Charles-Augustin de Coulomb

Biography

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France. He studied at the Paris School of Engineering in Mézières, after which he served as a military engineer in the West Indies. Returning to France, he held various engineering positions and worked on fortification construction. In 1781 he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences. During the Revolution, he retired to Blois, where he continued his scientific research. His main work—memoirs on electricity and magnetism—was published between 1785 and 1789. He also studied friction, the stiffness of threads, and the operation of windmills.

Key discoveries

• Coulomb's law: the force of electrostatic interaction between two point charges is proportional to the product of the charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
• Experiments with the torsion balance to measure small forces, enabling quantitative investigation of electrical and magnetic interactions.
• Research on friction and adhesion in mechanics, establishing laws of dry friction.
• Work on the theory of elasticity, calculation of torsion of wires and threads.