Background
Claude Servais Mathias Pouillet was born on February 16, 1791, in Cusance, Doubs, France. Pouillet was the second of ten children of Ignace Denis Pouillet, a papermaker, and of Marie Françoise Rolland.
Ecole Normale Superieure, 45 Rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France
Pouillet was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure from 1811 to 1813.
Drawing of a Pouillet pyrheliometer
Claude Servais Mathias Pouillet, 1790 – 1868. French physicist, professor of physics at the Sorbonne and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Pouillet was awarded a title of the Knight of the Legion of Honour.
(A galvanometer is an electromechanical instrument used fo...)
A galvanometer is an electromechanical instrument used for detecting and indicating an electric current. A galvanometer works as an actuator, by producing a rotary deflection (of a "pointer"), in response to electric current flowing through a coil in a constant magnetic field. Early galvanometers were not calibrated, but their later developments were used as measuring instruments, called ammeters, to measure the current flowing through an electric circuit.
inventor physicist politician scientist
Claude Servais Mathias Pouillet was born on February 16, 1791, in Cusance, Doubs, France. Pouillet was the second of ten children of Ignace Denis Pouillet, a papermaker, and of Marie Françoise Rolland.
Pouillet first attended the lycee of Besangon, and then from 1811 to 1813, he was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure.
After attending the lycée of Besançon, Pouillet taught for two years at the collège of Tonnerre. From 1811 to 1813 he was a student at the École Normale Supérieure, to which he returned from 1815 until 1822 as maître de conférences in physics. During this phase of his career, he also taught physics at the Athénée in Paris and at the Collège Royal de Bourbon, now the lycée Condorcet (1819-1829). In 1826 he became an assistant professor of physics at the Faculty of Sciences in Paris, first under Gay-Lussac and then under Dulong. Upon the latter’s death in 1838, Pouillet assumed the chair of physics, which he held until 1852 when he was removed for refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the imperial government.
Pouillet’s lectures - which were partially collected in his Éléments de physique expérimentale et de météorotogie (1827) and in the Leçons de physique de la Faculté des sciences (1828) - were widely read. (Pouillet published a popular account of Éléments in 1850.) Although offering no spectacular novelties, they presented, in clear language, a survey of the state of the various branches of physics and of recent developments in them. Simultaneously, Pouillet held important posts at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. Appointed assistant director and demonstrator of machines there in 1829, he became a professor of “physics applied to the arts“ and administrator - in effect, director - in 1831. A few years later he published the two-volume Portefeuille industriel du Conservatoire... (1834-1836), a collection of annotated technical drawings.
On 15 June 1849, he was dismissed from his post as an administrator following an attempted revolt organized by Alexandre Ledru-Rollin on the premises of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and on 12 November 1852 he lost his professorship for his refusal to take the oath of allegiance. Moreover, saddened by the death of his two children (a son of seventeen in 1849 and a daughter of twenty in 1850), he wished to retire. He, therefore, devoted his last years to the experimental research in which he had been engaged since the start of his career and to the work o( the Académie des Sciences, to which he had been elected in 1837.
A very active member of the Société d’Encouragement pour l’lndustrie Nationale, Pouillet served as rapporteur at several industrial expositions.
Pouillet, who had taught several sons of Louis Philippe, was a confirmed supporter of that monarch, whose programs he had faithfully supported as deputy from the Jura (1837-1848). Although he abandoned political activity during the Revolution of 1848, Pouillet suffered the repercussions of that event.
Pouillet was an active member of the Societe d’Encouragement pour l’lndustrie Nationale, Société Philomathique de Paris, and the French Academy of Sciences (elected 1837).