Savart

Felix Savart

Born: 30 June 1791 in Mézières, France
Died: 16 March 1841 in Paris, France

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Savart taught at the Collège de France from 1828, becoming a professor there in 1836. He collaborated with Biot on a theory of magnetism. Magnetic fields produced by electric currents can be calculated using the law discovered in 1820 by Savart in his joint work with Biot. They took magnetism as the fundamental property rather than the Ampère approach which treated it as derived from electric circuits.

Savart also carried out experiments on sound which became important for later students of acoustics. He developed the Savart disk, a device which produced a sound wave of known frequency, using a rotating cog wheel as a measuring device.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Felix Savart, Nouvelle biographie générale (Paris, 1969), 387-389. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996