Editing Henry Cavendish (section)

==Electrical research==
Cavendish's electrical and chemical experiments, like those on heat, had begun while he lived with his father in a laboratory in their London house. Lord Charles Cavendish died in 1783, leaving almost all of his very substantial estate to Henry. Like his theory of heat, Cavendish's comprehensive theory of electricity was mathematical in form and was based on precise quantitative experiments. Working with his colleague, [[Timothy Lane]], he created an artificial [[Torpedo (genus)|torpedo fish]] that could dispense electric shocks to show that the source of shock from these fish was electricity.<ref>{{Cite ODNB|title=Lane, Timothy (1734–1807), apothecary and natural philosopher|url=https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-67101|access-date=2021-05-28| year=2004 |language=en|doi=10.1093/ref:odnb/67101| isbn=978-0-19-861412-8 }}</ref> He published an early version of his theory of electricity in 1771, based on an expansive electrical fluid that exerted pressure. He demonstrated that if the intensity of electric force were inversely proportional to distance, then the electric fluid more than that needed for electrical neutrality would lie on the outer surface of an electrified sphere; then he confirmed this experimentally. Cavendish continued to work on electricity after this initial paper, but he published no more on the subject.

Cavendish wrote papers on electrical topics for the Royal Society<ref>{{cite journal |author=Cavendish, Henry |title=An Attempt to Explain Some of the Principal Phaenomena of Electricity, by means of an Elastic Fluid |journal=Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society |year=1771 |volume=61 |pages=564–677 |doi=10.1098/rstl.1771.0056|doi-access=free }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |author=Cavendish, Henry |title=An Account of Some Attempts to Imitate the Effects of the Torpedo by Electricity |journal=Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society |year=1776 |volume=66 |pages=195–225 |doi=10.1098/rstl.1776.0013|doi-access=free }}</ref> but the bulk of his electrical experiments did not become known until they were collected and published by [[James Clerk Maxwell]] a century later, in 1879, long after other scientists had been credited with the same results. Cavendish's electrical papers from the ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London'' have been reprinted, together with most of his electrical manuscripts, in ''The Scientific Papers of the Honourable Henry Cavendish, F.R.S.'' (1921). According to the 1911 edition of ''[[Encyclopædia Britannica]]'', among Cavendish's discoveries were the concept of [[electric potential]] (which he called the "degree of electrification"), an early unit of [[capacitance]] (that of a sphere one inch in diameter), the formula for the capacitance of a plate [[capacitor]],<ref name=eb>{{cite EB1911 |wstitle=Electricity |volume=9 |page=192 |first=John Ambrose |last=Fleming}}</ref> the concept of the [[dielectric constant]] of a material, the relationship between electric potential and current (now called [[Ohm's law]]) (1781), laws for the division of current in parallel circuits (now attributed to [[Charles Wheatstone]]), and the inverse square law of variation of electric force with distance, now called [[Coulomb's law]].<ref>James Clerk Maxwell, ed., ''The Electrical Researches of the Honourable Henry Cavendish''... (Cambridge, England: [[Cambridge University Press]], 1879), [https://books.google.com/books?id=3gYJAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA104 pages 104–113]: "Experiments on Electricity: Experimental determination of the law of electric force". Page 110: "Hence it follows that the electric attraction and repulsion must be inversely as the square of the distance..."</ref>