The World Renown Physicist, Léon Foucault.
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Who is Léon Foucault?
Léon Foucault was a French physicist. Foucault discovered and invented many things but he is most known for his invention of the Foucault pendulum, a simple devise formulated as an experiment to show the Earth’s rotation. Whilst the earth’s rotation was well known, when the Foucault pendulum was presented in 1851, it became an easy to see and simple proof that the earth did indeed rotate.
The Foucault pendulum, in modern days, is a frequent showing in museums and universities. Léon Foucault also did an early measurement of the speed of light.
What did Léon Foucault do?
Léon Foucault was born on September 18th, 1819. He was the son of a publisher in Paris. Léon Foucault studied medicine for awhile but shortly afterwards he abandoned it and moved to physics due to his phobia of blood. Foucault first directed his attention to the improvement of Louis Daguerre’s Photographic processes. Also for three years Foucault was an experimental assistant for Alfred Donné, in his run of lectures on microscopic anatomy.
In 1850, Léon Foucault & Hippolyte Fizeau (another French physicist) did an experiment, using the Fizeau–Foucault apparatus (a devise for measuring light), to measure the speed of light! The experiment became known as the Foucault-Fizeau experiment. It was viewed and said as “driving the last nail into the coffin” of Newton’s theory on light, when it showed that light travels faster through the air than through water.
In 1851 Léon Foucault presented the Foucault pendulum, like I previously said, but here is a video on how the Foucault pendulum works.
On February 11th, 1968 Léon Foucault died of what was said to be a rapidly developing case of multiple sclerosis, a disease that causes damage to the nerves in the brain and spinal cord. Foucault was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery. He was 48 years old.
What do I Think of Léon Foucault?
Léon Foucault sounds like a great man, and he was an important participant in the history of science. Today it is Léon Foucault’s 194th birthday….. happy birthday!
This blog was written by my son, Jesse Ranson.