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Cavendish experiment
[Artist's conception of Cavendish conducting his experiment. He performed the experiment inside a closed shed and observed the result from outside through a telescope. The opening in the wall was added by the artist to show the apparatus.]
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The Cavendish experiment, done in 1797 – 1798 by Henry Cavendish, was the first experiment to measure the force of gravity between masses in the laboratory,[1] and the first to yield accurate values for the gravitational constant and the mass of the Earth.[2][3] However, these were derived by others from Cavendish's result, which was a value for the Earth's density.[4] The experiment was devised sometime before 1783[5] by John Michell,[6] who constructed a torsion balance apparatus for it. However, Michell died in 1793 without completing the work, and after his death the apparatus passed to Francis John Hyde Wollaston and then to Henry Cavendish, who rebuilt the apparatus but kept close to Michell's original plan. Cavendish then carried out a series of measurements with the equipment, and reported his results in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1798.[7]
Contents
- 1 The experiment
- 2 Did Cavendish determine G?
- 3 Derivation of G and the Earth's mass
- 4 References
- 5 Notes
- 6 External links
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