When we visited Chatsworth on Thursday, it was the first time that I’d set foot in the House since I was seven years old. I remember an exhibit of old documents in a glass case which I think was in a corner opposite the main stairs in The Painted Hall. My mum explained these were the calculations made by the ‘first man to work out how weigh the Earth (because he couldn’t put it on a pair of scales, as he hadn’t one that was big enough)’.
On Thursday, I mentioned this to one of the guides and she suggested these might have been papers from the Chatsworth archives relating to Henry Cavendish, 1731-1810, who devised a way of measuring the force of gravity. I’d be about seven at the time of our visit, so this would have been connected with International Geophysical Year, 1957-58.