Ampere, Andre 2
André-Marie Ampère (UK: /ˈɒ̃pɛər, æm-/, US: /ˈæmpɪər/;[1] French: [ɑ̃pɛʁ]; 20 January 1775 – 10 June 1836)[2] was a French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics". He is also the inventor of numerous applications, such as the solenoid (a term coined by him) and the electrical telegraph. As an autodidact, Ampère was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and professor at the École polytechnique and the Collège de France.
The SI unit of measurement of electric current, the ampere, is named after him. His name is also one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.
Early life
André-Marie Ampère was born on 20 January 1775 to Jean-Jacques Ampère, a prosperous businessman, and Jeanne Antoinette Desutières-Sarcey Ampère, during the height of the French Enlightenment. He spent his childhood and adolescence at the family property at Poleymieux-au-Mont-d'Or near Lyon.[3] Jean-Jacques Ampère, a successful merchant, was an admirer of the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose theories of education (as outlined in his treatise Émile) were the basis of Ampère's education. Rousseau believed that young boys should avoid formal schooling and pursue instead a "direct education from nature."
Ampère's father actualized this ideal by allowing his son to educate himself within the walls of his well-stocked library. French Enlightenment masterpieces such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon's Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (begun in 1749) and Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (volumes added between 1751 and 1772) thus became Ampère's schoolmasters.[citation needed] The young Ampère, however, soon resumed his Latin lessons, which enabled him to master the works of Leonhard Euler and Daniel Bernoulli.[4]
French Revolution
In addition, Ampère used his access to the latest books to begin teaching himself advanced mathematics at age 12. In later life Ampère claimed that he knew as much about mathematics and science when he was eighteen as ever he knew, but as a polymath, his reading embraced history, travels, poetry, philosophy, and the natural sciences.[4] His mother was a devout Catholic, so Ampère was also initiated into the Catholic faith along with Enlightenment science. The French Revolution (1789–99) that began during his youth was also influential: Ampère's father was called into public service by the new revolutionary government,[5] becoming a justice of the peace in a small town near Lyon. When the Jacobin faction seized control of the Revolutionary government in 1792, his father Jean-Jacques Ampère resisted the new political tides, and he was guillotined on 24 November 1793, as part of the Jacobin purges of the period.
In 1796, Ampère met Julie Carron and, in 1799, they were married. Ampère took his first regular job in 1799 as a mathematics teacher, which gave him the financial security to marry Carron and father his first child, Jean-Jacques (named after his father), the next year. (Jean-Jacques Ampère eventually achieved his own fame as a scholar of languages.) Ampère's maturation corresponded with the transition to the Napoleonic regime in France, and the young father and teacher found new opportunities for success within the technocratic structures favoured by the new French First Consul. In 1802, Ampère was appointed a professor of physics and chemistry at the École Centrale in Bourg-en-Bresse, leaving his ailing wife and infant son Jean-Jacques Antoine Ampère in Lyon. He used his time in Bourg to research mathematics, producing Considérations sur la théorie mathématique du jeu (1802; "Considerations on the Mathematical Theory of Games"), a treatise on mathematical probability that he sent to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1803.
Teaching career
After the death of his wife in July 1803,[6][7] Ampère moved to Paris, where he began a tutoring post at the new École Polytechnique in 1804. Despite his lack of formal qualifications, Ampère was appointed a professor of mathematics at the school in 1809. As well as holding positions at this school until 1828, in 1819 and 1820 Ampère offered courses in philosophy and astronomy, respectively, at the University of Paris, and in 1824 he was elected to the prestigious chair in experimental physics at the Collège de France. In 1814, Ampère was invited to join the class of mathematicians in the new Institut Impérial, the umbrella under which the reformed state Academy of Sciences would sit.
Ampère engaged in a diverse array of scientific inquiries during the years leading up to his election to the academy—writing papers and engaging in topics from mathematics and philosophy to chemistry and astronomy, which was customary among the leading scientific intellectuals of the day. Ampère claimed that "at eighteen years he found three culminating points in his life, his First Communion, the reading of Antoine Leonard Thomas's "Eulogy of Descartes", and the Taking of the Bastille. On the day of his wife's death he wrote two verses from the Psalms, and the prayer, 'O Lord, God of Mercy, unite me in Heaven with those whom you have permitted me to love on earth.' In times of duress he would take refuge in the reading of the Bible and the Fathers of the Church."[8]
A lay Catholic, he took for a time into his family the young student Frédéric Ozanam (1813–1853), one of the founders of the Conference of Charity, later known as the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul.[citation needed] Ozanam would much later be beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1998. Through Ampère, Ozanam had contact with leaders of the neo-Catholic movement, such as François-René de Chateaubriand, Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, and Charles Forbes René de Montalembert.
