Astronomy André Marie Ampère

Was a renowned man of mathematics, science, chemistry, astronomy, and physics. He was a self-taught individual, and although he had never attended school, he went on to teach at university level and make contributions to science. Though he had hard personal life, he was still able to make a huge, positive impact in electrodynamics and electromagnetism, as well as mathematics and physics in general.His greatest accomplishments came from his work in electromagnetics. He was one of the first to really understand and contribute to the common knowledge in this field, and he was responsible for several important discoveries and inventions.

Ampère was born January 22, 1775 in Lyon France to Jean-Jacques and Madam Ampère (Britannica). As a young boy, Ampère was said to have been making calculations with stones even though he was yet to learn his numbers (natinalmaglab). Ampère’s father was his teacher and he believed that young boys should not need to go to school right away, but should learn things from nature, and he encouraged his son to find things out for himself (Britanica). His father did start teaching him with a variety of subjects, but when he tried to teach him Latin, Ampère was fairly disinterested. Because of this, his father shifted more to math, as his boy was more interested in it than Latin, and he also encouraged him to read some of the books from their library.

Ampère soon found himself enjoying reading books from the library, even reading through the French encyclopedia. It was at about age 12 that Ampère decided teach himself Latin, after he had learned he needed it to read the Latin written math books. The learning style that Ampère’s father had instilled in him worked well. Even after his father’s death, he was still able to continue his schooling, even studying works by Leonhard, Euler, Daniel Bernoulli, and Joseph Louis. Ampère’s father was a successful silk merchant who lived and worked between Lyon and a town just north called Saint-German. When the French Revolution came in 1787, upper and middle class families like the Ampère’s were often targeted. At the time, the upper and middle class in France only made up about one or two percent of the population, yet they still maintained the majority in the Estates-General (or Parliament) (History).

Although they were a bourgeois or middle-class family, the Ampère family was not in much danger because they dealt in the textile industry rather than farming or grain trading (Hofmann). In the fall of 1791, Ampère’s fathertook position of Lyon’s Justice of Peace, but he would only serve about two years (Hofmann). In the beginning of 1793, France’s revolution started to take a turn for the worse. King Louis the XVI was executed, and Jacobins took control of the Nation Convention,essentially controlling France (History). This new group of leaders was against Christianity and against the monarchy. They were so much against Christianity that they tried to change to a ten day week instead of God’s seven day design (MH).

“They also unleashed the bloody Reign of Terror (la Terreur), a 10-month period in which suspected enemies of the revolution were guillotined by the thousands” (History). André’s Father was both catholic and opposed to changing away from the monarchy. Jean-Jacques Ampère was tried and executed during the Jacobin purges in 1793. His father’s death took a great toll on Ampère. He spent almost a year and a half in serious depression, as he tried to grasp the suddenness and unjustness of his death. Eventually his interest in poetry and an interest in plants started to pull Ampère out of his troubled mental state. As he progressed on his journey back to normalcy, Ampère started corresponding with a friend. Both of the young men shared an interest in mathematics, and Ampère was able to help his friend learn and predict the mathematics in machines.

As their friendship progressed, it continued to improve Ampère state of mind. Eventually, the two friends also became increasingly interested in astronomy, and Ampère even made his own telescopes. However, it was not until spring of 1796, when Ampère met Julie Carron, that he fully recovered from his depression. After about a three-year courtship, André Ampère and Julie Carron were married. Both the Ampère and Carron families had been successful in the textile business before the revolution. Both families also maintained properties in Lyon and near Poleymieux. Similar to Ampère, Julie lost her father when she was in her early twenties.

They both came from strong catholic families, which were determined to carry out a traditional wedding ceremony. To avoid entanglement with the government, they were religiously married August 6, 1799 and then civilly married a day latter. In a little over a year, the Ampère’s had their first child. Their new baby boy,Jean-Jacques, brought the couple great joy. Though the French Revolution had taken a toll on Ampère, it also brought a new interest in science, which helped provide income for his new family. Ampère had tutored students in math, but soon was able to find a paying job teaching mathematics. In 1802, he found a teaching job very similar job that paid even better, but was unfortunately 40 miles away.

This meant he could not return home often, but left him with much extra time. It was during that time that“Ampère completed the Mathematical Theory of Games, an account of the probabilities of winning or losing faced by gamblers” (maglab). With this paper Ampere was able to gain some attention, and he was recommended for a similar professorship back in Lyon (Maglab). Ampère finally arrived back home to be with his family in April, 1803. Upon his return, he found his wife had never recovered from the birth of their son. Sadly, this man who had already lost his father, had only three more months with his wife. She died in July of 1803.

