Picture of Edme Mariotte conducting an experiment.
Gallery of Edme Mariotte
Établissement de l'Académie des sciences et foundation de l'observatoire 1666- Henri Testelin (detail). Mariotte probably 6th from right. Right of him Huygens en Cassini.
Achievements
Membership
French Academy of Sciences
1666 - 1681
Edme Mariotte was one of the founders of the French Academy of Science.
Établissement de l'Académie des sciences et foundation de l'observatoire 1666- Henri Testelin (detail). Mariotte probably 6th from right. Right of him Huygens en Cassini.
Edme Mariotte was a French physicist and plant physiologist. He, independent of Robert Boyle, discovered the law that states that the volume of a gas varies inversely with its pressure. Although widely known as Boyle’s law, this basic tenet of physics and chemistry is called Mariotte’s law in France, and Boyle-Mariotte law in the rest of the world.
Background
Edme Mariotte was born around 1620 in Til-châtel, Bourgogne, France to the family of Simon Mariotte, administrator at the district Til-Châtel, and Catherine Denisot. His date of birth is entirely unknown, and his title of seigneur de Chaseüil makes the present-day Chazeuil in Burgundy. It was probably inherited from his brother Jean in 1682. It refers to the estate of his father, which was first given to Jean. This estate was in the region Chazeuil. Several families of Mariottes are recorded for the immediate area in the early seventeenth century.
Education
Lack of biographical information makes it impossible to determine what drew Mariotte to the study of science and when or where he learned what he knew when named to the Academy. Seldom citing the names of others in his works, all written after joining the Academy, he left no clues about his scientific education. The circumstances surrounding his nomination, the letter to Huygens in 1668, and the nature of his scientific work combine to suggest that he was self-taught in relative isolation.
Whatever the advanced state of his botanical learning in 1666, Mariotte’ education in other realms of science seems to have taken place in the Academy. When, for example, late in 1667 or early in 1668, he presented some of his findings on “the motion of pendulums and of heavy things that fall toward the center [of the earth]” and an account of “why the strings of the lute impress their motion on those in unison or in [the ratio of an] octave with them.” he learned from Huygens that Galileo had already achieved similar results and only then, on Huygens’ advice, read Galileo’s Two New Sciences.
Career
Mariotte appears to have been residing in Dijon when he was named to the Academy. His letter announcing the discovery of the blind spot in the eye was sent from Dijon in 1668, as was the one extant (and perhaps only) letter he wrote to Christiaan Huygens. A letter from one Oded Louis Mathion to Huygens in 1669 suggests that Mariotte was then still in Dijon or at least that he had been there long enough to establish personal contacts. By the 1670’s, however, Mariotte had moved to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life.
It was a plant physiologist that Mariotte first attracted the attention of the Academy shortly after its founding. Engaged in a discussion of Claude Perrault’s theory of the vegetation of plants, the original academicians apparently invited a contribution by Mariotte, who held the “singular doctrine” that sap circulated through plants in a manner analogous to the circulation of blood in animals. Mariotte’s verbal presentation of his theory and of the experiments on which it was based drew a rejoinder from Perrault, and the Academy charged the two men to return with written accounts and further experiments. At the same time, apparently, Mariotte was elected to membership as physician. He carried out his charge on 27 July 1667, presenting the first draft of what was published in 1679 as De la végétation des plantes. His detailed argument from plant anatomy and from a series of ingenious experiments failed to resolve the controversy completely, and only in the early 1670’s did accumulate evidence provided by others vindicate his position.
All of Mariotte’s works have two basic characteristics: they treat subjects discussed at length in the Academy, and they rest in large part on fundamental results achieved by others. His own strength lay in his talent for recognizing the importance of those results, for confirming them by new and careful experiments, and for drawing out their implications.
Mariotte’s career was an Academy career, which embodied the pattern of research envisaged by the founders of the institution. Although named as physicien, he soon shared in the work of the mathématiciens as well. In 1668, while continuing the debate on plant circulation, he took active part in a discussion of the comparative mechanical advantages of small and large wheels on a rocky road, read a paper containing twenty-nine propositions on the motive force of water and air (a subject to which he repeatedly returned during his career), read another paper on perspective (geometrical optics), and reviewed two recently published mathematical works.
Also in 1668 Mariotte published his first work, Nouvelle découverte touchant la veüe, which immediately embroiled him in a controversy that lasted until his death, although no one denied the discovery itself. Curious about what happened to light rays striking the base of the optic nerve, Mariotte devised a simple experiment: placing two small white spots on a dark background, one in the center and the other two feet to the right and slightly below the centerline, he covered his left eye and focused his right eye on the center spot. When he backed away about nine feet, he found that the second spot disappeared completely, leaving a single spot on a completely dark surface; the slightest motion of his eye or head brought the second spot back into view. By experiments with black spots on a white background and with the spots reversed for the left eye, he determined that the spot disappeared when the light from it directly struck the base of the optic nerve, which therefore constituted a blind spot or, as he called it, defect of vision in the eye.
