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Encyclopedia Britannica



PLATEAU, JOSEPH ANTOINE FERDINAND (1801-1883)

This article appears in Volume V21, Page 804 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: PIG-POL
PLATEAU, JOSEPH ANTOINE FERDINAND (1801-1883) , Belgian physicist, was born at Brussels on the 14th of October 18o1, and died on the 15th of September 1883 at
Ghent
 , where he had been professor of physics from 1835. He was a pupil and friend of L. A. J.
Quetelet
 , who had much influence on the early part of his career. The more
original
  investigations of
Plateau
  refer chiefly to portions of one or other of two branches of sciencephysiological optics and molecular forces. We owe to him the " stroboscopic " method of studying the motion of a vibrating
body
 , by looking at it through equidistant radial slits in a revolving disk. In 1829 he imprudently gazed at the midday sun for 20 seconds, with the view of studying the after effects. The result was blindness for some days, succeeded by a temporary recovery; but for the next fourteen years his sight gradually deteriorated, and in 1843 he became permanently blind. This calamity did not interrupt his scientific activity. Aided by his wife and son, and afterwards by his son-in-law G. L. van der Mensbrugghe, he continued to the end of his life his researches on visiondirecting the course of the experiments which they made for him, and interpreting the bearing of the results. He also published a valuable analytical catalogue of all the more important memoirs which had been written, from the earliest times to the end of the 18th century, on his favourite theme of subjective visual phenomena. But even more extra-
ordinary
  were this blind man's investigations about molecular forces, embracing hundreds of novel experiments whose results he saw only with others' eyes. These form the subject of his
great
 
work
  Statique experimentale et theorique des liquides soumis aux seules forces moleculaires (2 vols., 1873), a valuable contribution to our knowledge of capillary phenomena. His son,
Felix
  Auguste Joseph
Plateau
  (b. 1841), became professor of
zoology
  and comparative anatomy at
Ghent
  in 187o.


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