Background
Foucault was born on September 18, 1819 in Paris, France. He was a son of a Paris bookseller.
Copley Medal
Legion of Honor
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Foucault was born on September 18, 1819 in Paris, France. He was a son of a Paris bookseller.
After an education received chiefly at home, Foucault studied medicine, which, however, he speedily abandoned for physical science, the improvement of L. J. M. Daguerre's photographic processes being the object to which he first directed his attention. During three years he was experimental assistant to Alfred Donne (1801-1878) in his course of lectures on microscopic anatomy.
From 1845 Foucault was editor of the scientific section of the Journal de débats.
His first important experimental demonstration was of the earth's rotation, for which he used a pendulum. The plane of motion of a freely suspended simple pendulum appears to rotate; in fact, it is spatially fixed while the earth rotates. Foucault published his account of this in 1851, together with an equation connecting the apparent angular rotation of the pendulum's plane with the angular velocity of the earth and the latitude of the place of the experiment. It created great interest, and the experiment, readily repeatable with simple apparatus, was, and still is, frequently performed in public.
In 1852 Foucault gave a further demonstration of the earth's rotation with a freely mounted gyroscope and derived some laws describing its behavior. These experiments, in combination with earlier theoretical work by Gustave Coriolis, led to a clearer understanding of rotating frames of reference.
In 1850 Foucault joined the debate over the then-competing particle and wave theories of light. D. F. J. Arago had demonstrated in 1838 that a crucial test could be made by comparing the velocities of light in air and in a dense medium, and he was experimenting to determine the velocity of light with a rotating-mirror method devised by Charles Wheatstone in 1834. Lack of success and ill health led Arago to pass the task on to Foucault in 1850. Success came in the same year, when Foucault observed a retardation of the velocity of light in water, giving support to the wave theory. He then saw how the rotating-mirror method could be refined to measure the absolute velocity of light in a restricted space. Foucault overcame the technical problems and in 1862 obtained a value of 2.98 x 1010 centimeters per second, the first accurate measure of this fundamental physical constant.
In 1855 he was appointed physicist at the Paris Observatory. Foucault worked to improve the design of telescopes. He improved certain surveying instruments, particularly the centrifugal governor, which aided timekeeping in the use of field-transit instruments. The 1860 saw Foucault turning toward precision engineering and electricity, but he was incapacitated by a stroke in July 1867 and died in Paris on February 11, 1868.
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In 1862 Foucault was made a member of the Bureau des Longitudes. In 1864 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society of London; and in 1865 he became a member of the Académie des Sciences.
It is not known, whether Foucault was married or not.