Following the presentation of the Traité de la percussion, Mariotte seems largely to have withdrawn from Academy activities until 1675. Scattered evidence, particularly a striking demonstration of the hydrostatic paradox performed before a large audience at the Collège de Bourgogne in Paris in 1674 and reported in the Journal des sçavans in 1678, suggests that he was at work on the pneumatic experiments that form the basis of his De la nature de l’air (1679). Like his other works, Nature de l’air combines a review and reconfirmation of what was already known about its subject with some original contributions. Like the Traité de la percussion, it also omits the name of the author on whom Mariotte clearly had relied most heavily, in this case Robert Boyle, while acknowledging its debt to a more distant source, Blaise Pascal’s équilibre des liqueurs.
Nature de l’air focuses on three main properties of air: its weight, its elasticity, and its solubility in water. To show that air has weight, Mariotte points out the behavior of the mercury barometer and the common interpretation that the weight of the column of mercury counterbalances the weight of the column of air standing on the reservoir. Turning to the elasticity of air, he presents a series of experiments in which air is trapped in the mercury tube before it is immersed in the reservoir, thus depressing the height at which the mercury settles.
Involved in 1675-1676 in the Academy’s (never completed) project to meet Louis XIV’s request for a complete inventory of the machines in use in France, which was to be prefaced by a short theoretical introduction,11 and in 1677 in a series of varied experiments, by 1678 he had begun a fairly continuous series of reports to the Academy on the rainbow and the refraction of light by lenses and small apertures. A proposal by Carcavi in March 1679 for a complete treatise on optics by Mariotte, Picard, and La Hire resulted in Mariotte’s presentation in July and August of his De la nature des couleurs. He worked further on the essay over the next two years, reporting frequently to the Academy. In 1681 he read the final version, which then appeared as the fourth of the Essays de physique.
Mariotte’s treatise attracted widespread attention and was the only one of his major works to be translated into English (by J. T. Desaguliers in 1718). Although eventually superseded in its theoretical portions by Daniel Bernoulli’s Hydrodynamica (1738), it remained a standard practical guide to the construction of fountains for some time thereafter.
According to the testimony of La Hire and his colleagues, Mariotte was also the author of an unsigned Essay de logique that appeared in 1678. B. Rochot has shown that this work closely resembles in content and structure, and frequently quotes verbatim, an unpublished manuscript by Roberval. According to Rochot, however, Mariotte did not plagiarize Roberval but, rather, succeeded him at his death in 1675 as recording secretary for an Academy project on scientific method, whence the absence of an author’s name upon publication. The work bears Mariotte’s unmistakable stamp, however, both in the fit between its proposed methodology and his actual research procedures and in the use of his own research as examples (in particular the argument for the choroid as the seat of vision).
As an active member of the Academy for over twenty-five years, Mariotte exerted influence over scientific colleagues both within and without that institution. His closest associate seems to have been La Hire, but during his tenure, he carried out joint investigations with most of the other members, including Huygens. His work was known to the Royal Society and was cited by Newton in the Principia. Mariotte conducted an extensive correspondence (as yet unpublished) with Leibniz, for whom he was a source of information about the work of the Academy in the early and mid-1670s and who in turn cooperated with Mariotte’s meteorological survey. Huygens’ accusation of plagiarism in 1690 seems to have done little to dim the reputation Mariotte had earned during his career.
Honored as the man who introduced experimental physics into France, Edme Mariotte played a central role in the work of the Paris Academy of Sciences from shortly after its formation in 1666 until his death in 1684. He became, in fact, so identified with the Academy that no trace remains of his life outside of it or before joining it. His fame rests on his work on hydrostatics and on the establishment of the law of gases that bears his name. An elongated crater that is located on the far side of the Moon was named after Mariotte to honor his influence on the development of science.
Indirect evidence places Mariotte as titular abbot and prior of St.-Martin-de-Beaumont-sur-Vingeanne (Côte-d’Or), but his precise ecclesiastical standing is uncertain; contemporary sources generally do not refer to him by a clerical title and he is mostly known for his scientific but not religious activities.
Politics
Being a cleric of relatively high rank and one of the founders of the Academy Mariotte had an opportunity to influence French political environment but his interests were in the sphere of natural philosophy rather than in social life and there is no information on his political views.
