With all his solid piety, this man was not so distant from ordinary worldly affairs as not to take a lively interest in all that was happening around him and, above all, all that concerned the welfare of men. He was especially enthusiastic for the freedom of the South American Republics, eagerly following the course of Bolivar and Canaris, and rejoicing at the success of their efforts. South American patriots visiting Paris found a warm welcome at his hands, and also introductions that made life pleasant for them at the French capital. His house was always open to them, and no service that he performed for them seemed too much.
Ampère was beloved by his family and his friends; he was perhaps the best liked man among his circle of acquaintances in Paris because of the charming geniality of his character and his manifold interests. He was kind, above all, to rising young men in the intellectual world around him, and was looked up to by many of them as almost a second father. His charity towards the poor was proverbial, and this side of his personality and career deserves to be studied quite as much as what he was able to accomplish for science. The beauty of his character was rooted deeply in the religion that he professed, and in our day, when it has come to be the custom for so many to think that science and faith are inalterably opposed, the lesson of this life, so deeply imbued with both of these great human interests, deserves to be studied. Ozanam, who knew him best, has brought out this extremely interesting union of intellectual qualities, in a passage that serves very well to sum up the meaning of Ampère's life.
"In addition to his scientific achievements," says Ozanam, "this brilliant genius has other claims upon our admiration and affection. He was our brother in the faith. It was religion which guided the labors of his mind and illuminated his contemplations; he judged all things, science itself, by the exalted standard of religion.... This venerable head which was crowned by achievements and honors, bowed without reserve before the mysteries of faith, down even below the line which the Church has marked for us. He prayed before the same altars before which Descartes and Pascal had knelt; beside the poor widow and the small child who may have been less humble in mind than he was. Nobody observed the regulations of the Church more conscientiously, regulations which are so hard on nature and yet so sweet in the habit. Above all things, however, it is beautiful to see what sublime things Christianity wrought in his great soul; this admirable simplicity, the unassumingness of a mind that recognized everything except its own genius; this high rectitude in matters of science, now so rare, seeking nothing but the truth and never rewards and distinction; the pleasant and ungrudging amiability; and lastly, the kindness with which he met everyone, especially young people. I can say that those who know only the intelligence of the man, know only the less perfect part. If he thought much, he loved more."
[CHAPTER IX.]
Ohm, the Founder of Mathematical Electricity.
Lord Kelvin, himself one of the greatest of the electrical scientists of the nineteenth century, in commenting some years ago on Ohm's law, said that it was such an extremely simple expression of a great truth in electricity, that its significance is probably not confined to that department of physical phenomena, but that it is a law of nature in some much broader way. Re-echoing this expression of his colleague, Professor George Chrystal, of Edinburgh, in his article on electricity in the Encyclopedia Britannica (IX. edition), says that Ohm's law "must now be allowed to rank with the law of gravitation and the elementary laws of statical electricity as a law of nature in the strictest sense." In a word, to these leaders and teachers in physical science of the generation after his, though within a comparatively short time after Ohm's death, there has come the complete realization of the absolutely fundamental character of the discovery made by George Simon Ohm, when he promulgated the principle that a current of electricity is to be measured by the electromotive force, divided by the resistance in the circuit. The very simplicity of this expression is its supreme title to represent a great discovery in natural science. It is the men who reach such absolutely simple formulæ for great fundamental truths that humanity has come, and rightly, to consider as representing its greatest men in science.
Like most of the distinguished discoverers in science who have displayed marked originality, Ohm came from what is usually called the lower classes, his ancestors having had to work for their living for as long as the history of the family can be traced. His father was a locksmith, and succeeded his father at the trade. The head of the family for many generations had been engaged at this handicraft. The first of them of whom there is any definite record was Ohm's great-grandfather, Wilhelm Ohm, who was a locksmith at Westerholt, not far from Münster, in Westphalia. Wilhelm Ohm's son, Johann Vincent, the grandfather of the great electrician, during his years as a journeyman locksmith had spent some time in France, and subsequently settled down in Kadolzburg, a small suburb of Erlangen, in Bavaria. In 1764, he obtained the position of locksmith to the University of Erlangen, and became a citizen of that municipality. Both of his sons followed the trade of their father.
The elder of these, Johann Wolfgang, worked at his trade as a journeyman in a number of the small cities of Germany, and only after ten years of absence in what, because of the independent condition of the States now known as the German Empire, were then considered foreign parts, did he wander back to his native place. On his return he received the mastership in his craft, and shortly after, about 1786, married a young woman named Beck. George Simon Ohm, the electrical scientist, was the first child of this marriage, and was born March 16th, 1789. A second son, born three years later, also became distinguished in after-life for his mathematical ability. This younger brother, after having filled a number of teaching positions in various German educational institutions, was called as professor of mathematics to Berlin, where he died in 1862.
While their father, Johann Wolfgang Ohm, followed his trade of locksmith for a living, like many another handicraftsman, he had many mental interests which he cultivated in leisure hours, and doubtless dwelt on while his hands were occupied with the mere routine work of his trade. It is curiously interesting to find that he devoted himself, during the hours he could spare from his occupation, to two such diverse intellectual occupations as mathematics and Kant's philosophy; but they had no newspapers in those days, and a man, even of the artisan class, had some time for serious mental occupation. It might be thought, under these circumstances, that he would be but the most passing of amateurs in either of these subjects, and have a very superficial knowledge of them. This probably was true for his philosophy fad, for there are not many who have ever thought themselves more than amateurs in Kantism, and even Kant himself, I believe, thought that only one scholar ever really understood his system, and subsequently said he had some doubts even about that one; but in mathematics, the elder Ohm seems to have attained noteworthy success.
Hofrath Langsdorff, who was the professor of mathematics at Erlangen during the last decade of the eighteenth century, and who was called to Heidelberg in 1804, a fact that would seem quite enough to set beyond all question that his opinion in this matter may be taken as that of a competent judge, declared that the elder Ohm's mathematical knowledge was far above the ordinary, and that he knew much more than the elements even of the higher mathematics. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the father should have tried to encourage in both his boys a taste for mathematics, nor that he should have taken their mathematical instruction into his own hands and succeeded in making excellent mathematicians of them, even in their early years. He was so successful in this, indeed, that Langsdorff, after a five-hour examination of the brothers when they were respectively 12 and 15, did not hesitate to declare that the Erlangen locksmith's family was likely to be remembered as containing a pair of brothers who, for success in mathematics, might rival the famous Bernoulli brothers, so well known at that time.