The Personality of Henry Cavendish - A Great Scientist with Extraordinary Peculiarities Archimedes NEW STUDIES IN THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY VOLUME 36 EDITOR Jed Z. Buchwald , Dreyfuss Professor of History, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA. ASSOCIATE EDITORS FOR MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES Jeremy Gray , The Faculty of Mathematics and Computing, The Open University, Buckinghamshire, UK. Tilman Sauer, California Institute of Technology ASSOCIATE EDITORS FOR BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES Sharon Kingsland , Department of History of Science and Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA. Manfred Laubichler , Arizona State University ADVISORY BOARD FOR MATHEMATICS, PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY Henk Bos , University of Utrecht Mordechai Feingold , California Institute of Technology Allan D. Franklin , University of Colorado at Boulder Kostas Gavroglu , National Technical University of Athens Paul Hoyningen-Huene , Leibniz University in Hannover Trevor Levere , University of Toronto Jesper Lützen , Copenhagen University William Newman , Indian University, Bloomington Lawrence Principe , The Johns Hopkins University Jürgen Renn , Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Alex Roland , Duke University Alan Shapiro , University of Minnesota Noel Swerdlow , California Institute of Technology ADVISORY BOARD FOR BIOLOGY Michael Dietrich , Dartmouth College, USA Michel Morange , Centre Cavaillès, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris Hans-Jörg Rheinberger , Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin Nancy Siraisi , Hunter College of the City University of New York, USA Archimedes has three fundamental goals; to further the integration of the histories of science and technology with one another: to investigate the technical, social and practical histories of specifi c developments in science and technology; and fi nally, where possible and desirable, to bring the histories of science and technology into closer contact with the philosophy of science. To these ends, each volume will have its own theme and title and will be planned by one or more members of the Advisory Board in consultation with the editor. Although the volumes have specifi c themes, the series itself will not be limited to one or even to a few particular areas. Its subjects include any of the sciences, ranging from biology through physics, all aspects of technology, broadly construed, as well as historically-engaged philosophy of science or technology. Taken as a whole, Archimedes will be of interest to historians, philosophers, and scientists, as well as to those in business and industry who seek to understand how science and industry have come to be so strongly linked. For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/5644 Russell McCormmach The Personality of Henry Cavendish - A Great Scientist with Extraordinary Peculiarities Russell McCormmach ISSN 1385-0180 ISSN 2215-0064 (electronic) ISBN 978-3-319-02437-0 ISBN 978-3-319-02438-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-02438-7 Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London Library of Congress Control Number: 2014932292 © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) For Lewis Pyenson Pref ace When I was fi ve, my mother gave me a copy of Jonathan Norton Leonard’s Crusaders of Chemistry . I still have it, signed and dated by her, 1938. Long after I had forgotten the other chemists, I remembered the one who measured. He is the subject of the chapter in Leonard’s book entitled “Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Machine,” which concludes: “So lived and died the coldest, most unhuman mortal who ever wrote his name large in the history of science …. His sole interest was to measure the objects in the material universe.” Many years later, my boyhood fascination with the measuring machine returned, transformed into a scholarly interest in a scientifi c genius. I entered the fi eld of history of science with a disserta- tion on his work, and for many years after, I saved every fact I could fi nd about him. Popular histories of science like Leonard’s take material from scholarly works. We do not have to look far to discover the source of Leonard’s characterization of the man who was a measuring machine. It was the nineteenth-century chemist George Wilson’s fascinating biography, The Life of the Hon ble Henry Cavendish . Although I have reservations about the measuring machine, I greatly admire Wilson’s portrait of Cavendish, and I am in its debt for my understanding of the man. I took up the study of the history of science in part to learn how the scientifi c view of the world came about. If such a view does actually exist, I thought it probably applied to me, an initial reason for my curiosity. From my study of scien- tists of the past, I came to think that Cavendish came as close as any to holding a scientifi c view of the world. Even in his case, it was not exclusive. He came into the world with an aristocratic take on it. The origin of this book is a diagnosis of Cavendish by the eminent neuropsy- chologist Oliver Sacks, which appeared as a brief communication in the scientifi c journal Neurology in 2001. Skeptical of recent claims of Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, for historical fi gures, Sacks considers Cavendish an exceptional case, fi nding the evidence for his autism “almost overwhelming.” 1 In his memoir the same year, Uncle Tungsten , Sacks says that upon rereading Wilson’s biography 1 Oliver Sacks, “Henry Cavendish: An Early Case of Asperger’s Syndrome?” Neurology 57 (2001): 1347. vii viii Preface of Cavendish, he has concluded that Cavendish was a “unique autistic genius.”2 The same nineteenth-century biography was the origin both of the man as measuring machine and of the man with a psychological disorder. Below I examine these characterizations and their connection. In 1996, Christa Jungnickel and I published a biography of Cavendish. We pointed out that because of his strange behaviors he invites a psychological approach, but that it was not the approach we took, as we explained. At the end of the biography, we briefl y mentioned possible psychological descriptions of his behavior such as social anxiety, shyness, and embarrassment. We pointed out that he also showed “autistic-like traits,” 3 which we listed, citing Sacks, who had introduced us to the world of autism with his moving account of the autistic scientist Temple Grandin. 4 Three years later, we brought out an improved version of our biography, in which we again briefl y brought up psychological descriptions, but this time we omitted any mention of autism. Autism is a disorder that begins in childhood, and almost nothing is known about Cavendish’s childhood; also certain criteria for autism seemed a questionable fi t, and we wanted the biography to be solid. Since then I have found in recent writings on the subject a growing acceptance of a more inclusive understanding of autism together with a trend in clinical thinking that favors an autistic continuum approach. In the present book, I consider Sacks’s diagnosis of Cavendish’s autism, which has been on my mind for the past dozen years. Besides Cavendish, a number of eighteenth-century scholars – for example, Jeremy Bentham, John Howard, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Emmanuel Kant – have been diag- nosed with a form of autism. Without doubt, they all showed autistic-like traits. They pursued their interests obsessively, with little regard for what people might have thought. They also leave us wondering. Might their non-social behaviors have come about through choice? Might they have avoided society and ignored convention in pur- suit of their goals because they could afford to? Did they show the same traits as autistic persons with the signifi cant difference that the latter had no choice in the matter? 2 Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001; New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 121. 3 Hugo Lidbetter writes that Jungnickel and McCormmach “got very close to suggesting” that Cavendish may have had Asperger’s syndrome. We got closer than that: we say it. Since this book went to press, an article by Lidbetter was brought to my attention.