卡文迪什在电学上进行了大量重要而不为人知的研究。他在1777年向皇家学会提交论文,认为电荷之间的作用力可能呈现与距离的平方成反比的关系,后来被库仑通过实验证明,成为库仑定律。他和法拉第共同主张电容器的电容会随着极板间的介质不同而变化,提出了电容率的概念,并推导出平板电容器的公式。他第一个将电势概念大量应用对电学现象的解释中。並通过大量实验,提出了电势与电流成正比的关系,这一关系1827年被欧姆重新发现,即欧姆定律。卡文迪什对电学的研究基本都没有发表,詹姆斯·克拉克·麦克斯韦的最后五年致力於对卡文迪什个人实验记录的整理,於1879年出版了麦克斯韦注释的《尊敬的亨利·卡文迪什的電學研究》(The Electrical Researches of the Honourable Henry Cavendish),卡文迪什在电学上成果才使世人知晓。
^In 1851, George Wilson, a gifted physician and chemist (and author of the first monograph on colour-blindness), published a book-length biography of Cavendish that not only covered every aspect of his life's work, but portrayed his eccentricities of mind and behaviour in beautiful detail¹: He did not love; he did not hate; he did net hope; he did not fear; he did not worship as others do. He separated himself from his fellow men, and apparently from God. There was nothing earnest, enthusiastic, heroic, or chivalrous in his nature, and as little was there anything mean, grovelling, or ignoble. He was almost passionless. All that needed for its apprehension more than the pure intellect, or required the exercise of fancy, imagination, affection, or faith, was distasteful to Cavendish. An intellectual head thinking, a pair of wonderfully acute eyes observing, and a pair of very skilful hands experimenting or recording, are all that I realise in reading his memorials. His brain seems in have been but a calculating engine; his eyes inlets of vision, not fountains of tears; his hands instruments of manipulation which never trembled with emotion, or were clasped together in adoration, thanksgiving, or despair; his heart only an anatomical organ, necessary for the circulation of the blood...Henry Cavendish: An early case of Asperger's syndrome? 查看存档