Henry Cavendish: Unveiling the Brilliance of a Scientific Pioneer
Cavendish was born in October 1731 in the city of Nice, France. He was the first child of two sons of Lord Charlie and Lady Ann Cavendish in England. in his forefathers—but did he himself care about these little things? There were some people who in the fourteenth century were considered to be the captains of the wealthy families of the British. If one of these ancestors was Lord Chief Justice, then there was another Thomas Cavendish – the second Englishman who circumnavigated the world in a ship. Lord Charlie, Henry’s father himself, was also a respected scientist who received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society of London for his invention of the maximum-minimum thermometer.
• Unfortunately, here his brother was born and there his mother died. But Henry’s education, in spite of his father’s wealth, was according to the old worn-out routine. At the age of 11 he was sent to boarding school in Hackney, and at 15, he had a further four years of education at Cambridge. He had little interest in theology, but its study was necessary to obtain a degree, so Cavendish left university without graduating.
Henry and his brother Frederick left for London and then Paris to study mathematics and physics. He used to get a very small scholarship from his father during his student days, but by the time he reached 40, he became the heir to a huge property. Then he never had the problem of money in his life.
Henry Cavendish’s education was not less, wealth was not less, but no girl would probably ever be ready to marry him. It was difficult for him to open up in the society of men, in front of women he used to lose his senses. The one or two maids who used to stay at his house to run the household, were ordered not to come in front of his eyes. Whatever orders had to be given, they would reach through notes; accidentally in her room
Didn’t even reach that out of job. People usually waste their time talking about nonsense, Henry had something to say about science and talked about it Even if it was necessary to do something, then that too could have been done by how many? He could not even talk about money with his moneylenders. Asking him how to invest so much wealth in business, Cavendish’s answer was always the same – don’t lick my brain, do what you think is right. He never used words extravagantly, where did he have words? come often
Even if he has some connection with the world now, it is only through the medium of the Royal Society. He was made its Fellow in 1760—he was then only 29 years old and regularly joined the club of fellows he was just at the age of bread.
The great problem of that era was fire: what is this fire? Two German scientists and inventors, Johann Barwer and his disciple Georg Unsert Staal, had laid down an establishment in relation to the ‘nature of fire’ that how things burn? This installation seemed quite correct from above and the scientific world had accepted it as a principle, despite some of its flaws. Even Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, had no objection to accepting this interpretation of ‘flame’. This principle of ‘Phlogiston’ was something like this: All things that burn have two elements – one is ash (bhasma) and the other is a flammable substance, which he named ‘Phlogiston’. When something starts burning, this flammable phlogiston starts coming out of it, and when that thing stops burning it means that the phlogiston present in it is over.
Till now no one had separated phlogiston from the liquid. Cavendish thought, why don’t I try it myself? Now he spent the first few days in the library, where he came to know that Theophrastus Paracelsus and Jan von Helmont had once discovered a kind of ‘inflammable air’. By putting some iron in sulfuric acid, he had seen that this ‘air’ burns. But apart from this, he did not do any other research about ‘Jwalan-Vat’. Cavendish thought, maybe this was the ‘air’ that science is searching for today.
Cavendish now came to his private laboratory, which he had kept inside his own house. On the discovery of Paracelsus and von Helmont, he started experiments and further developed their setup. iron,Taking pieces of zinc and tin, he produced some ‘air’ by putting them in sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid. When he put pieces of iron in a vessel containing sulfuric acid, bubbles started coming upwards from there. And, above all, there was a provision for filling these bubbles into a kind of balloon. These balloons are filled. In one, bubbles of iron and sulfuric acid, in the second of zinc and sulfuric acid, in the third of tin and sulfuric acid were rising. and the other three contained bubbles of gas produced in the same way by the reaction of iron, zinc and tin released in hydrochloric acid.
But was it really phlogiston? Cavendish tried burning samples of all the six gases. The same blue-yellow flame emanated from each. But it should be determined. Same weight of all six! Light – all light, and all the same weight! Once further tests were made and it was found that the amount of air thus generated depended on the amount of metal used, on the basis of which Cavendish made an erroneous conclusion that this air was a product of the metal and not of the acid. He was of the opinion that he actually declared phlogiston to be separate from the mixture in its individual state. He also declared his discoveries in front of the members of the Royal Society.
Today we may wonder how the scientists of that era accepted this phlogiston ‘element’ (or even the concept of phlogiston). Henry Cavendish’s proficiency with the pari falla was amazing – he could even weigh this very small-gauge gas. He knew that when something burned, its ash weighed a little more than the ‘real thing’, and yet he had no difficulty in accepting that phlogiston would fly out of it when the same thing burned. Is. Not only Cavendish, all the scientists had shown the same eagerness in accepting this flammable liquid as ‘phlogiston’.
After some time, Lavoisier came and abolished this theory of phlogiston and told that that ‘burning-vat’ of Cavendish was hydrogen. Call it phlogiston or hydrogen, its invention created a lot of panic.
