Correspondence of the late James Watt on his discovery of the theory of the composition of water. With a letter from his son / Edited with introductory remarks and an appendix by James Patrick Muirhead.

  • James Watt
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Correspondence of the late James Watt on his discovery of the theory of the composition of water. With a letter from his son / Edited with introductory remarks and an appendix by James Patrick Muirhead. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    398/410 page 256
    SO heard, rests on the improbability of his (Sir Charles Blagden’s,] and many others knowing what Mr. Watt liad done, and not communicating it to Mr. Caven- dish, and on the omission of any assertion in Mr. Ca- vendish’s paper, even in the part written by Sir C. Blagden with the view of claiming priority as against Mr. Lavoisier, that Mr. Cavendish had drawn his conclusion before April 1783, although in one of the additions to that paper, reference is made to Mr. M^att’s theory. As great obscurity hangs over the material ques- tion at what time Mr. Cavendish first drew the con- clusion from his experiment, it may be as well to examine what that great man’s habit was in commu- nicating his discoveries to the Royal Society. A Committee of the Royal Society, with Mr. Gil- pin the clerk, made a series of experiments on the formation of nitrous acid, under Mr. Cavendish’s direction, and to satisfy those who had doubted his theory of its composition, first given accidentally in the paper of January 1784, and afterwards more fully in another paper, June 1785. Those experi- ments occupied from the 6th December 1787, to 19th March 1788, and Mr. Cavendish’s paper upon them was read 17th April 1788. It was, therefore, written and printed within a month of the experiments being concluded. Mr. Kirwan answered Mr. Cavendish’s paper (of 15th January 1784) on water, in one which was read 5th February 1784, and Mr. Cavendish replied in a paper read 4th March 1784. Mr. Cavendish’s experiments on the density of the
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