Plane of polarization
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Augustin-Jean Fresnel | |
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Born | |
Died | 14 July 1827 | (aged 39)
Cause of death | of Tuberculosis |
Resting place | Père Lachaise Cemetery |
Nationality | French |
Education |
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Known for | |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Physics, Engineering |
Institutions |
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Augustin-Jean Fresnel (/freɪˈnɛl/, fray-NEL; Template:IPA-fr; 10 May 1788 – 14 July 1827) was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost universal acceptance of the wave theory of light, and the rejection of any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the 1830s[2] until the end of the 19th century.
But he is perhaps better known for inventing the catadioptric (reflective/refractive) Fresnel lens and for pioneering the use of "stepped" lenses to extend the visibility of lighthouses, saving unknown numbers of lives at sea. The simpler dioptric (purely refractive) stepped lens, first proposed by Count Buffon[3] and independently reinvented by Fresnel, is used in screen magnifiers and in condenser lenses for overhead projectors.
By expressing Huygens' principle of secondary waves and Young's principle of interference in quantitative terms, and supposing that simple colors consist of sinusoidal waves, Fresnel gave the first satisfactory explanation of diffraction by straight edges, including the first explanation of rectilinear propagation that would satisfy a modern physicist.[4] By further supposing that light waves are purely transverse, he explained the nature of polarization and lack thereof, the mechanism of chromatic polarization (the colors produced when polarized light is passed through a slice of doubly-refractive crystal followed by a second polarizer), and the transmission and reflection coefficients at a boundary between transparent isotropic media (including Brewster's angle). Then, by generalizing the relationship between wave speed and polarization for calcite, he accounted for the directions and polarizations of the refracted rays in doubly-refractive crystals of the biaxial class (those for which Huygens' secondary wavefronts are not axisymmetric). The period between the first publication of his pure-transverse-wave hypothesis and the presentation of his solution to the biaxial problem was less than a year. Later, by allowing the reflection coefficient to be complex, he accounted for the change in polarization due to total internal reflection, as exploited in the Fresnel rhomb. Defenders of the established corpuscular theory could not match his quantitative explanations of so many phenomena on so few assumptions.
Fresnel's legacy is the more remarkable in view of his lifelong battle with tuberculosis, to which he succumbed at the age of 39. Although he did not become a public celebrity in his short lifetime, he lived just long enough to receive due recognition from his peers, including (on his deathbed) the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society of London, and his name recurs frequently in the modern terminology of optics and waves.
Inevitably, after the wave theory of light was subsumed by Maxwell's electromagnetic theory in the 1860s and '70s, the magnitude of Fresnel's contribution was somewhat obscured. In the period between Fresnel's unification of physical optics and Maxwell's wider unification, a contemporary authority, Professor Humphrey Lloyd, described Fresnel's transverse-wave theory as "the noblest fabric which has ever adorned the domain of physical science, Newton's system of the universe alone excepted."[5]
Early life

"Augustin Fresnel, engineer of Bridges and Roads, member of the Academy of Sciences, creator of lenticular lighthouses, was born in this house on 10 May 1788. The theory of light owes to this emulator of Newton the highest concepts and the most useful applications."[6][9]
Family
Augustin-Jean Fresnel (also called Augustin Jean or simply Augustin), born in Broglie, Normandy, on 10 May 1788, was the second of four sons of the architect Jacques Fresnel (1755–1805)[10] and his wife Augustine, née Mérimée (1755?–1833).[11] In 1790, following the Revolution, Broglie became part of the département of Eure. The family moved twice — in 1790 to Cherbourg,[12] and in 1794[13]: 166 to Jacques' home town of Mathieu, where Madame Fresnel remained as a widow,[14]: 590 outliving two of her sons.
The first son, Louis (1786–1809), was admitted to the École Polytechnique, became a lieutenant in the artillery, and was killed at Jaca, Spain, the day before his 23rd birthday.[11] The third, Léonor (1790–1869),[10] followed Augustin into civil engineering, succeeded him as Secretary of the Lighthouse Commission,[15] and helped to edit his collected works.[16] The fourth, Fulgence Fresnel (1795–1855), became a noted linguist, diplomat, and orientalist, and occasionally assisted Augustin with negotiations.[17]
Their mother's brother Jean François "Léonor" Mérimée (1757–1836),[11] father of the writer Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870), was a paint artist who turned his attention to the chemistry of painting. He became the permanent secretary of the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) and a professor at the École polytechnique, and was the initial point of contact between Augustin and the leading optical physicists of the day (see below).