Views
The discovery, confirmed by Mariotte’s colleagues in both Paris and London, startled him into abandoning the traditional (and correct) view that images in the eye are formed on the retina (a continuous layer of tissue) and adopting the choroid coat behind the retina (discontinuous precisely where the optic nerve passes through it to attach to the retina) as the seat of vision. Mariotte’s fellow academician, the anatomist Jean Pecquet, who with others had been investigating the eye since 1667, immediately disputed this conclusion and wrote to defend the traditional view. A series of experiments carried out before the Academy in August 1669 only widened the area of disagreement between the two men, as did Perrault’s support of Pecquet. Mariotte published a rebuttal of Pecquet’s critique in 1671, but by then the issue had become moot. As the Lettres écrites par MM. Mariotte, Pecquet et Perrault …(1676) reveals, Pecquet and Perrault could not provide a convincing explanation for a blind spot on the retina (partly because they disagreed with Mariotte over the action of nerves), and Mariotte rested part of his argument on phenomena now known to be irrelevant (such as the reflection of light from the choroid of certain animals).
Although the controversy over the seat of vision dominated Mariotte’s attention in 1669 and 1670, he continued his research in other areas. In 1669 he took part in discussions of the cause of weight (in which he supported some form of action at a distance against Huygens’ mechanical explanation) and of the nature of coagulation of liquids. The latter issue seems to lie behind a series of experiments on freezing, carried out and presented jointly with Perrault in 1670. The experiments, which concerned the pattern of formation of ice and the trapping of air bubbles in it, enabled Mariotte to construct a burning glass of ice.
In 1671 Mariotte read a portion of his Traité du nivellement (published in 1672) describing a new form of level which used the surface of free-standing water as a horizontal reference and employed reflection of a mark on the sighting stick to gain greater accuracy in sighting. In the treatise itself, he gave full instructions for the instrument’s use in the field and a detailed analysis of its accuracy in comparison with that of traditional levels, in particular, the chorobates of Vitruvius. In 1672 Mariotte’s activities in the Academy were restricted largely to confirmation of G. D. Cassini’s discoveries of a spot on Jupiter and a new satellite (Rhea) of Saturn.
As early as 1670 Mariotte had announced his intention to compose a major work on the impact of bodies. Completed and read to the Academy in 1671, it was published in 1673 as Traité de la percussion ou choc des corps. The first comprehensive treatment of the laws of inelastic and elastic impact and of their application to various physical problems, it long served as the standard work on the subject and went through three editions in Mariotte’s lifetime.
Taken as a whole, the treatise reveals Mariotte as a gifted experimenter, learned enough in mathematics to link experiment and theory and to draw the theoretical implications of his work. He made full use of the results obtained by his predecessors and contemporaries, but his experimental mode of analysis and presentation differed markedly from their approaches to the problem. Clearly he knew of the work of Wallis, Wren, and Huygens published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1668; and there are enough striking similarities between Mariotte’s treatise and Huygens’ then-unpublished paper on impact to suggest that he knew the content of the latter, perhaps verbally from Huygens himself. Certainly his colleagues in the Academy recognized Mariotte’s debt to others while they praised the clarity of his presentation. And yet Galileo’s name alone appears in the treatise; Huygens’ in particular is conspicuously absent.
Except for the published theorems, if Mariotte took the other ideas from Huygens, he could have done so only when Huygens offered them in the course of Academy discussions. Mariotte may well have considered the content of those discussions the common property of all academicians and have felt no need to record their specific sources when publishing them under his own name.
Certainly in 1671 and 1673, Huygens made no proprietary claims in the Academy. His response to Mariotte’s treatise consisted of a critique of the theory of elasticity on which parts of it were based. His commitment on cosmological grounds to the existence in nature of perfectly hard bodies that rebound from one another and transmit impulses placed him at odds with Mariotte’s empirically-based rejection of them. Later that same theory of elastic rebound formed an integral part of Huygens’ Traité de la lumière (1690). Huygens also later denied Mariotte any role in the determination of the center of oscillation, claiming (despite the evidence of Mariotte’s treatise) that he had discussed only the center of percussion and had failed to demonstrate that it was the same as the center of oscillation.
This last statement, further confirmed by experiments with a double-column barometer and extended to the expansion of air through experiments in a vacuum receiver, has gained Mariotte a share of Boyle’s credit for the discovery and formulation of the volume-pressure law; indeed, it is called “Mariotte’s law” in France. If, however, in the essay Mariotte gives no credit to Boyle, neither does he make any claims of originality; rather, he treats the law as one of a series of well-known properties of air.
Interested in the barometer more as a meteorological tool than as an experimental apparatus, Mariotte turns next to a discussion of the relation between barometric pressure and winds and weather, and then to the solubility of air in water. The determination through experiment that water does absorb air in amounts dependent on pressure and temperature leads him, in one of his rare excursions into the theory of matter, to posit the existence of a matière aérienne, a highly condensed form of matter into which air is forced under high pressure and low temperature. His discussion, which includes the work on freezing done with Perrault in 1670, rests in part, however, on a lack of distinction between the air dissolved in water and the water vapor produced by high temperature and low pressure.
