Biography

Andre Marie Ampere Biography: The French physicist and mathematician, Andre Marie Ampere is mainly credited for laying down the basis of electrodynamics (now known as electromagnetism). He was the first person to demonstrate that a magnetic field is generated when two parallel wires are charged with electricity and is also known for inventing the astatic needle, a significant component of the contemporary astatis galvanometer.

A short Biography on world Famous Scientists and Their Inventions.

Andre Marie Ampere Biography, Inventions, Education, Awards and Facts

Andre Marie was born in Lyon, France on January 20. 1775. He grew up at the family property at Poleymieux-au-Mont-d’Or near Lyon. His father, Jean-Jacques Ampere was an affluent businessman and local government official. Young Ampere spent most of his time reading in the library of his family home, and developed a great interest in history, geography, literature, philosophy and the natural sciences. His father gave him Latin lessons and encouraged him to pursue his passion for mathematics.

At a very young age, he rapidly began to develop his own mathematical ideas and also started to write a thesis on conic sections. When he was just thirteen. Ampere presented his first paper to the Academie de Lyon. This paper consisted of the solution to the problem of constructing a line of the same length as an arc of a circle.

His method involved the use of infinitesimals, but unfortunately his paper was not published because he had no knowledge of calculus then. After some time Ampere came across d’Alembert’s article on the differential calculus in the Encyclopedia and felt the urge to learn more about mathematics.

Ampere took few lessons in the differential and integral calculus from a monk in Lyon, after which he began to study the works of Euler and Bernoulli. He also acquired a copy of the 1788 edition of Lagrange’s Mecanique analytique, which he studied very seriously.

From 1797 to 1802 Ampere earned his living as a mathematics tutor and later he was employed as the professor of physics and chemistry at Bourg Ecole Centrale. In 1809 he got appointed as the professor of mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique, a post he held until 1828. He was also appointed to a chair at Universite de France in 1826 which he held until his death.

In 1796 Ampere met Julie Carron, and got married in 1799.

During 1820, the Danish physicist, H.C 0rsted accidentally discovered that a magnetic needle is acted on by a voltaic current – a phenomenon establishing a relationship between electricity and magnetism. Ampere on becoming influenced by 0rsted’s discovery performed a series of experiments to clarify the exact nature of the relationship between electric current-flow and magnetism, as well as the relationships governing the behaviour of electric currents in various types of conductors.

Moreover he demonstrated that two parallel wires carrying electric currents magnetically attract each other if the currents are in the same direction and repel if the currents are in opposite directions.

On the basis of these experiments, Ampere formulated his famous law of electromagnetism known as Ampere’s law. This law is mathematical description of the magnetic force between two electrical currents.

His findings were reported in the Academie des Sciences a week after 0rsted’s discovery. This laid the foundation of electrodynamics.

Ampere died at Marseille on June 10, 1836 and was buried in the Cimetiere de Montmartre, Paris. The SI unit of measurement of electric current, the ampere, is named after him.

Anders Celsius Biography: Anders Celsius was a Swedish astronomer who is known for inventing the Celsius temperature scale. Celsius also built the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1740, the oldest astronomical observatory in Sweden.

A short Biography on world Famous Scientists and Their Inventions.

Anders Celsius Biography, Inventions, Education, Awards and Facts

Born in Uppsala, Sweden, Anders Celsius was raised a Lutheran. His father. Nils Celsius, was an astronomy professor. Celsius completed his education in his home town; north of Stockholm. He showed an extraordinary talent in mathematics from childhood. He studied at Uppsala University where, like his father, he joined as a professor of astronomy in 1730.

In his efforts to build a astronomical observatory in Sweden, Celsius visited several of the famous European astronomy sites from 1732 to 1734. At the time, English and French astronomers debated about the actual shape of the earth. To resolve this dispute, teams were sent to the “ends” of the world to assess the precise local positions. Pierre Louis de Maupertuis headed the expedition to the north and Celsius joined as his assistant.

The expedition to Lapland, the northernmost part of Sweden, continued from 1736 to 1737. Newton’s theory about the flattening of the earth at the poles was finally confirmed in 1744 after all measurements were taken.

Celsius went back to Uppsala after the expedition. He is considered to be the first astronomer to analyze the changes of the earth’s magnetic field at the time of a northern light and assess the brightness of stars with measuring tools.

At Uppsala Observatory, Celsius favoured the division of the temperature scale of a mercury thermometer at air pressure of 760mm of mercury into 100°C, where 100 was taken as the freezing point and 0 as the boiling point of water.

Due to the elaborated fixation of the measuring environment and methods, this account was thought to be more precise compared to that of Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit and Rene-Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur.

Celsius was an avid admirer of the the Gregorian calendar, which was adapted in Sweden in 1753, just nine years after his death. “Degree Celsius”, the unit of temperature interval, has been named after this brilliant scientist.

Celsius became the secretary of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala in 1725, where he remained until his death. He died of tuberculosis in 1744.

Amedeo Avogadro Biography: The Italian scientist, Amedeo Avogadro is most famous for his contributions to the theory of moles and molecular weight, including what is known as the Avogadro s law. In respect of his contributions to the molecular theory, the number of molecules in one mole was renamed the Avogadro’s Number.

A short Biography on world Famous Scientists and Their Inventions.

