. George Wilson, The Life of the Hon ble Henry Cavendish (London: Cavendish Society, 1851; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1975), 369, 435.
- 18.
Thomas Thomson, History of the Royal Society from Its Institution to the End of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812), 455.
- 19.
Henry Cavendish, “An Attempt to Explain Some of the Principal Phaenomena of Electricity, by Means of an Elastic Fluid,” PT 61 (1771): 584–677; reprinted in Henry Cavendish, The Electrical Researches of the Honourable Henry Cavendish, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Cambridge, 1879), 3–63. Maxwell thought that Cavendish planned a book. Ibid., xliii.
- 20.
Henry Cavendish, “Experiments to Determine the Density of the Earth,” PT 88 (1798): 469–526; Scientific Papers 2: 249–86. A. H. Cook, “Experiments on Gravitation,” in Three Hundred Years of Gravitation, ed. S. W. Hawking and W. Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 51–79, on 52.
- 21.
Joseph Larmor, “Preface to Volume 1,” in The Scientific Papers of the Honourable Henry Cavendish, F.R.S., vol. 1: The Electrical Researches, ed. J. C. Maxwell and J. Lamor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), v–x, on x.
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McCormmach, R. (2014). The Person. In: The Personality of Henry Cavendish - A Great Scientist with Extraordinary Peculiarities. Archimedes, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02438-7_1
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