Claude Pouillet

Claude Pouillet

Claude Servais Mathias Pouillet
Born 16 February 1790
Cusance
Died 14 June 1868 (aged 78)
Paris

Claude Servais Mathias Pouillet (16 February 1790 14 June 1868) was a French physicist and a professor of physics at the Sorbonne and member of the French Academy of Science. Succeeding Dulong, he became the fourth holder of the chair of physics at Polytechnique for a brief period of time (1830-1831) but chose to resign, citing health reasons. He was succeeded by César Despretz in 1831 and Gabriel Lamé in 1832.

The Pouillet effect was named after the phenomenon that he published in 1822 on the heat produced by the wetting of dry sand.

He developed a pyrheliometer and made, between 1837 and 1838, the first quantitative measurements of solar constant. His estimate was 1228 W/m2, very close to the current estimate of 1367 W/m2. Using the wrong Dulong-Petit law he estimated the temperature of the Sun's surface to be around 1800 °C. This value was corrected in 1879 to 5430 °C by Jožef Stefan (1835–1893).

Pouillet works include:

Svante Arrhenius (1896) cited a great deal of Pouillet's work.

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