Amedeo Avogadro Biography, Inventions, Education, Awards and Facts

Amedeo was born in Turin, Italy, on 9th – August, 1776 in a noble family of lawyers. His father. Count Filippo Avogadro was a well-known lawyer and civil servant. Amedeo followed his father’s footsteps and earned a doctorate of law in 1796. He then began to practise. Soon after, he developed interest in natural philosophy and mathematics. Despite his successful legal career he left it to teach mathematics and physics at liceo (high school) in Vercelli in 1809.

In 1820, he was appointed as the professor of mathematical physics at the University of Turin. Unluckily, his post was short lived, since political turmoil suppressed the chair and Avogadro lost his job by July, 1822. The post was however reestablished in 1832, and Avogadro took his position back in 1834. Here he remained until his retirement in 1850.

Not much is known about Amedeo’s private life and his political activity; despite his unpleasant aspect (at least as depicted in the rare images found), he was known to be dedicated to a sober life and a religious man. He was happily married and blessed with six sons.

In 1811 Avogadro theorised that equal volumes of gases at the same temperature and pressure contain equal numbers of molecules. He further established that relative molecular weights of any two gases are similar to the ratio of the densities of the two gases under the constant conditions of temperature and pressure.

His suggestion is now known as the Avogadro’s principle. He also cleverly reasoned that simple gases were not formed of solitary atoms but were instead compound molecules of two or more atoms. (Avogadro did not actually use the word atom; at the time the words atom and molecule were used almost interchangeably.

He talked about three kinds of “molecules,” including an “elementary molecule”—what we would call an atom.) Thus Avogadro was able to resolve the confusion that Dalton and others had encountered regarding atoms and molecules at that time.

Avogadro’s findings were almost completely neglected until it was forcefully presented by Stanislao Cannizarro at the Karlsruhe Conference in 1860. He demonstrated that Avogadro’s Principle was not only helpful to determine molar masses, but also, indirectly, atomic masses.

Avogadro’s work was mainly rejected before due to earlier established conviction that chemical combination occurred due to the similarity between unlike elements. After the electrical discoveries of Galvani and Volta, this similarity was in general attributed to the attraction between unlike charges.

The number of molecules in one mole is now called Avogadro s number taking the value of 6.0221367 x 1023. The number was not actually determined by Avogadro himself. It was given his name due to his outstanding contribution to the development of molecular theory. This Italian scientist died on July 9, 1856 in Turin.

Alfred Nobel Biography: The foundation of the Nobel Prize-that has been honouring people from all around the world for their great accomplishments in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and for work in peace-was laid by none other than Alfred Nobel. He was a Swedish scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, author and pacifist. He was a great genius who invented dynamite and many other explosives. He also constructed companies and laboratories in more than 20 countries all over the world.

A short Biography on world Famous Scientists and Their Inventions.

Alfred Nobel Biography, Inventions, Education, Awards and Facts

Alfred Nobel was born on October 21, 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden. He was the third out of the four sons to the Swedish family. His father, Immanuel Nobel, an engineer and a prosperous arms manufacturer, encouraged his four sons to pursue mechanical fields. When Alfred was just nine years old, his family moved to Saint Petersburg in 1842, where his father started a ‘torpedo’ works. Here young Alfred received his early education by private tutors. He studied chemistry with Professor Nikolay Nikolaevich Zinin.

At the age of 18, he travelled to the United States where he spent four years studying chemistry and also worked for sometime under John Ericsson. During this time he also went to Paris where he was first introduced to nitroglycerin, a volatile, explosive liquid first made by an Italian scientist, Ascanio Sobrero in 1847. With the end of the war his father’s weapon’s business collapsed leaving the family poor. As a result the family had to rely on the earnings of his mother, Andriette Ahlsell Nobel who worked at the grocery store.

After the family business got bankrupt, Alfred devoted himself to the study of explosives and sought a way to make the aggressive explosion of liquid nitroglycerin somehow more controllable. In 1863 he succeeded in exploding nitroglycerin from a distance with a gunpowder charge, and two years later he patented the mercury fulminate detonator which is a critical component for the development of high explosives. Nobel then built up factories in Hamburg and Stockholm, and soon New York and California.

Unfortunately his name became controversial after many serious accidents in the transit and use of his intrinsically unstable product, including an 1864 explosion at their factory in Heleneborg in Stockholm that killed Nobel’s younger brother Emil, among other casualties.

In order to improve the image of his business, Nobel put all his efforts to produce a safer explosive. In 1866 he discovered that when nitroglycerin was incorporated in an absorbent still substance like kieselguhr (porous clay) it became safer and more convenient to handle. He called this mixture dynamite and received a patent in 1867.

The same year he demonstrated his explosive for the first time at a quarry in Redhill, Surrey, England. After a few months he also developed a more powerful explosive by the name of ‘Gelignite’, (also called blasting gelatin). He made this by absorbing nitroglycerin into wood pulp and sodium or potassium nitrate.

During November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed his last will and testament and established the Nobel Prizes, to be awarded annually without distinction of nationality. The executors of his will formed the Nobel Foundation to fulfill his wishes. The statutes of the foundation were formally adopted on June 29, 1900 and the first prize was awarded in 1901.

This great man died of a stroke on December 10, 1896 at Sanremo, Italy and was buried in Stockholm.