Work in electromagnetism
In September 1820, Ampère's friend and eventual eulogist François Arago showed the members of the French Academy of Sciences the surprising discovery by Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted that a magnetic needle is deflected by an adjacent electric current. Ampère began developing a mathematical and physical theory to understand the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Furthering Ørsted's experimental work, Ampère showed that two parallel wires carrying electric currents attract or repel each other, depending on whether the currents flow in the same or opposite directions, respectively - this laid the foundation of electrodynamics. He also applied mathematics in generalizing physical laws from these experimental results.
The most important of these was the principle that came to be called Ampère's law, which states that the mutual action of two lengths of current-carrying wire is proportional to their lengths and to the intensities of their currents. Ampère also applied this same principle to magnetism, showing the harmony between his law and French physicist Charles Augustin de Coulomb's law of electric action. Ampère's devotion to, and skill with, experimental techniques anchored his science within the emerging fields of experimental physics.
Ampère also provided a physical understanding of the electromagnetic relationship, theorizing the existence of an "electrodynamic molecule" (the forerunner of the idea of the electron) that served as the component element of both electricity and magnetism. Using this physical explanation of electromagnetic motion, Ampère developed a physical account of electromagnetic phenomena that was both empirically demonstrable and mathematically predictive.
Almost 100 years later, in 1915, Albert Einstein together with Wander Johannes de Haas made the proof of the correctness of Ampère's hypothesis through the Einstein–de Haas effect. In 1827, Ampère published his magnum opus, Mémoire sur la théorie mathématique des phénomènes électrodynamiques uniquement déduite de l'experience (Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely Deduced from Experience), the work that coined the name of his new science, electrodynamics, and became known ever after as its founding treatise.
In 1827, Ampère was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society and in 1828, a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.[9] Probably the highest recognition came, as a reward for his mathematical representations in his publication, ‘Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of electrodynamic phenomena deduced solely from experiment,’ for which Ampère was awarded the title of the "Newton of electricity".[citation needed]
Honours
- 8.10.1825: Member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.[10]
Legacy
An international convention, signed at the 1881 International Exposition of Electricity, established the ampere as one of the standard units of electrical measurement, in recognition of his contribution to the creation of modern electrical science and along with the coulomb, volt, ohm, watt and farad, which are named, respectively, after Ampère's contemporaries Charles-Augustin de Coulomb of France, Alessandro Volta of Italy, Georg Ohm of Germany, James Watt of Scotland and Michael Faraday of England. Ampère's name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.
Many streets and squares are named after Ampère, as are schools, a Lyon metro station, a graphics processing unit microarchitecture, a mountain on the moon and an electric ferry in Norway.[11]
Writings...
Full Name: André Marie Ampère
Achievements: He established the study of electromagnetism (“electrodynamics”)
Born: January 22, 1775; Polémieux near Lyons, France
Died: June 10, 1836; Marseillle, France (Aged 61)
Field & Discipline: Physics; Philosophy
Language: French
Father: Jean Jacques Ampère
Mother: Jeanne Antoinette Sarcey de Sutières
Siblings: Joséphine.
Spouse: 1) Julie Carron (m. 1799, d. 1804); 2) Jeanne-Françoise Potot (m. 1806)
Children: Jean-Jacques-Antoine; Josephine-Albine
Education: Self-educated
Major Work:
“Notes on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena Deduced Solely from Experiment” (Ampère’s law)
Life & Times:
In 1796 Ampère (whose father was [son of] JJ Ampere*) married Julie Carron and until 1801 taught mathematics at a school in Lyon. The following year he became professor of physics and chemistry in the Central School of the Department of Ain, at Bourg-en-Bresse.
