Makers of Electricity

by Brother Potamian; James J. Walsh

[CHAPTER VIII.]
André Marie Ampère.

Few men of the nineteenth century are so interesting as André Marie Ampère, who is, as we have seen, deservedly spoken of as the founder of the science of electro-dynamics. Extremely precocious as a boy, so that, like his immediate predecessor in discovery, Oersted the Dane, his rapid intellectual development drew down upon him ominous expressions from those who knew him, he more than fulfilled the highest promise of his early years. His was no one-sided genius. He was interested in everything, and his memory was as retentive as his intellect was comprehensive. He grew up, indeed, to be a young man of the widest possible interests. Literature never failed to have its attraction for him, though science was his favorite study and mathematics his hobby. The mathematical mind is commonly supposed to run in very precise grooves, yet Ampère was always a speculator, and his speculations were most suggestive for his contemporaries and subsequent generations. Indeed, his mathematics, far from being a hindrance to his penetrating outlook upon the hazier confines of science, rather seemed to help the penetrations it gave. While he was so great a scientist that Arago, so little likely to exaggerate his French contemporary's merit, has said of Ampère's discovery identifying magnetism and electricity, that "the vast field of physical science perhaps never presented so brilliant a discovery, conceived, verified, and completed with such rapidity," his friends knew this great scientist as one of the kindliest and most genial of men, noted for his simplicity, his persuasive sympathy and his tender regard for all those with whom he was brought into intimate relations.

André Marie Ampère

The commonly accepted formula for a great scientist, that he is a man wrapt up in himself and his work, enmeshed so completely in the scientific speculations that occupy him that he has little or no time for great humanitarian interests, so that his human sympathies are likely to atrophy, is entirely contradicted by the life of Ampère. He was no narrow specialist, and, indeed, it may be said that not a single one of these great discoverers in electricity whom we are considering in this volume was of the type that is sometimes accepted as indicative of scientific genius and originality. After reading their lives, one is prone to have the feeling that men who lack that wider sympathy which, in the famous words of the old Latin poet, makes everything human of interest to them, are not of the mental calibre to make supreme discoveries, even though they may succeed in creating a large amount of interest in their scientific speculations in their own generation. It is the all-round man who does supreme original work of enduring quality.

André Marie Ampère was born at Lyons, January 22d, 1775. His father, Jean Jacques Ampère, was a small merchant who made a comfortable living for his family, but no more. His father and mother were both well informed for their class and time, and were well esteemed by their neighbors. His mother especially was known for an unalterable sweetness of character and charitable beneficence which sought out every possible occasion for its exercise. She was universally beloved by those who knew her, and the charm of Ampère's manner, which made for him a friend of every acquaintance, was undoubtedly a manifestation of the same family strain.

Shortly after the birth of their son, the parents gave up business and retired on a little property situated in the country not far from Lyons. It was in this little village, without any school-teacher and with only home instruction, that the genius of the future savant, who was to be one of the distinguished scientific men of the nineteenth century, began to show itself. For Ampère was not only a genius, but, what is so often thought to be an almost absolute preclusion of any serious achievement later in life, a precocious genius. The first marvelous faculty that began to develop in him was an uncontrollable tendency to arithmetical expression. Before he knew how to make figures, he had invented for himself a method of doing even rather complicated problems in arithmetic by the aid of a number of pebbles or peas. During an illness that overtook him as a child, his mother, anxious because of the possible evil effects upon his health of mental work, took his pebbles away from him. He supplied their place, however, during the leisure hours of his convalescence, when time hung heavy on his child hands, by bread crumbs. He craved food, but, according to the "starving" medical régime of the time, he was allowed only a single biscuit in three days. It required no little self-sacrifice on his part, then, to supply himself with counters from this scanty supply, and his persistence, in spite of hunger, evidently indicates that this mathematical tendency was stronger than his appetite for food. This is all the more surprising, since children are usually scarcely more than little animals in the matter of eating, and commonly satisfy their physical cravings without an after-thought of any kind.

Ampère learned to read when but very young, and then began to devour all the books which came to hand. Usually, the precocious taste for reading specializes on some particular subject; but everything was grist that came to the child Ampère's mental mill, and it was all ground up; and, strangest of all, much of it was assimilated. Travel, history, poetry, occupied him quite as much as romance; and, amazing as it may appear, even philosophy was not disdained while he was still under ten years of age. It seems amusing to read the declaration of the French biographer, that if this boy of ten had any special predilection in literature, it was for Homer, Lucan, Tasso, Fénelon, Corneille and Voltaire, yet it must be taken seriously.

When he was about fifteen, this omnivorous intellectual genius came across a French encyclopedia in twenty folio volumes. This seemed to him a veritable Golconda of endless riches of information. Each of the volumes had its turn. The second was begun as soon as the first was finished, and the reading of the third followed, and so on, until every one of the volumes had been completely read. References to other volumes might be looked up occasionally, but this did not distract him into taking other portions of the works out of alphabetical order. Surprising as it must seem, most of this heterogeneous mass of information, far from being forgotten at once, was deeply engraved on his wonderful memory. More than once in after-life, when many years had passed, it was a surprise to his friends to find how much information Ampère had amassed on some abstruse and unfamiliar subject, and how readily he was able to pour forth details of information that seemed quite out of his line. He would then confess that the encyclopedia article on the subject, read so many years before, was still fresh in his mind, or at least that its information was so stored away as to be readily available. We have heard much of Gladstone's memory in more recent years; but that seems to have been nothing compared to this wonderful faculty which recalled for Ampère, even as an old man, the unrelated details of every encyclopedia article that had passed under his eyes half a century before, when he was a boy of ten to fourteen.