Remember high school physics, the electricity unit, where you (possibly) learned about the coulomb, the unit of electric charge? Well today is Couloumb’s birthday, but he did had nothing to do with establishing the coulomb unit.
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb was born June 14, 1736 in France. When he was little, his family moved to Paris, where he received a top-notch education — and in those days, the best education in the western world was to be had in France.
When he graduated he joined the French army and became an engineer. He stayed in the army for most of his life, designing and building forts and other structures. He didn’t start experimenting with electricity and magnetism until the late 1770s, when he was posted in Paris. He discovered an inverse relationship between electrical force and distance, and went on to find that exactly the same relationship applied to magnetism. The relationship is still known as Couloumb’s Law.
When the French Revolution of 1789 came about, he helped set up the new system of weights and measures the government wanted to adopt. His health had deteriorated, though, mostly thanks to illnesses he had contracted when posted to Martinique in the mid-1760s. He became one of the founding members of the French National Institute, but retired shortly afterward, and died in 1806 at the age of 70.
He never married, and although he spent his life as an army engineer, he continually published scientific papers on everything from friction to electricity. His is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower, and besides the couloumb (which was named in his honor in 1880) and Coulomb’s Law, there are over a dozen other effects, relationships, and values named after him, mostly in electromagnetism. There are also not one but two craters on the moon that bear his name. Possibly the most obscure thing named after him is the Screened Coulomb Potentials Implicit Solvent Model, which is…um…something or other in computer simulations of biological molecules. No, wait, the COULOUMB experiment run at CERN between 1979 and 1985 is definitely more obscure; it…er… “measured the ratio of real to the imaginary part of the forward elastic scattering amplitude.” Feel free to look it up yourself.
In a more down-to-earth vein, Couloumb’s designs for retaining walls are still in use around the world today. There is nothing imaginary about a good retaining wall.
