Lord Charles Cavendish FRS (17 March 1704 – 28 April 1783) was a British nobleman, Whig politician, and scientist.
In 1757 the Royal Society (of which he was vice-president) awarded him the Copley Medal for his work in the development of thermometers which recorded the maximum and minimum temperatures they had reached.
Charles Cavendish was also one of the early experimenters with the electrical storage device, the Leyden jar, which came to England in 1746.
Henry Cavendish was even better known than his father for electrical experiments, and also for other discoveries in physics, including the famous torsion-balance measurement of the mass of the earth.
A recent thesis on plasma arcs mentions Priestley's account of a replication of this by the experimenter Benjamin Wilson (1721–1788): In 1759, when Wilson repeated experiments "first contrived by Lord Charles Cavendish," he observed a "singular appearance of light upon one of the surfaces of the quicksilver," (from The History and Present State of Electricity, J Priestly (1775) vol.