Education
Augustin and his brothers were initially home-schooled by their mother. Augustin, a sickly child, was considered the slow one, hardly beginning to read until the age of eight. At ten he was undistinguished except for his ability to turn tree-branches into toy bows and cannon that worked far too well, earning himself the title l'homme de génie (the man of genius) from his accomplices, and a united crackdown from their elders.[18][14]: 590–91
In 1801, Augustin was sent to the École centrale at Caen, as company for Louis. But Augustin lifted his performance: in 1804 he was accepted into the École Polytechnique, being placed 17th in the entrance examination, in which his solutions to geometry problems impressed the examiner, Adrien-Marie Legendre. As the surviving records of the École Polytechnique begin in 1808, we know little of Augustin Fresnel's time there, except that he apparently excelled in geometry and drawing — in spite of continuing poor health — and made few if any friends. Graduating in 1806, he then enrolled at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (National School of Bridges and Roads, also known as "ENPC" or "École des Ponts"), from which he graduated in 1809, entering the service of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées as an ingénieur ordinair aspirant (ordinary engineer in training). Directly or indirectly, the "Corps des Ponts" would be his sole or main employer for the rest of his life.[19][20][14]: 591–2,601
Religious formation
Fresnel's parents were Roman Catholics of the Jansenist sect, characterized by an extreme Augustinian view of original sin. In the home-schooling that the boys received from their mother, religion took first place. In 1802, Mme Fresnel wrote to Louis concerning Augustin:
I pray God to give my son the grace to employ the great talents, which he has received, for his own benefit, and for the God of all. Much will be asked from him to whom much has been given, and most will be required of him who has received most.[21]: 147
Augustin Fresnel remained a Jansenist.[22] He indeed regarded his intellectual talents as a gift from God, and considered it his duty to use them for the benefit of others.[21]: 148 Plagued by poor health, and determined to do his duty before death thwarted him, he shunned pleasures and worked to the point of exhaustion.[13]: 166 According to his fellow engineer Alphonse Duleau, who helped to nurse him through his final illness, Fresnel saw the study of nature as part of the study of the power and goodness of God. He placed virtue above science and genius. Yet in his last days he needed "strength of soul," not against death alone, but against "the interruption of discoveries… of which he hoped to derive useful applications."[21]: 148–9n Although Jansenism is considered heretical by the Roman Catholic Church, the brief article on Fresnel in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1909) does not mention his Jansenism, but describes him as "a deeply religious man and remarkable for his keen sense of duty."[1]
Engineering assignments
He served as an engineer successively in the departments of Vendée, Drôme and Ille-et-Vilaine; but his espousal of the cause of the Bourbons in 1814 occasioned, on Napoleon’s reaccession to power, the loss of his appointment. On the second restoration he obtained a post as engineer in Paris.[19]
During the Hundred Days he was persona non grata, but after Waterloo he returned to Paris to his former occupation.[23]
Contributions to physical optics
Historical context
Interference
In connexion with his study of the theory and phenomena of diffraction and interference he devised his double mirrors and biprism in order to obtain two sources of light independent of apertures or the edges of opaque obstacles.[1]
Diffraction
In 1818 he read a memoir on diffraction for which in the ensuing year he received the prize of the Académie des Sciences at Paris.[24]
The Fresnel diffraction equation is an approximation of Kirchhoff-Fresnel diffraction that can be applied to the propagation of waves in the near field.[25] It is used to calculate the diffraction pattern created by waves passing through an aperture or around an object, when viewed from relatively close to the object. In contrast the diffraction pattern in the far field region is given by the Fraunhofer diffraction equation.
Polarization
Partial reflection
reflectivity, reflection coefficient, Fresnel equations, computer graphics, rendering of water.
Circularly polarized light he obtained by means of a rhomb of glass, known as "Fresnel’s rhomb", having obtuse angles of 126°, and acute angles of 54°.[19]
Double refraction
and by modeling the medium as an array of particles subject to restoring forces, with simplifying assumptions inspired by sound waves,
Ether drag
His first memoir (1814) was a demonstration of the phenomenon of the stellar aberration.[26]
aberration of light, not published; aether drag hypothesis
Reception
Lighthouses and the Fresnel lens
Prior art
Fresnel was not the first person to focus a lighthouse beam using a lens. That distinction apparently belongs to the London glasscutter Thomas Rogers, who proposed the idea to Trinity House in 1788.[27] The first Rogers lenses, 53cm in diameter and 14cm thick at the center, were installed at the Old Lower Lighthouse at Portland Bill in 1789.[28] Further samples followed at Howth Baily, North Foreland, and at least four other locations.[27] But much of the light was wasted by absorption in the glass.

