The life of the Hon. Henry Cavendish : including abstracts of his more important scientific papers, and a critical inquiry into the claims of all the alleged discoverers of the composition of water / by George Wilson.

  • George Wilson
Date:
1851
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The life of the Hon. Henry Cavendish : including abstracts of his more important scientific papers, and a critical inquiry into the claims of all the alleged discoverers of the composition of water / by George Wilson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sures of hydrogen and one of oxygen are exploded together in a shut globe, they lose their elasticity, or cease to exist as gases, and in their place is found an equal weight of water. This fact might not have been regarded by Cavendish as justifying any conclusion, or it might have been seen to warrant various conclusions, among which he hesitated to select, and therefore published none. But he did reveal a conclusion to Priestlej'-, and it was this : that hydrogen and oxygen were turned or con- verted into water; which was equivalent to saying that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. That he told Priestley thus much, appears from the terms in which Priestley refers to Cavendish in his paper of 1783. The language is very remarkable. Priestley does not make the shghtest allusion to Cavendish's experiments as having been a repetition of his and Warltire's. They had been so modified by their repeater, and had brought to light so unexpected a truth, that Priestley preferred no claim to them, but spoke of them con- sidered as a whole, as an experiment of Mr. Cavendish's concerning the re-conversion of air into water. He called it re-conversion, because he believed that water was convertible into air (gas or gases), and regarded Cavendish's experiments as complementary to his own. So convinced was he of their importance, that he repeated them with gases carefully prepared, so as to exclude from them moisture; compared the weight of the gases burned with that of the water produced, and found it, as nearly as he could judge, equal, and, in consequence, he came to the conclusion that there was a strong presumption that the air [inflammable air from charcoal, and oxygen] was re-converted into water, and therefore that the origin of it had been water. His repetition was very inaccurate, and he com- mitted the grievous blunder of substituting for Cavendish's hydrogen the mixture of combustible gases obtained by heating charco°al, which he conceived to be an anhydrous gas. These matters are referred to elsewhere, but they do not concern us here ; neither does Priestley's want of entire confidence in the significance of the experiments as estabUshing the conversion of the gases into water. The wonder is, considering how maccurate his experiments were, that he got so far as to entertam « a strong presumption concerning the lesson they taught.
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