Shortly after that, he wrote a small treatise on gaming which proved algebraically that an habitual gambler would eventually be ruined. The treatise brought him recognition and later in 1802 was appointed to the chair of mathematics and astronomy at the Lyceum in Lyons.
In 1805 the École Polytechnique in Paris took him on as an assistant lecturer in mathematical analysis, and he brought out a paper (expanding the research of his gaming treatise) on the applications of the calculus of variation, but this time applying his theories to problems in mechanics.
In 1808, Ampere became Inspector-General of Napoleon's newly formed university system, a job that he held for the rest of his life. A year later he was made Lecturer in Mathematics at the Ecole and became a full professor in 1815. He entered the Academie des Sciences, in the Geometry section and, in 1828, took a new job at the College de France.
Between 1813 and 1816, Ampère produced some of his most inspired work in philosophy and mathematics. He was decades ahead of his time when he suggested a system of classification for the elements based on a comprehensive assessment of their chemical properties. To a great extent he was anticipating the periodic table, not developed until many years later.
Other investigations related to mathematics, mechanics, metaphysics, optics and the theory of gases. In 1814, quite independently, he arrived at [work related to] Avogadro*’s hypothesis of the molecular constitution of gases. His interests took him into diverse areas, such as animal physiology, the theory of the earth, and psychology.
After 1815, he directed his efforts towards molecular physics and chemistry. He wrote a paper on the calculation of the proportions in which materials combine, taking into account the number and disposition of their molecules.
The work for which Ampère became best known was his research on electricity. In it, more that any other scientist, he established the field of [developed theory of] electromagnetism*. (The term modern “amp”, a measure of resistance, is named after him) His work was originally stimulated by the discovery by the Dane, [work inspired by] Oersted,* that an electric current created a magnetic field in a wire, and that this field would deflect a compass needle.
Ampère was at the Academy when Oersted’s work was first presented and, within a week, he had presented his own paper on the subject. His approach gave a far more complete explanation of Oersted’s discovery.
In a series of papers presented over the next two years, Ampere developed a rule for finding the direction in which a compass needle turned, when a wire carrying a current was held near it. He also showed that two parallel wires, both carrying electric currents, attracted each other when the currents flowed in the same direction and repelled each other when they flowed in opposite directions. Further experimentation proved that the strength of the attraction or repulsion was directly dependent upon the strength of the current, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
He also developed the radical theory that every atom in a magnet is magnetic because it is enclosed by a circular electric current. From there, he went on to theorize that the magnetism of the earth could be caused by electrical currents circulating about it from west to east (see: [work related to] Christie*). Ampère also argued that the strength of an electric current could be calculated by the extent to which it was capable of deflecting a compass needle, a theory that eventually led to the invention of the galvanometer.
Ampère effectively opened up a new branch of science, which he called electrodynamics, but which has become known as electromagnetism. He summed it up in paper published in 1827: "Notes on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena Deduced Solely from Experiment", in which he described the precise mathematical formulae of electromagnetism. The paper also contained “Ampère’s law,” which relates the magnetic force produced by two parallel current conductors to the product of their currents and the distance between them.
Ampere spent the last ten years of his life revising his encyclopedic classification of academic disciplines. The winter of 1832 was spent out of Paris (to escape cholera) with his friend, [a pal of] Gounod*, who published Ampere’s "Essay on the Philosophies of Science". Remarkable for its holistic approach to human knowledge, the work began with explanations of simple mathematics and went from subject to subject, according to the characteristics that they shared, so that no topic was approached without an explanation necessary to its understanding.
This was the most significant intellectual achievement of his late years. The first volume, on natural sciences, appeared in 1834, the second, on human sciences, appeared posthumously, under the supervision of his son, in 1843.
Throughout the period in which he was compiling “Essay”, his health deteriorated. In 1836, on a tour as Inspector-General, he came down with a fever in Marseille and very quickly died.
Extra Connections: His work related to that of [work related to] Faraday*, [work related to] Daniel Bernoulli*, [work related to] Sturgeon*, [work related to] Morse* and [work related to] Cannizzaro*.
Assessment: He made original contributions to mathematics and chemistry as well as electrodynamics, the field he virtually created. The amp is named after him.
Oneliner: Andre Marie Ampere, after whom the amp is named
Bibliography:
- James R. Hofmann, André-Marie Ampère, Cambridge University Press, 1995.