224 GREAT MEN OF SCIENCE 



which he had pursued. At that time also, he wrote poetry. 

 His marriage at the age of twenty-four then gave his Hfe a 

 definite direction again; he settled in Lyons, where he taught 

 mathematics. He later became professor of physics and 

 chemistry at a school in Bourg (north of Lyons); but his 

 family, on account of the serious ijlness of his wife, was not 

 able to follow him thither; he soon lost her, after only four 

 years of marriage. A mathematical work of his then led to 

 an appointment in Paris, where he gradually rose to the 

 highest scientific posts. 



Oersted's discovery thereafter decided the direction in 

 which his gift for scientific research was to develop. In a 

 short time he unfolded the astonishingly fertile activity 

 which resulted in the creation of the main part of electro- 

 dynamics (the science of moving electricity). While 

 Galvani and Volta supplied the means for this develop- 

 ment, and Oersted showed a main road to its application, 

 Ampere gave this application - which led to electro- 

 magnetism - a fixed form which is serviceable to-day, and 

 forms the main part of its content; only Faraday was later 

 able to add to it something new and important, both in form 

 and matter. Ampere died, sixteen years after Oersted's 

 discovery, at the age of sixty-one. He, like Fresnel, was 

 obviously of a diflPerent nature from the majority of his col- 

 leagues in the Academy; this is shown by various traits of 

 character, which his contemporary biographers regarded as 

 peculiar,^ and also by the fact that he, probably alone in the 

 Academy, did not trust the idea of caloric, and also in his 

 wide sympathy for all fundamental questions of natural 

 science, even when they related to ideas, at that time re- 

 garded as very far fetched, concerning the evolution of living 

 creatures. 



^ Arago, Oeuvres, Tome II. Notices biographiques, 1854. A some- 

 what earlier and good biography is found in the Revue des deux mondes, 

 vol. ix, page 389, 1837. 



