Charles Augustin De Coulomb

Charles Coulomb started a relationship with Louise Francoise LeProust Desormeaux with whom he had two sons. He married her in 1802 after the birth of their second son.

He had always been of a delicate health. His later years were marked by ill health and he died on 23 August 1806.

A lunar feature, ‘Crater Coulomb’ is named after him to honor his contributions to the world.

Charles Coulomb was born on 14 June 1736, in Angouleme, France, to aristocratic parents. His father, Henri Coulomb worked as a lawyer, while his mother Catherine Bajet hailed from a well-established family.

He received good education from the Collège Mazarin and the college de France where he attended lectures in the subjects of philosophy, language, literature, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, etc.

In 1758, he went to Paris to study to acquire admission into the prestigious the École du Genie at Mézières. He was able to pass the entrance exam after some months to secure admission into the college.

He graduated with the rank of lieutenant en premier in the Corps du Génie in 1761.

Coulomb began his career as an engineer with the post of ‘Lieutenant’ in the Corps du Génie. During this time he worked in the fields of structural design, soil mechanics and so on.

He was posted to Brest at first. But later on, in February 1764 he was sent to Martinique in the West Indies. There he was made in charge of building the new Fort Bourbon which took him many years to complete.

The total cost of constructing Fort Bourbon was six million livres, a huge amount in those times. Hundreds of laborers were employed at the construction site and Coulomb directed them through the various phases of construction. This work was very hectic and took a toll on Coulomb’s health and he became very ill.

The practical engineering skills that he acquired during his army construction projects proved quite useful in his later theoretical endeavors in mechanics. He returned to France in 1772 and was posted to Bouchain. By now he also got involved in research and had begun to write his own papers.

In 1773, he presented his first work to the Académie des Sciences in Paris. His first work titled, ‘Sur une application des règles, de maximis et minimis à quelque problèmes de statique, relatifs à l'architecture’, was written to determine the influence of friction and cohesion in some statistical problems.

He is best known for developing Coulomb’s law which he first published in 1785. This law which described the electrostatic interaction between electrically charged particles led to the development of the theory of electromagnetism.