Physicist and engineer, b. 14 June 1736 (Angoulême, France), d. 23 August 1806 (Paris).
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb came from a wealthy family of the provinces who moved to Paris during his childhood. In Paris Charles-Augustin entered the Collège Mazarin, where he received a good classical grounding in language, literature, and philosophy and the best available teaching in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry and botany.
When his father lost the family's fortune through speculation and his parents separated Coulomb followed his father to Montpellier, hoping to be able to enrol in the École du Génie at Mézi¸res, a college of engineering. After thorough preparation in mathematics he passed the entrance exam in 1760 and graduate in the following year with the rank of lieutenant in the Corps du Génie (Corps of Engineers).
For the next twenty years Coulomb served in the army. From 1764 to 1772 he was in charge of the construction of a new fort in the French colony of Martinique in the West Indies. The years took a heavy toll on his health.
On his return to France Coulomb began scientific studies of physical problems with the help of applied mathematics. His first work, presented to the Académie des Sciences in 1773, was aimed in his own words "to determine, as far as a combination of mathematics and physics will permit, the influence of friction and cohesion in some problems of statics." It showed Coulomb's skills in the application of techniques such as the calculus of variations to the theory of ruptures in masonry piers and earth pressure. His generalised sliding wedge theory of soil mechanics remains in use today in basic engineering practice.
In 1777 Coulomb submitted a paper on the magnetic compass as an entry to the Academy's annual competition and won a share of the prize. His work on friction Théorie des machines simples won him the prize for 1781, and he was elected to the mechanics section of the Academy. This allowed him to move to Paris and devote his time to physical science rather than engineering.
Between 1785 and 1791 Coulomb published seven papers on electricity and magnetism. He developed a theory of attraction and repulsion between bodies of the same and opposite electrical charge and demonstrated experimentally the inverse square law for such forces. These papers constitute the most important achievements of Coulomb's career; they described action between electrical charges at a distance in terms similar to Newton's theory of gravitation based on action between masses at a distance.
When the Revolution began in 1789 Coulomb first took his distance. He retired from the Corps in 1791 and retreated to his country property when the Académie des Sciences was closed in 1793. But his enlightened views were known and soon brought him back into public service. In 1775 Coulomb had already submitted a memoir to the authority in charge of reforming the Corps du Génie and argued that in all public services promotion should be on merit. In 1795 he was elected to the Institut de France, the successor to the Academy, and returned to Paris. From 1802 until his death he was inspector general of public instruction and, in that role, he was mainly responsible for the establishment of the high school system in France.
O'Connor, J. J. and E. F. Robertson (2002) Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland,
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Poisson.html (accessed 1 June 2004)