Gave. Everyone, scientific and non-scientific, started making it while sitting at home. Some must have been injured in the tests, some might have even died – because if hydrogen and oxygen in a particular ratio accidentally mix, there is a possibility of a very dangerous explosion. And it also comes in the story that an enthusiastic French actually did. fill your lungs with hydrogen Took and throwing the gas out of the mouth, set it on fire and did a demonstration in front of everyone.
The first hydrogen filled balloon was flown in 1788. Hydrogen is the lightest element known to science. In 1781, while living in England, an Italian demonstrated that a soap bubble, if filled with hydrogen, would float upwards. Even before that, balloons were prepared by applying paper lining to the cloth, which started rising towards the sky when hot air was filled. One successfully flew too far; There was no passenger in it. But out of fear, the farmers working on the fields finished him off when he landed some 15 miles outside Paris. In 1785, a hydrogen balloon exploded and all the passengers sitting in it were killed. Nearly 150 years later, in 1957, Germany’s colossal Hindenburg, flying through the air, suddenly shattered into pieces upon reaching the town of Lakehurst, New Jersey – and 36 passengers who were eating air lost their lives. It was filled with 7,000,000 cubic hydrogen, and how many times it had crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
In addition to the accidents of these hydrogen-filled balloons, there were also some explosions that could have been made possible by controls inside the laboratories, and some details of which even reached the Royal Society, how in some laboratories, somewhere in the laboratory, the burning of hydrogen occurred. Along with this, some dew-c is also produced. A British experimenter proved the explosion of hydrogen in a closed bottle by a spark of electricity and observed that some drops of water came from somewhere on the walls of the bottle. Similarly, when a French scientist placed a saucer of sugar upside down on a hydrogen flame, that saucer also started getting wet from the bottom. Priestley also described the explosion produced by the mixing of hydrogen and air in a thick glass bottle. But so many other tasks were left unfinished for him, so in a hurry he came to the conclusion that the work of gunpowder could not be taken from these explosions. He had some inkling of the truth, but he did not investigate it further.
But the news of these explosions and drops of water in closed bottles gave birth to another new idea in Cavendish’s mind. Returning to his laboratory, he began filling glass tubes with air and hydrogen. Sometimes with oxygen. ever test on test with hydrogen Did it An electric spark passed through the mixture. Tests continued for 10 years. The gases were fed into the tube by measurement and the gas and water came out the other side. Measurements were made of pure oxygen, light air and hydrogen, and the results were duly recorded.
In 1784, Cavendish published these air-related tests in front of the Royal Society. The results of so much perseverance were astonishing – phlogiston-(the name given to hydrogen by Cavendish) when mixed with phlogiston-free air (oxygen), water is obtained. And from the calculations of tests, he had also got the proof that this water is produced only when hydrogen and oxygen are mixed in 2: 1 ratio. Cavendish showed how much water was produced by mixing both the gases in quantities comparable to their original quantities. Cavendish proved through experiments that water, instead of being an element – the common man might not believe it – is a mixture of two colorless gases.
In these tests, Cavendish also learned that 20 percent of the air we breathe is oxygen. He came to this conclusion only after microscopic study of the explosion of hydrogen and air. Cavendish observed that when the air mixed with hydrogen expands by the sparking of electricity, some acid is also produced from it. Analyzed and found it is due to nitrogen present in the atmosphere; The spark of electricity can also combine nitrogen and oxygen. The manure that is made in nature is produced from this only. When lightning falls from the sky, it gets mixed with rain and nitrogen and oxygen, as a gift to the earth in the form of fertilizer. Cavendish had probably separated the gases of the atmosphere by squeezing them drop by drop. Sparks on sparks of electricity – and keep releasing oxygen on oxygen so that no nitrogen is left in the air. But a bubble of air still ‘remained’ somewhere in it: it was ‘argon’ – which is counted among the ‘rare’ gases, and the amount of which is less than 1 percent in our atmosphere.
Cavendish also died in the same way as he had died all his life – alone with no one to care – his funeral was solemnized in Derby in 1810 at the age of 79 – also erected a monument to the eccentric science charity. He had nothing to do with these religions, religious sects. And church people for life Cavendish was not satisfied only with the study of chemistry, his research in the field of electricity is also amazing. Using Newton’s principles of gravity, he had also calculated the relative gravity of the earth and how accurately it was – 5.48. Indeed, he had measured and weighed the weight of the earth as well.
A special part of his will was used by his heirs to establish a series-C of Cavendish Laboratories in England. In these sometime in 1897 the great scientist JJ Thomson invented the electron; And these laboratories have produced at least six Nobel Prize winning scientists in chemistry and physics.
The discovery of hydrogen and nitrogen, the physical analysis of the atmosphere, the elemental separation of water, and the introduction of wonderful methods in experimental science and in analytical science—these are the credits that place Henry Cavendish among the great giants of science.
Henry Cavendish was the richest man in England during his time. When his wealth was estimated at his death, it turned out to be more than 10 lakh pounds, although while alive, his dress used to be so worn-old that it was made on sight – not clothes, rags, now fall or fly away. An eccentric – but he was a great scientist in the world.