Profiles the eminent 18th century natural philosopher Henry Cavendish, best known for his work in chemistry and physics and one of the most baffling personalities in the history of science. In these chapters we are introduced to the psychology of science and of scientists and we learn about Cavendish’s life and times. His personality is examined from two perspectives: one is that he had a less severe form of autism, as has been claimed; the other is that he was eccentric and a psychological disorder was absent. Henry Cavendish lived a life of science, possibly more completely than any other figure in the history of science: a wealthy aristocrat, he became a dedicated scientist. This study brings new information and a new perspective to our understanding of the man. The scientific and non-scientific sides of his life are brought closer together, as the author traces topics including his appearance, speech, wealth, religion and death as well as Cavendish’s life of natural philosophy where objectivity and accuracy, writing and recognition all played a part. The author traces aspects of Cavendish’s personality, views and interpretations of him, and explores notions of eccentricity and autism before detailing relevant aspects of the travels made by our subject. The author considers the question “How do we talk about Cavendish?” and provides a useful summary of Cavendish’s travels. This book will appeal to a wide audience, from those interested in 18th century history or history of science, to those interested in incidences of autism in prominent figures from history. This volume contains ample relevant illustrations, several interesting appendices and it includes a useful index and bibliography.

First edition of Cavendish's groundbreaking electrical research.

With a never-before published paper by Lord Henry Cavendish, as well as a biography on him, this book offers a fascinating discourse on the rise of scientific attitudes and ways of knowing. A pioneering British physicist in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Cavendish was widely considered to be the first full-time scientist in the modern sense. Through the lens of this unique thinker and writer, this book is about the birth of modern science.

The 'water controversy' concerns one of the central discoveries of modern science, that water is not an element but rather a compound. The allocation of priority in this discovery was contentious in the 1780s and has occupied a number of 20th century historians. The matter is tied up with the larger issues of the so-called chemical revolution of the late eighteenth century. A case can be made for James Watt or Henry Cavendish or Antoine Lavoisier as having priority in the discovery depending upon precisely what the discovery is taken to consist of, however, neither the protagonists themselves in the 1780s nor modern historians qualify as those most fervently interested in the affair. In fact, the controversy attracted most attention in early Victorian Britain some fifty to seventy years after the actual work of Watt, Cavendish and Lavoisier. The central historical question to which the book addresses itself is why the priority claims of long dead natural philosophers so preoccupied a wide range of people in the later period. The answer to the question lies in understanding the enormous symbolic importance of James Watt and Henry Cavendish in nineteenth-century science and society. More than credit for a particular discovery was at stake here. When we examine the various agenda of the participants in the Victorian phase of the water controversy we find it driven by filial loyalty and nationalism but also, most importantly, by ideological struggles about the nature of science and its relation to technological invention and innovation in British society. At a more general, theoretical, level, this study also provides important insights into conceptions of the nature of discovery as they are debated by modern historians, philosophers and sociologists of science.

"The Cavendishes flourished during the high tide of British aristocracy following the revolution of 1688-89, and the case can be made that this aristocracy knew its finest hour when Henry Cavendish gently laid his delicate weights in the pan of his incomparable precision balance. For this it took two generations and two kinds of invention, one in social forms and the other in scientific technique. This biography tells how it came to pass."--Book jacket