Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
Henry Cavendish showed that water was composed of oxygen and hydrogen in 1781. The first decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen, by electrolysis, was done in 1800 by English chemist William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle. In 1805, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Alexander von Humboldt showed that water is composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.