Arago Geophysicist and Meteorologist

Lequeux, James

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-20723-0_9

James Lequeux³

Part of the book series: Astrophysics and Space Science Library ((ASSL,volume 421))

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Abstract

A polar aurora. Wikimedia Commons, US Air Force Zarex

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Notes

1.
*Comptes rendus de l’Académie des sciences (1854) 38, p. 1039.
2.
*Comptes rendus de l’Académie des sciences (1835) 1, p. 380–410.
3.
La Bonite was not an oceanographic ship, but had “as a special mission to carry consular agents to the most remote points of the globe.” She even went to Hawaii, an exceptional destination for a French ship.
4.
Philosophical transactions (1666) 2, p. 433–448, accessible via http://www.jstor.org/stable/101197.
5.
*Arago, F. Œuvres complètes, t. 9, p. 433–488. The expedition was to the Antarctic from 1837 to 1840; Dumont d’Urville discovered Terre Adélie during this trip, a non-negligible feat.
6.
*Comptes rendus de l’Académie des sciences (1838) 7, p. 206–224.
7.
See Lequeux (2013), chapter 9.
8.
*Annuaire du Bureau des longitudes pour 1838, p. 221–614; *Arago, F. Œuvres complètes, t. 4 p. 1–404.
9.
*Arago, F. Œuvres complètes, t. 11 p. 619–653.
10.
Wells (1814), This book was analyzed by Arago in *Annales de Chimie et de Physique 5 (1817) p. 183–216; he added interesting details.
11.
*Arago, F. Œuvres complètes, t. 8, p. 83–146.
12.
Ibid, p. 120–124.
13.
*Arago, F. Astronomie populaire t. 3, p. 497–503.
14.
*Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences 7 (1827), p. 569–604.
15.
*Annuaire du Bureau des longitudes pour 1846, p. 574–608, see p. 595 and 606.
16.
*Arago, F. Œuvres complètes, t. 10, p. 548–560.
17.
*Arago, F. Œuvres complètes, t. 10, p. 282–289.
18.
*Annales de Chimie et de Physique 29 (1825), p. 77.
19.
For a history of magnetic observations at the Paris Observatory from 1667 to 1872, see Rayet, G. (1876) Annales de l’Observatoire de Paris, Mémoires, 13, p. A.*1–A.*40, accessible via http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/iarticle_query?journal=AnPar&volume=0013&type=SCREEN_THMB.
20.
*Arago, F. Œuvres complètes, t. 4, p. 459–541.
21.
It made little sense at this time to try to give an absolute value to the magnetic field; its unit was only defined at the end of the 1830s by the German physicists Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) and Wilhelm Weber (1804–1891).
22.
*Annales de Chimie et de Physique 44 (1830), p. 231–243, see p. 238.
23.
*Arago, F. Œuvres complètes t. 4, p. 571–594, see p. 571.
24.
*Annales de Chimie et de Physique 39 (1828) p. 369–390, see p. 390.
25.
*Arago, F. Œuvres complètes, t. 8, p. 184–652.
26.
*Comptes rendus de l’Académie des sciences 19 (1844) p. 1327–1331.
27.
*Connaissance des temps pour 1823, p. 245–257 and 324–327.
28.
There was another motivation for Arago: As the unit of length was then defined from the size of the Earth, its contraction would cause a problem, so that another way of defining the meter would be welcome. As written by Tisserand (1893) p. 6: “Arago thought that from a thorough study of the light coming from the Sun or from stars one could find a more constant unit of length, no more related to the Earth but rather to celestial bodies, a sidereal meter.” This meant that the unit of length had to be related to the wavelength of some atomic transition, or to the velocity of light: actually, this is what has been done in the successive new definitions of the meter of 1960 and 1975.
29.
*Arago, F. Œuvres complètes, t. 5, p. 635–644.
30.
Œuvres complètes, t. 9, p. 52–66.
31.
Humboldt (1816), p. 73, wrote, “Weak winds acting continuously in a large zone like the trade winds cause a translation motion of the sea that we do not observe in the strongest storms, because they act only in a small area.”
32.
The HMS Challenger, an adapted cruiser of the Royal Navy that sailed through the globe from 1870 to 1876, was however the first ship entirely devoted to oceanography.

References

Le Mouël, J.-L. (2006) Arago et le magnétisme terrestre, in Arago, Journée scientifique du Bureau des longitudes, Académie des Sciences, Paris, p. 23-32.
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*Humboldt, A. de (1816) Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent, 4 t., Schoell, Paris, et Librairie grecque – latine – allemande, Paris.
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Paris Observatory, Paris, France
James Lequeux

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Lequeux, J. (2016). Arago Geophysicist and Meteorologist. In: François Arago. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 421. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20723-0_9

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