Abstract
ON June 14 the bicentenary occurs of the birth of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, the French military engineer and physicist, who is remembered for his work on friction, machines and electricity and magnetism. Born at Angouleme, he was educated in Paris, and entering the corps of military engineers served successively at Martinique, Rochefort, the Isle of Aix, Cherbourg and in Paris. He rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, was a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, and after the Revolution, of the National Institute, and was made a chevalier of the Order of St. Louis and a member of the Legion of Honour. He was intimately acquainted with the civil engineering of his day, and his various memoirs were the result of long and refined experiments combined with mathematical inquiries. He counted many eminent men of science among his contemporaries, such as Laplace, Lavoisier, Lalande, Borda, Messier, Monge, Charles, Berthollet and Mechain, but, wrote Thomas Young, “among all the men of science who have done honour to France, it would be difficult to point out a single individual, who, with regard to the cultivation of terrestrial physics, could at all be put in competition with M. Coulomb”. Towards the end of his life, Coulomb suffered much from ill-health, and his death took place on August 23, 1806, when he was seventy years of age.
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Bicentenary of Coulomb (1736–1806). Nature 137, 976–977 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137976d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137976d0