Discover the shy scientist
HENRY CAVENDISH (1731-1810) was one of the greatest English chemists and physicists of his time, but was so shy and introverted that few were aware of this.
Cavendish was born into the nobility: his mother was Lady Anne Grey, fourth daughter of Henry Grey, first Duke of Kent; his father was Lord Charles Cavendish, third son of William Cavendish, second Duke of Devonshire.
Lady Anne died in 1733, leaving Charles to bring up his two sons. When Lord Cavendish passed away in 1783, Henry inherited a large fortune that he used to finance his scientific experimentation.
Cavendish’s biographers describe him as a man of a ‘most reserved disposition’, other people even claiming he suffered from shyness to a degree ‘bordering on disease’. He could not suffer the attention of women and communicated with his female servants through notes.
The only socialising Cavendish would endure was to attend dinner at the Royal Society with fellow scientists. However, it was made clear to fellow guests that Cavendish could not be approached or even directly looked at.
To ask his opinion, they were advised to wander into his proximity, as if by chance, and to ‘speak as it were into vacancy’.
Cavendish spent a lot of time in his laboratory working on experiments he would almost never share.
Perhaps his most famous accomplishment, known as the Cavendish Experiment, was estimating the density of the Earth by determining the gravitational attraction between two small 2in lead balls and two 348lb lead balls — incredibly painstaking and precise work.
He calculated that the Earth weighed a little over six billion trillion metric tons.
Today’s scientists with the most advanced technology estimate the Earth to weigh about 5.9725 billion trillion metric tons; a difference of roughly 1 per cent of his findings. Cavendish’s contribution to science might have been forgotten had not Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) taken on the task of editing his papers in the 1870s, which had been bequeathed to the University of Cambridge.
Maxwell discovered the shy scientist could lay claim to having made several important discoveries that were attributed to later scientists.
These included Richter’s Law of Reciprocal Proportions, Ohm’s Law (that the current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the voltage across the two points), Dalton’s Law of Partial Pressures, Coulomb’s Inverse-Square Law, Charles’s Law of Gases and the principles of electrical conductivity.
According to the science historian J. G. Crowther, he also foreshadowed the work of Kelvin and G. H. Darwin on the effect of tidal friction on slowing the rotation of the Earth, Larmor’s discovery, published in 1915, on the effect of local atmospheric cooling, the work of Pickering on freezing mixtures and some of the work of Rooseboom on heterogeneous equilibria.
Charles Adams, Edinburgh.
QUESTION A. E. Housman’s poem On Wenlock Edge concludes: Today the Roman and his trouble/Are ashes under Uricon. What or where is Uricon?
URICON is modern- day Wroxeter, a village nine miles south- east of Shrewsbury in Shropshire. Uricon is
short for Uriconium, or Viriconium Cornoviorum, the Latin name for this place. Wroxeter today is a small settlement, but was once the site of a key Roman legionary fortress.
Such a fortress would at full strength hold 6,000 men. It was an important site for the Roman advance across the Midlands and into Wales, during the early stages of the Roman Claudian conquest, starting in AD43.
Uriconium would have been occupied around AD50. It was a good strategic site, with half a dozen or so marching camps alongside. Typically, it was at a crossroads, having Watling Street to the east and south, a road into Wales to the west, and north and south connections.
The fort was subsequently overlaid by a Civitas, or large town, then only rediscovered by archaeology in the Seventies — a fact I find surprising, as the name Wroxeter contains the English element ‘Xeter’, a well-known corruption of the Latin castra or castle.
This explains the derivation of the name. The front part contains the interchangeable ‘V’ or ‘U’, often transliterated ‘W’, perpetuated in spelling, but dropped in pronunciation.
A. E. Housman, as Latin professor at Trinity College, Cambridge, would have been well aware of this linguistic pattern. He would have used Uricon as it’s easier to versify than Wroxeter and, being archaic, gives a sense of timelessness.
Housman’s Shropshire Lad walking along Wenlock Edge to the north of Much Wenlock would have been able to look down on Uricon a few miles to the north.
Nigel Probert, Porthmadog, Gwynedd.
QUESTION What were the names of the 28 dog tracks that once were in London? I can only think of 14.
FURTHER to the earlier answer, initial trialling of the electric hare at White City London in early June 1927 seems to have been a hit-and-miss affair. Reports at the time tell of the ‘Barmy Bunny’ travelling round the dog track as if with a Zimmer frame, and on other occasions rocketing around in a blur of fur.
David Urquhart, Burntisland.
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