Cavendish's 1766 paper On Factitious Airs
- When
- 1766
- Where
- Royal Society of London, inferred institutional context for the paper's appearance; no passage states where the paper appeared
Cavendish's first paper described "inflammable air"—hydrogen—produced by acids acting on metals, reported its density, and noted it formed water on combustion.
Cavendish's first paper, Factitious Airs, appeared in 1766. In it he described the density of inflammable air, a definite, peculiar, and highly inflammable gas produced by the action of certain acids on certain metals. He observed that the gas formed water on combustion, and he correctly guessed that this gas—hydrogen—was proportioned two to one in water. The Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal for this paper.
Sources
- Henry Cavendish Wikipedia, revision of 2026-08-31
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.