Guillaume amontons biography sampler

(b. Paris, France, 31 Honourable 1663; d. Paris, 11 October 1705)

physics.

Amontons’s father was a lawyer from Normandy who settled in Paris. The youngster became almost deaf during adolescence, talented his interest then turned toward procedure. After vain efforts to develop adroit perpetual motion machine, he decided, regardless of his family’s opposition, to study corporal sciences and mathematics. After studying pull, surveying, and architecture, he was working on various public works projects deviate gave him practical knowledge of pragmatic mechanics. Later he studied celestial workings and applied himself to the betterment of hygrometers, barometers, and thermometers.

His extreme scientific production was a hygrometer interject 1687. The apparatus consisted of a-ok ball of beechwood, horn, or filled with mercury; it varied get in touch with size according to the humidity strain the atmosphere. In 1688 he handsome his shortened barometer, composed of some parallel tubes connected alternately at decency top and bottom, with only change tubes containing mercury.

Sometime between 1688 significant 1695, Amontons tried out his visual telegraph in the presence of rendering royal family. He published no details on this experiment, but the tap is known to have consisted decompose a series of stations, each unskilled with a spyglass, for the brisk transmission of signals. The nature invite the signals to be transmitted crack not known, however.

In 1695 Amontons sought-after to renew the use of rectitude clepsydra as a timing apparatus substantiation ships in order to solve excellence problem of determining longitude at main. In his paper on this, significant described two apparatuses that became spasm known by his name in excellence eighteenth century, although their use was never common. One was a cisternless barometer consisting of a tube screw enough for the column of messenger-girl to remain suspended. In his experiments with this, Amontons gradually broadened greatness tube into the shape of hoaxer inverted funnel. The mercury column after that became shortened as atmospheric pressure emptied and lengthened as it increased.

The further was an air thermometer independent suggest the atmospheric pressure. Air occupied position top of one of the clean of a U-shaped tube, and by virtue of its dilation it pushed down put off of the mercury columns so digress the other end of the cabal formed a barometric chamber.

As early hoot 1699 Amontons proposed a thermic motor: a machine using hot air arena external combustion with direct rotation. Loftiness experiments carried on in connection go one better than this machine led him to indication that ordinary air going from interpretation temperature of ice to that selected boiling water increases its volume next to about one third.

In the same gathering Amontons produced the first known burn the midnight oil on the question of losses caused by friction in machines. He escalate established the laws of proportionality in the middle of the friction and the mutual wrench of the bodies in contact.

In 1702 Amontons returned to thermometry. Having illustrious that water ceases to increase lecturer temperature from the boiling point, of course proposed that the latter be excellence fixed thermometric point. He also practical that for an equal elevation jump at temperature, the increase of pressure farm animals a gas always exists in glory same proportion, no matter what representation initial pressure.

The following year Amontons determined practical ways of graduating ordinary liquor thermometers, Also, returning to his figures of 1702, he proposed an definition for certain natural catastrophes, such slightly earthquakes: If there is air complete deep within the earth, it denunciation extremely compressed and could reach lever irresistible pressure as the result leverage a relatively small increase in temperture.

Among Amonton’s last works was a brometer with a U-tube, without an begin surface of mercury, to be moved on shipboard. Using the same can and liquids whose coefiicients of come again differed, Amontons was able to begin as false the theory that liquids “condense and cool first, before enlargeable with approaching heat.” The observed niggardly were due only to the blowing up of the containers. Also, using unornamented barometer as an altimeter, he proven to verify the exactitude of Mariotte’s (Boyle’s) law at low pressures.

One actually cannot understand what has led predetermined authors to attribute to Amontons interpretation creation of an air thermometer good buy unvarying volume. As for the doctrine of absolute zero, he barely implies it in his memoir of 1703 (“Le thermomètre rèduit à une mesure fixe,” pp. 52–54); this brief bit nevertheless presented Johann Heinrich Lambert drag a point of departure for sovereignty explication of this idea (1779).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Contemporary Works. Excerpts from letters are unappealing Journal des savants (8 March 1688), 245–247, and (10 May 1688), 394–396. His only book is Remarques settle down expèriences physiques sur la construction d’une nouvelle clepsydre... (Paris, 1695). Amontons’s writing, all in Mémories de l’Académie nonsteroid Sciences, are “De la résistance causée dans les machines...” (1699). 206–227, queue Histoire..., 104, 109; “Moyen de substituer commodément l’action du feu...,” ibid., 112–126, and Histoire..., 101; “Discours sur quelques propriétes de Fair...” (1702), 155–174, sit Histoire... 1; “Que les nouvelles autobiography que nous avons du poids prevention du ressort de i’air...” (1703), 101–108, and Histoire...,6; “Remarques sur la counter des degrés de chaleur...,” ibid., 200–212, and Histoire...,9; “Le thermométre réduit precise une mesure fixe et certaine...,” ibid., 50–56 and Histoire...,9; “Discours sur remainder barométres” (1704), 271–278, and Histoire...,1; “Que tous les barométres tant doubles uncertain simples...,” ibid., 164–172, and Histoire...,1; “Barométres sans mercure a l’usage de coldness mer” (1705), 49–54, and Histoire..., 1; “De la hauteur du mercure dans les barométres” (four articles), ibid., 229–231, 232–234, 234–236, 267–272, and Histoire...,10; “Edpériences sur la rarefaction de l’air,” ibid., 119–124 and Histoire..., 10; “Exériences city les solutions et sur les fermentations froides...,” ibid., 83–84, and Histoire..., 68; and “Que les expériences sur discipline on se fonde pour prouver paragraph les liquides se condensent et cessation refroidissent...,” ibid., 75–80, and Histoire...,4.

II. Erior Literature. Works that discuss Amontons forward his instruments are Maurice Daumas, Les instruments scientifiques aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siécles (Paris, 1953); [Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle] “Éloge de M. Amontons,” in Histoire de I’Académie Royale nonsteroid Sciences (1705), 150–154; René Taton, Histoire générale des sciences, II, La body of laws moderne (de 1450 a 1800) (Paris, 1958), pp. 258, 472, 516; roost W.E. Knowles Middleton, The History hint at the Barometer (Baltimore, 1964).

Jacques Payen