Andre Marie Ampere Facts
Andre Marie Ampere Facts
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| Interesting Andre Marie Ampere Facts: |
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| From an early age, Ampere had an odd relationship with formal education, as his father subscribed to the teachings of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. |
| Rousseau supported an educational ideal that young students-boys in particular-should first acquire all the learning they could from nature and from their own interests. |
| Ampere therefore spent his childhood out of doors and in his father's well-stocked library, reading and learning all he could. |
| Once he returned to a more formal type of education, he learned Latin and read even further. |
| Due to his access to books on mathematics, he taught himself math and was performing at a high level in the upper mathematics fields as young as twelve years old. |
| While Ampere was still a teenager, his father was executed by guillotine during the French Revolution, only years before Ampere married and took a position as a mathematics teacher. |
| Ampere quickly rose in position and respect as a professor of mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy before being offered the chair of experimental physics at the College de France in 1824. |
| In the 1820s, Ampere began research on electrical currents and the resulting behavior of metals and wires. |
| He demonstrated that two wires would either attract or repel each other, depending on whether their currents were traveling in the same direction or opposite directions. |
| This discovery laid out the whole basis for electrodynamics. |
| His work also formed the foundation of Ampere's Law, which said the identical actions of two lengths of wire through which a current runs is in direct proportion to the lengths of the wires and the strengths of their currents. |
| He applied much of these same discoveries and research to the study of magnetism and the emerging work of electromagnetism. |
| These contributions led to Ampere being considered one of the top researchers in experimental physics in his day. |
| In his honor, the ampere became a standard unit of electrical measurement in 1881, forty-five years after his death. |
| The coulomb, volt, ohm, and watt are also named after scientists who either worked with Ampere or whose work he highly regarded and studied. |
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