Search -
Pioneers of electricity; or, Short lives of the great electricians
Pioneers of electricity or Short lives of the great electricians Author:John Munro Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHARLES AUGUSTIN DE COULOMB. COULOMB has been regarded as the pioneer of experimental science in France, as William Gilbert was in England. The fame of both r... more »ests principally on their electrical and magnetic researches. Gilbert, the physician, who flourished two centuries earlier, obtained results which were chiefly qualitative. Coulomb, the mathematician and engineer, with the love of definition and the habit of measurement, inheriting the advances which had been made meanwhile, arrived at quantitative results. He gauged the forcesjjf attraction and repulsion between electrified bodies or magnetic poles, and formulated the laws which governed them. Charles Augustin de Coulomb was born at Angou- lome, on June I4th. 1736, of a good family belonging to Montpelier, which had furnished members to the provincial parliament. He went to school at Paris, and discovering a bent for mathematics, entered the army as a military engineer. Being drafted to the island of Martinique, in the West Indies, he took part in the erection of Fort Bourbon. But the climate was then fatal; most of his comrades died of fever, and Coulomb, after a stay of three years, returned home with his health permanently injured. His services in the colony were unrewarded, owing to a change of ministry. He was engaged on military duty at Aix, Rochelle and Cherbourg, but also employed his leisure in original work. In 1773 hegained some distinction by a paper on 'Statical Problems applied to Architecture," which was presented to the Royal Academy of Sciences, of which he became a corresponding member. Six years later he shared with Van Swinden, the author of Posi- tioncs Physicee, a prize offered by the Academy for the best mode of constructing mariners' compasses. I Ic was now resident at Rochefort, and in its n...« less