CHARLES COULOMB: BIOGRAPHY, CONTRIBUTIONS, WORKS - BIOGRAPHIES - 2024

Charles Coulomb (1736-1806) was a French scientist considered the most important physicist in his native country. Thanks to his research and discoveries in the field of electromagnetics, the unit of electric charge is called the coulomb (C).

His scientific career spanned several areas, most notably magnetism, electricity, and friction. One of his main contributions was the development of the torsion balance, with which he was able to measure both the magnetic and electrical force of attraction.

Charles Coulomb is considered the most important physicist in France. Source: wikipedia.org

By measuring these forces, he was able to formulate Coulomb's laws, which establish that the force between two electric charges is directly proportional to the product of their magnitudes, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance that separates them.

His name appears on one of the 72 scientists that are inscribed on the metal plates on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower, as a tribute to being one of the most important French.

Biography

Charles Coulomb was the son of Henry Coulomb and Catherine Bajet. He was born in the small town of Angouleme in France, on June 14, 1736.

Although he was born into a family of prestige and economic comfort, they fell out of favor as a result of a series of adverse events in which usury and mismanagement of their capital prevailed, which led to the separation of their parents.

His first studies were carried out in his hometown. Then he moved to Paris and there the young man continued his academic training at the well-known Collège Mazarin, where he obtained a broad education in the basic subjects: mathematics, humanities, astronomy, botany and chemistry.

He received professional education at the École du Génie en Mézieres, to obtain the title of military engineer along with the rank of first lieutenant, in 1761. During his military career he served France on various occasions; one of these was in the West Indies, where he had the important role of supervising the construction of forts in Martinique.

Military and investigator

On this island, once it was recovered by the French, Coulomb was entrusted with the construction of Fort Bourbon, with the intention of making this island much safer and protecting it from any invasion. This task occupied him until 1772, approximately nine years.

After this, he devoted himself to investigative work on statics in architecture to present it to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, thus he became a correspondent for this important institution in 1974.

At that time in his life, he was awarded first prize for his postulates on magnetic compasses and for the development of an advanced study on friction.

Throughout his professional career, Coulomb knew how to take advantage of his military work together with his scientific work. Thus, in Rochefort, where he was stationed between 1779 and 1780, he used the shipyards as his own laboratory to test mechanics, resistance of materials and friction.

In 1781 he received the award from the Paris Academy of Sciences for his work on the laws of friction and the stiffness of strings, a groundbreaking study that was not contested in more than a century.

In 1786 he obtained the rank of lieutenant colonel, with which he felt quite comfortable. However, under the so-called "Regime of Terror" within the framework of the French Revolution, he preferred to take shelter in a secluded property that he had inside, putting himself safe and dedicating himself exclusively to his scientific lectures.

At the service of the Revolution

Then he returned to Paris by order of Napoleon Bonaparte, being in charge of public instruction. He served at the Paris Academy of Sciences for approximately 25 years, and was appointed president of the same institution in 1801, when it became the Institute of France.

He also contributed to the new French government in the conceptualization, ordering and application of a metric decimal system of weights and measures that would provide an organizational standard for all research and applications in the country.

His performance and scientific knowledge led him to participate in the monitoring of a new communications system, which served as the basis for future developments in this field.

Last years

After many years of relationship, finally in 1802 he married Louise Françoise LeProust, with whom he had already had two children. The first was born in 1790 and the second in 1797.

Charles Coulomb died in Paris, at the age of 70, on August 23, 1806, just five years after he began to serve as president of the Institute of France.

Contributions

Coulomb was one of the leading physicists in all of France, thanks to his contribution in the field of electricity and on magnetic forces, friction forces, elasticity of metals and silk.

One of his first contributions, in 1772, made it possible to study and know the pressure to which the retaining walls are subjected as a result of the volume of the earth they support. It also defined how vaults should be balanced on all construction jobs to avoid damage to structures.

These analyzes were carried out during the construction of the fort in Martinique, thanks to which he defined the first approximation of the tangential stress, as well as the laws of friction. It also marked a milestone in the formulation of the Coulomb method in order to evaluate the strength of materials.

