Abstract
AMONG the less well known of the remarkable group of French men of science who lived through the Revolutionary period was Alexis-Marie Rochon, astronomer, physicist and mechanician, who was born at Brest on February 21, 1741, and died on April 5, 1817. Three years before his death, in August 1814, when Napoleon was an exile in Elba and Wellington was the British ambassador in Paris, Brewster, then aged thirty-two, visited Rochon in Paris, and in his diary for August 22 recorded, “I went this morning to call upon M. Rochon… a venerable and intelligent old man of seventy-three, who is well known to philosophers by his scientific works and inventions. He showed me his prismatic micrometer, a small instrument, with a level for measuring the inclination of lines to the horizon by the coincidence of two images, and his method of doubling the double refraction of Iceland crystal by extinguishing two of the images and employing two that are most remote.…”
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Alexis-Marie Rochon (1741–1817). Nature 147, 205 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/147205b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/147205b0