In the early 1770s, the dependence of the force between charged bodies upon both distance and charge had already been discovered, but not published, by Henry Cavendish of England. In his notes, Cavendish wrote, "We may therefore conclude that the electric attraction and repulsion must be inversely as some power of the distance between that of the 2 + ⁠ 1 / 50 ⁠ th and that of the 2 − ⁠ 1 / 50 ⁠ th, and there is no reason to think that it differs at all from the inverse duplicate ratio".