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Henry Cavendish: An early case of Asperger’s syndrome?

Is autism compatible with major creativity or genius? Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) made fundamental advances in many scientific areas, ranging from his discovery of hydrogen to his famous (and remarkably accurate) weighing of the earth and estimation of its density. He showed (by sparking hydrogen and oxygen together) the composition of water; he showed that air was a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen, and also that it contained a minute amount of another substance, which was identified a century later as argon. He discovered specific and latent heats, the cooling and heating of air with expansion and compression, and how the electrical conductivity of solutions varied with their concentration. He discovered eutectic mixtures and supercooling; he discovered an inverse-square law of electrostatic attraction and repulsion, and made exact investigations of what would later be called chemical equivalents. He was the first to realize that a fish, the torpedo, could generate electricity (and a form of electricity quite different from static electricity—electrical currents were unknown at the time). He united extraordinary intuitive powers with great experimental ingenuity and consummate mathematical skill, in a manner perhaps unequalled since Newton.

Yet even in his lifetime, his peculiarities were the stuff of legend. He did all his work alone, in complete …