Abstract
FRENCH science has suffered a very great loss in the person of Prof. Gabriel Lippmann, who died at sea on July 13 while returning from Canada, where he had taken part in the mission of Marshal Fayolle. Prof. Lippmann was born in 1845 at Hollerich, in the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, of French parents, who soon after his birth settled in Paris. He passed through the higher normal school, and devoted his life to teaching and research. He became professor of physics at the Faculty of Sciences in Paris in 1878 and director of the laboratory for physical research at the Sor- j bonne in 1886, and was elected a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences in the same year. Of an original and independent mind, Prof. Lippmann left his personal mark on all questions he touched. The philosophical and general side of scientific conceptions claimed his attention particularly, and he saw clearly the connecting links between differing phenomena. His work on electro-capillarity dates from the time when electricians began to see the power and flexibility of the new instrument. He saw at a glance the future of electricity. Every physicist knows his capillary electrometer and the connection he established between the constant of Laplace's formula and the potential difference: but he showed as well how mechanical work could be obtained from an electro-capillary motor. At the time he made these discoveries and stated the principle of the conservation of electricity he published other work in which he played the role of pioneer. In his note in the Comptes rendus of the Paris Academy of Sciences for 1875 on the properties of an electrified water surface, he earthed a mass of water by a wire ending in a Wollaston electrode, and showed that if a stick of rubbed resin was brought near, oxygen was set free at the electrode, while hydrogen remained in. solution. Ostwald, in his "General Chemistry,"begins his treatment of ionic theory with a description of this experiment. On the publication of Rowland's discovery Prof. Lippmann showed, in June, 1879, that the phenomena ought to be reversible and that electricity ought to have inertia. This idea of reversibility was a frequent subject of his thoughts, and he often reverts to it in his celebrated treatise on thermodynamics. Prof. Lippmann also published in 1889 some calculations on induction in resistance free circuits, which twenty years after were confirmed by the experiments of Prof. Kamerlingh Onnes. In 1891 he communicated to i the Academy of Sciences the principles of the discovery with which his name is immediately associated: that is, colour photography by interference. The accurate solution of the problem of the reproduction of colour is thus obtained from the thin laminae which had such an attraction for the mind of Newton. Prof. Lippmann was a man of few words. So long as he was unable to give i to a problem a form which would lead him to a solution satisfactory to himself, those who knew him little might believe him indifferent. He would gather himself together, and in a few words would show how far his thoughts had taken him into the fundamentals of the subject. During the last year of his life he devoted much attention to relativity, and on his last voyage from Havre to New York he spent most of his days discussing it with Prof. Michelson. The work Prof. Lippmann leaves behind him is of capital importance; but it represents only a part of the thoughts of a man of science with views acute and deep whom the search for perfection and a reserved temperament kept far from noise and strife.
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Prof. G. Lippmann, For.Mem.R.S. Nature 107, 788–789 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/107788a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/107788a0