He based his experiments on the forces applied to materials and their resistance to deformation, allowing us to know their behavior. It thus served as the cradle of research in the area of ​​modern construction.

He also made contributions in the field of ergonomics, as well as in that of mechanics when analyzing how the friction of machines is, with which he again obtained the recognition of the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1781 for the formulation of the laws of friction.

Coulomb law

Although throughout his prolific scientific career he wrote more than 25 articles as a correspondent for the Academy, dealing with different fields of physics, his greatest contribution to science is Coulomb's law that he formulated in 1776.

This law acts mainly in atomic reactions and states the following: "the force between electric charges is proportional to the product of the individual charges, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance that separates them."

It means that, as the electric charges have a greater magnitude, they will have a greater force of attraction or repulsion, but that the distance that separates them will have the opposite effect in a proportion of the square of it; that is, the greater the distance, the less force.

Focused on analyzing the attractive or repulsive forces of electric charges, he developed the torsion balance. With this he showed that the law of gravitation formulated by Newton is fully fulfilled.

In this field of experimentation, he found that electrical attraction and repulsion are verified without intervention, through remote action. In this context, Coulomb was a defender of the theory of electric and magnetic fluids.

Thanks to all these studies, and in particular to the mathematical definition of Coulomb's Law, the field of electricity and magnetics became an exact science, which led it to the place of honor it occupies in human science.

Plays

Coulomb was a prolific author whose intention was to document and systematize all his postulates, and also to be able to present them in memory of the Academy of Science and get credit for it.

Its first publication was in 1773 under the title Sur une application des règles, de maximis et minimis à quelqueproblèmes de statique, relatifs à l'architecture. In this work he showed his studies on the resistance of beams and materials.

Then, in 1777 he delivered another article to the Academy in which he collected his invention of the torsion balance, in addition to his research on the compass and terrestrial magnetism.

He wrote more than seven treatises on electricity and magnetism, until in 1785 he formulated and presented the law that bears his name.

Simple Machine Theory

Other of his great works was Theory of Simple Machines, which in 1781 gave him the great prize of the Academy of Science.

In the text he speaks of this type of machines as devices in which the magnitude or direction of the force is varied and the law of conservation of energy is fulfilled, since nothing is destroyed, it is only transformed. Mainly, the simple machines are inclined plane, lever and pulleys.

On electricity and magnetism

On Electricity and Magnetism is one of his most memorable publications. In it he condenses a large part of his work in this important field of physics and for which he has received much of his recognition, such as, for example, that the unit of electric charge is called a coulomb.

The coulomb or coulomb is the measure used in the international metric system to define the amount of electricity or charge carried in one second by a current of one ampere.

It also has a scientifically defined relationship in number of times of the elemental charge, which can be positive or negative.

Coulomb presented 25 memoirs that condense his research works, which he collected between 1781 and 1806 to consign them to the Academy.

References

1. "Brief biography of Charles Agustin de Coulomb" in Virtual Museum of Science. Retrieved August 7, 2019 in the Virtual Museum of Science: museovirtual.csic.es
2. "Coulomb, Charles-Augustin" in the Historical Forum of Telecommunications. Retrieved August 7, 2019 in the Historical Telecommunications Forum: Forohistorico.coit.es
3. "Charles Coulomb" in Biographies and Lives. Retrieved August 7, 2019 in Biographies and Lives: biografiasyvidas.com
4. "Charles de Coulomb" in Biography. Retrieved August 7, 2019 in Biography: biography.com
5. "Charles Augustin de Coulomb" in EcuRed. Retrieved August 7, 2019 in EcuRed: ecured.cu
6. "Charles-Augustin de Coulomb" in EncyclopediaBritannica. Retrieved August 7, 2019 in Encyclopedia Britannica: britannica.com
7. Martínez, N. «Charles de Coulomb and the torsion balance» (January 28, 2011) in rtve. Retrieved August 7, 2019 in rtve: rtve.es