Not long after his wife’s death, Ampère decided to leave his hometown, now filled with so many bad memories. With his reputation in mathematics, Ampère attained a tutoring position at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, about 250 miles north of Lyon. It took a while for Ampère to settle in, as he knew no one in this new city. Before long, however, the Potot family befriended him, and he began to gain a foothold in Paris. A few years, later in 1806, Ampère married Jeanne Potot and later had a daughter together, but the marriage was not a happy one. Discouragingly, Ampère’s father-in-law deceived him for money. This did not help Ampère’s already unhappy marriage, and eventually they dissolved the marriage.

As he continued to raise his two children with the help of his mother and aunt, Ampère became an inspector General for the Paris university. In 1809, he was chosen as Professor of Mathematics for Ecole Polytechnique, even though he had never gone to school himself (Britanica). While he was teaching mathematics, Ampère also studied and researched chemistry and physics. It was during this time that he studied light, and favored the theory that light traveled in a wave. (Maglab). Today it is still believed that light travels in a sort of wave, but it is also theorized that it travels as particles in some circumstances. In 1811, he proposed the existence of a new element he named Flourine in a compound also containing hydrogen.

He proposed that it was similar to chlorine and that it could be separated by electrolysis. Although Ampère could not prove Flourine was a separate element, Henri Moissan did so 80 years later, when he separated Flourine through hydrolysis (Anirudh). With a reputation built from all his mathematical undertakings and accomplishments, Ampère was able to gain entrance into Institute Impériale mathematics group as well as the French Academy of Sciences.In 1820, Ampère was also accepted into the University of Paris as an assistant Professor of Philosophy and Astronomy. In that same year, Christian Orsted discovered that a magnetic needle is diverted by nearby electrical current, and before long, one of Ampère’s friends demonstrated this same experiment before the French Academy of Sciences (Britannica).

Upon seeing this experiment, Ampère was greatly intrigued, and he threw himself into figuring out the math behind what they were seeing. Within about a week, Ampère had written his first in a six part series of theories on the connection between magnetism and electric. He expanded on Christian Orsted’s experiments. He was able to show two parallel wires carrying current in same direction attract one another, but two parallel wires carrying current in opposite directions repel one another. (Paragraph Britannica). Ampère demonstrated many things about the flow and force of electric currents using both physics and mathematics.

For example, Ampère demonstrated that certain lengths of individual electrified wires carry an amount of force that corresponds to the strength of the magnetic pull or push between the wires. This formed the basis for Ampère’s law. Ampère even managed to theorize the idea that “magnetism came from tiny electrical charges in the wire”. His great mind was describing how electricity traveled in electrons, a discovery which did not take place until 1897, almost eighty years later. Even though Ampère was a highly respected man at the time, his contemporaries were doubtful of some of these seemingly crazy new ideas. However, with his mathematical diagnostics for many of these situations and through his speeches and demonstrations, Ampère started to sway the great minds of his time and changed many to come.

In recognition of all his great work in electrodynamics the International Electoral Congress latter name the standard unit of electricity Ampère (maglab). Ampère was also an inventor and created the solenoid and a device to measure electricity. He determined that when a piece of metal or wire was inside an electrified wire coil, the inner wire would be magnetized. This solenoid created a way for the center wire to be pulled up or pushed down inside of the coil depending on the direction of the current. Two ways the solenoid is used today are electrically opening or closing a valve and pushing a starter gear into position to start an engine.

Ampère was also one of the first to move beyond just detecting electricity, to actually measuring the amount of electricity traveling through an object. Today, there are many forms of devices similar to that which Ampere designed to measure electricity. Both of these inventions were very important, and they are both used in different ways today. André Marie Ampère was a great man responsible for incredible inventions and discoveries, and he also held to his faith in God as creator and designer.

In his Essai sur la Philosophie des Sciences, he said “We can see only the works of the Creator, but through them we rise to a knowledge of the Creator Himself” (Century). As he wrapped up his many explorations and discoveries in the 1820s, Ampère wrote Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely Deduced from Experience. This book was a summary of his great works and provided a strong foundation for others to be able to continue and expound upon his work. André Marie Ampère was a Founding Father of Electromagnetism and a huge contributor to the foundation of Electrodynamics, and is recognized worldwide for his achievements.