Odd People
Henry Cavendish
He barely spoke, and so was discovered a century late
He communicated with his female servants only by note, and left unpublished work in a drawer. Maxwell opened it a hundred years later.
Contemporary descriptions agree. He could not meet anyone's eye, and turned away if spoken to. He attended Royal Society dinners and said almost nothing. One Fellow wrote that the way to address him was to speak as if into empty air.
At home he arranged the household so that he would not encounter his female servants, and left instructions by note. He was among the richest men in England and wore the same suit.
This man performed the most delicate measurement of his century: weighing the Earth. He sealed the apparatus in a room, stayed outside it, and read the scale through a telescope aimed at a hole in the wall.
The trouble was what he did not publish. He worked out the relation between current and voltage before Ohm, and confirmed the inverse-square law of electric force before Coulomb. And he put the papers away.
- 1770sElectrical manuscripts written — and shelved
- 1810Death
- 1879Maxwell edits and publishes the papers. Other names were already attached
Editing them, Maxwell went through case by case, matching what Cavendish already knew against what now bore other names. He noted that Cavendish had been indifferent to publishing, not ignorant.
The question that remainsIs something you never announce not a discovery — or is making it sayable half of what science is?
Go deeper in the Library
How the Earth Was WeighedConcept explained