Augustin-Jean Fresnel

Fresnel came from a religious background. His family members were the followers of Catholic bishop, Cornelius Otto Jansen, and followed his ideology called the Jansensist values.

Fresnel suffered from poor health all his life and was often exhausted due to overwork. However, in spite of all this, he continued to perform his experiments and researches with great passion and determination throughout his life.

He passed away on July 14, 1827 after suffering from tuberculosis for a brief period.

Born on May 10, 1788, Augustin-Jean Fresnel was son of Jacques Fresnel and Augustine Merimee. His father was an architect.

He was a slow learner as a child and was unable to read even when he was eight years old. He began his education in Ecole Centrale in Caen, after which he went to Ecole Polytechnique for higher secondary education and finally to Ecole des Ponts et Chausses, so that he could become a Civil Engineer.

After graduation, Fresnel served for a short term as an army engineer but was decommissioned in 1814, as he supported Bourbons.

Fresnel began his research on optics in 1814. He conducted experiments and observations using his devices to study diffraction and interference fringes, which led him to believe that the ‘wave theory of light’ proposed by English physicist, Thomas Young, was right.

He presented his findings on the aberration of light to the French Academy of Sciences in 1815; though appreciated, the paper was never published. The same year, he was appointed as an engineer in Paris and spent most of his life there.

In 1816, Fresnel extended the work of Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens and showed that Huygens' principle, together with his own principle of interference could explain both the rectilinear propagation of light and also diffraction effects.

He pioneered the construction of a unique kind of lens that replaced the use of mirrors in lighthouses and increased their functionality.

Augustin-Jean Fresnel invented the Fresnel lens for lighthouses, a type of compact lens that can be made much thinner than a comparable conventional lens. A Fresnel lens can capture more oblique light from a light source as they can be constructed with large aperture and short focal length.