Water Water Everywhere

The well drawn fellow above is one Henry Cavendish, born this day 1731 in Nice, France. Henry was by, all accounts a fantastic scientist, and one odd duck. I know a few scientists, and I am not sure if one being a scientist means you are an odd duck, or if just odd ducks are drawn to science. Henry's major claim to fame is his "discovery" of hydrogen. He was the first to show that water is a compound, and that air is a mixture, before that both were considered elements. Thales would have be appalled. However, ponder those two seemingly simple ideas. Ideas that today we find obvious, and take for granted. These were ground breaking ideas, and Henry should be praised to the skies for them. These were the works that led him to the "discovery" of hydrogen which he called inflammable air. It was not until nearly a decade later that the French scientist Antonie Lavoisier named Cavendish's inflammable air hydrogen. Cavendish was morbidly shy of strangers and women, he communicated with his female servants by writing notes, very rarely speaking to them. When he actually was forced to speak, he mostly mumbled his replies. He was a tall, thin, man with a squeaky voice, and one man who knew him said that "he probably uttered fewer words in the course of his life than any man who lived to fourscore years." Modern thinkers have opined that perhaps he suffered from Asperger Syndrome, but I have never been a fan of going back in time, and giving men or women "modern" diseases merely based on what other people wrote or said about them. Anyone that has been misdiagnosed by a doctor with a full medical history in front of them will understand my viewpoint. One of his best known experiments was his attempt to determine the density of the Earth. He called it "weighing the world." Not sure about all the science of it, and you can puzzle over it yourself at any number of websites written by guys with a least a passing understanding of the science. I take the layman's view that whatever the damn fool was trying to do, weighing the world, must be a pretty tough task. It is not like you can kindly ask the Earth to step its fat ass onto the office scale (which is what happens to me when I go to the doctor). Either way he came remarkably close to actual number, and the experiment itself has been called the "Cavendish Experiment." Now, knowing the science community like I do, I can say that if you get your name added to any sort of law, experiment, or constant, you have achieved hero status. Of course, being an anti-social bastard did have it down side in Cavendish's life I suppose. He did not publish many of his findings, and it was not until nearly a century later, when James Clerk Maxwell, a fairly good scientist in his own right, obtained his papers, and realized that Cavendish had discovered many things that other scientists were credited with. But, for being an odd duck in a group of odd ducks, and weighing the world in a shed outside of his house, and for being an overall genius in a world full of fools, Henry Cavendish (October 10th, 1731- February 24th, 1810 at the age of 79), you are my hero of the day.