- English chemist and physician. In 1803
he formulated Henry's law, which states that when a gas is dissolved
in a liquid at a given temperature, the mass that dissolves is in direct
proportion to the pressure of the gas.
Henry was born in Manchester and graduated from Edinburgh. In poor health
after a childhood accident, he worked mainly for his father, an industrial
chemist.
Henry worked for about 20 years on the analysis of inflammable mixtures
of gases and attempted to find correlations between chemical composition
and illuminative properties. He established that firedamp - the cause
of many mining disasters - is methane, and confirmed the composition
of methane and ethane. Like English chemist John Dalton, Henry showed
that hydrogen and carbon combine in definite proportions to form a limited
number of compounds.
In medicine, Henry studied contagious diseases. He believed that these
were spread by chemicals which could be rendered harmless by heating;
he used heat to disinfect clothing during an outbreak of cholera in
1831.
A series of chemistry lectures which he gave 1798-99 were later published
as Elements of Experimental Chemistry and became a highly successful
textbook.
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