Charles Auguste Coulomb

Charles Auguste Coulomb was born June 14, 1736 in Angouleme in the south of France in a wealthy family. After studying mathematics and science in Paris, he chose a military career.

As a technical service officer, he conducted fortification works on the island of Martinique, where he stayed for nine years. Already during his stay in Martinique, he began to engage in scientific work, which dealt mainly with technical mechanics and some problems of statics.

In 1776, after returning to France, he took part in a competition announced by the French Academy of Sciences on the improvement of navigation devices. The pendant successfully solved the task and simultaneously undertook a thorough study of magnetism, especially by studying the dependence of the properties of magnets on temperature.

For successful work on creating a new design of the compass and developing the theory of simple mechanisms in 1782, he was elected a member of the Academy. Although he remained a soldier in order to have better opportunities for experimentation, his name became known in the scientific world.

In 1784, Coulomb published a paper in which he described the dependence of the twisting force of a thread on its diameter, length, twisting angle and constant value, depending on the physical properties of the filament material. At the same time, he described the method of measuring small forces with the help of the so-called torsion balance, later called the Coulomb balance.

From 1785 to 1789, he published seven capital works on electricity and magnetism. Torsion balance Kulon also used to measure the magnitude of the force with which two point electrical charges interact. He determined that this force is directly proportional to the sum of the charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

This first quantitative relationship was then checked by Coulomb and another method. Then Coulomb found that the electric charge is not redistributed in the bodies, depending on their chemical nature, but goes on when they touch from one body to another as a result of electrical repulsive forces.

He also explained the fact that the intensity of the electrostatic field at a point close to the surface of a charged conductor is proportional to the density of electric charges near this point.

In addition to his scientific work, Coulomb also engaged in public activities - he held a significant post in the Ministry of Education and the post of general caretaker of water resources and sources. However, later he fell out of favor with the highest governmental circles and stopped any public activity.

When the French Revolution erupted in 1789, he retired to his estate in Blois, where he devoted himself entirely to scientific work. In the same year he published his important work, in which he expanded the concept of the existence of two types of electricity for magnetism and formulated a law according to which the interaction of two magnetic poles is analogous to the interaction of two point electric charges.

The pendant with his scientific works introduced into the science of electricity and magnetism a quantitative method of investigation and extended the principles of Newtonian mechanics to electricity and magnetism.

Its torsion scales were successfully used in the finest measuring instruments and in other fields of physics. After the coming to power of Napoleon, Coulomb was returned to all his posts, on which he remained for the rest of his life.

He died on August 23, 1806 in Paris.