Despite his commitment to a special form of matter to explain solubility, Mariotte rejects any attempt to reduce the elasticity of air to a more fundamental mechanism. Explicitly denying the existence of an expansive subtle matter among the particles of air, he prefers to rely heuristically on Boyle’s analogy (without citing the source) of a ball of cotton or wool fibers. A similar analogy of sponges piled on top of one another, together with the volume-pressure law, suggests to him a means for determining the height of the atmosphere.
On the basis, then, of four suppositions (the geometric structure of the light cone and of a sunbeam passing through an aperture; the gross phenomenon of refraction, including partial reflection; the refraction of light toward the normal in the denser medium, and conversely; and the focusing of the human eye), Mariotte presents a comprehensive catalog of experimental results concerning refraction, emphasizing the precise order and intensity of the colors produced and the angles of the rays producing them.
Mariotte’s review of various mechanisms proposed for explaining these results finds fundamental weaknesses in all of them. In particular Descartes’s notion of a rotatory tendency to motion, besides being inherently unclear, implies constantly alternating patterns of color contrary to observation; and Newton’s proposal of white light as a composite of monochromatic colors, although it explains much, fails on the crucial test. That is, repeating Newton’s refraction of violet rays through a prism, Mariotte finds further separation in the form of red and yellow fringes about the image. In the absence of adequate theory, he retreats in the essay to eight “principles of experience,” which are essentially generalizations of the behavior of refracted light as observed in the preceding experiments. Using these principles, Mariotte then undertakes to explain a long series of observed phenomena, including the chromaticism of lenses, the shape of the spectrum, and diffraction about thin objects. The explanations are merely a prelude, however, to his main concern, a complete account of the rainbow.
Reviewing previous accounts from Aristotle to Descartes, Mariotte states his basic agreement with that of Descartes but points to its lack of complete correspondence with observation. In particular, Descartes failed to explain the upper and lower boundaries (40° and 44°) of the primary rainbow. Mariotte’s own full account applies to Descartes’s basic mechanism the precise measurements made in the preceding experiments but ends with a small divergence between the calculated and the observed height of the rainbow. The divergence, a matter of forty-six minutes of arc, led Mariotte to carry out with La Hire a protracted series of refraction experiments using water-filled glass spheres. Employing the techniques established in his essay on air, he made adjustments for the different densities of air (and hence different indexes of the sun on the water in the spheres. 500 feet, where the rainbow is formed, and for the heating effects of the sun on the water in the spheres. This work brings theory and observation into closer alignment. Similar but less extensive use of the “principles” offers satisfying explanations of stellar coronas (explained by refraction through water vapor in the clouds), solar and lunar coronas, and parhelia and false moons (all explained by refraction through small filaments of snow in the shape of equilateral prisms.)
Quotations:
"The ratio of the expanded air to the volume of that left above the mercury before the experiment is the same as that of twenty-eight inches of mercury, which is the whole weight of the atmosphere, to the excess of twenty-eight inches over the height at which [the mercury] remains after the experiment. This makes known sufficiently for one to take it as a certain rule of nature that air is condensed in proportion to the weight with which it is charged."
"Among our sensations, it is difficult not to confuse what comes from the part of objects with what comes from the part of our senses. Supposing this, one clearly sees that it is not easy to say much about colors, and that all one can expect in such a difficult subject is to give some general rules and to derive from them consequences that can be of some use in the arts and satisfy somewhat the natural desire we have to render account of everything that appears to us."
Membership
Founder
French Academy of Sciences
,
France
1666 - 1681
Personality
The mind of Edme Mariotte was highly capable of all learning, and the works published by him attest to the highest erudition. In 1667, on the strength of a singular doctrine, he was elected to the Academy. In him, sharp inventiveness always shone forth combined with the industry to carry through, as the works referred to in the course of this treatise will testify. His cleverness in the design of experiments was almost incredible, and he carried them out with minimal expense.
Quotes from others about the person
"Mariotte took everything from me, he protested in a sketch of an introduction to a treatise on impact never completed, as can attest those of the Academy, M. du Hamel, M. Gallois, and the registers. [He took] the machine, the experiment on the rebound of glass balls, the experiment of one or more balls pushed together against of line a equal balls, the theorems that I had published. He should have mentioned me. I told him that one day, and he could not respond." - Christiaan Huygens, Dutch physicist.
"The mind of this man was highly capable of all learning, and the works published by him attest to the highest erudition. In 1667, on the strength of a singular doctrine, he was elected to the Academy. In him, sharp inventiveness always shone forth combined with the industry to carry through, as the works referred to in the course of this treatise will testify. His cleverness in the design of experiments was almost incredible, and he carried them out with minimal expense." - Jean-Baptiste du Hamel, French cleric and natural philosopher.
Connections
Being a catholic priest Edme Mariotte was never married and had no children.
