Home > Sections > Famous Scientists > André-Marie Ampère
André-Marie Ampère
Life Details
Born: January 20th, 1775. Died: June 10th, 1836.
Introduction
A French physicist famed for founding and naming the term known as electromagnetism. His name was given to the unit for measuring electric current.
Early Life
Born into a prosperous bourgeois family during the height of the French Enlightenment, his father, Jean-Jacques Ampère was a successful merchant.
Inventions
Ampère made the discovery that a wire carrying electric current can attract or repel another wire next to it that's also carrying electric current. He surmised that this attraction is magnetic, but there was not necessarily the need for magnets to be involved.
From this, he formulated Ampère's Law of electromagnetism, and gave the best description of electric current of his time.
Other discoveries made by Ampère was that he proposed the existence of a particle we now know as the electron, found the chemical element flourine, and he also grouped elements by their properties almost 50 years before Dmitri Mendeleev made his periodic table.
His most famous attribute is that the SI unit of electric current, the ampere (commonly known as amps), is named after him.
Later Life & Death
In 1799, Ampère married 25-year-old Catherine-Antionette Carron, who went by the name of Julie. He had a son, Jean-Jacques and named in memory of his beloved father. In 1803, Julie died of abdominal cancer.
In 1806 Ampère married again, to Jeanne-Françoise Potot, which quickly turned out to be a mistake. However, they had a daughter together, Albine, born in 1807. She came to live with her father and younger sister, Josephine after the marraige broke down.
At the age of 61, Ampère caught pneumonia, and he died in the city of Marseilles on June 10th 1836.