Nor was Fresnel the first to suggest replacing a convex lens with a series of concentric annular prisms, to reduce weight and absorption. In 1748, Count Buffon proposed grinding such prisms as steps in a single piece of glass.[3] In 1790[30] (although secondary sources give the date as 1773[31]: 609 or 1788[32]), the Marquis de Condorcet suggested that it would be easier to make the annular sections separately and assemble them on a frame; but even that was impractical at the time.[33][34] These designs were intended not for lighthouses,[3] but for burning glasses.[31]: 609 Brewster, however, proposed a system similar to Condorcet's in 1811,[3][26][32] and by 1820 was advocating its use in British lighthouses.[35]
Prototypes
Meanwhile, in June 1819, Fresnel was engaged by the Commission des phares (Commission of Lighthouses) on the recommendation of Arago (a member of the Commission since 1813), to review possible improvements in lighthouse illumination.[33] The Commission had been established by Napoleon in 1811, and placed under the Corps des Ponts — Fresnel's employer.[36]
On 29 August 1819, unaware of the Buffon-Condorcet-Brewster proposal,[26][33] Fresnel presented his first report, in which he recommended what he called lentilles à échelons (lenses by steps) to replace the reflectors then in use, which reflected only about half of the incident light.[37] One of the assembled commissioners, Jacques Charles, recalled Buffon's suggestion. Fresnel was disappointed to discover that he had again "broken through an open door".[38] But, whereas Buffon's version was biconvex and in one piece, Fresnel's was plano-convex and made of multiple prisms for easier construction. With an official budget of 500 francs, Fresnel approached three manufacturers. The third, François Soleil, found a way to remove defects by reheating and remolding the glass. Arago assisted Fresnel with the design of a modified Argand lamp with concentric wicks (a concept that Fresnel attributed to Count Rumford[39]: 11 ), and accidentally discovered that fish glue was heat-resistant, making it suitable for use in the lens. The prototype, with a lens panel 55cm square, containing 97 polygonal (not annular) prisms, was finished in March 1820 — and so impressed the Commission that Fresnel was asked for a full eight-panel version. Completed a year later, largely at Fresnel's personal expense, this model had panels 72cm square. In a public spectacle on the evening of 13 April 1821, it was demonstrated by comparison with the most recent reflectors, which it suddenly rendered obsolete.[40]
(Fresnel acknowledged the British lenses and Buffon's invention in a memoir published in 1822.[39]: 2–4 . The date of that memoir may be the source of the claim that Fresnel's lighthouse advocacy began two years later than Brewster's;[35] but the text makes it clear that Fresnel's involvement began no later than 1819.[39]: 1 )
Fresnel's innovations

Fresnel's next lens was a rotating apparatus with eight "bull's-eye" panels, made in annular arcs by Saint-Gobain,[41] giving eight rotating beams — to be seen by mariners as a periodic flash. Above and behind each main panel was a smaller, sloping bull's-eye panel of trapezoidal outline with trapezoidal elements.[42] This refracted the light to a sloping plane mirror, which then reflected it horizontally, 7 degrees ahead of the main beam, increasing the duration of the flash.[39]: 13,25 Below the main panels were 128 small mirrors arranged in four rings, stacked like the slats of a louver or Venetian blind. Each ring, shaped like a frustum of a cone, reflected the light to the horizon, giving a fainter steady light between the flashes. The official test, conducted on the Arc de Triomphe on 20 August 1822, was witnessed by the Commission — and by Louis XVIII and his entourage — from 32km away. The apparatus was stored at Bordeaux for the winter, and then reassembled at Cordouan Lighthouse under Fresnel's supervision. On 25 July 1823, the world's first lighthouse Fresnel lens was lit.[43] It was about this time that Fresnel started coughing up blood.[44][45]: 146
In May 1824,[26] Fresnel was promoted to Secretary of the Commission des phares, becoming the first member of that body to draw a salary.[46] He was also an examiner at the École Polytechnique (since 1821),[1] but poor health soon induced him to resign that post and save his energy for his lighthouse work.[47]
In the same year he designed the first fixed lens — for spreading light evenly around the horizon[33] while minimizing waste above or below. This had the familiar reflecting (catoptric) rings above and below the refracting (dioptric) panels. But the curved refracting surfaces were segments of toroids about a common vertical axis, so that the dioptric panel looked like a cylindrical drum and the entire apparatus looked like a beehive.
In 1825 he unveiled the Carte des phares (Lighthouse Map), calling for a system of 51 lighthouses plus smaller harbor lights, in a hierarchy of lens sizes (called orders, the first order being the largest), with different characteristics to facilitate recognition: a constant light (from a fixed lens), one flash per minute (from a rotating lens with eight panels), and two per minute (sixteen panels). On 1 February 1825, the second lighthouse Fresnel lens entered service: a third-order fixed lens at Dunkirk.[48]
Also in 1825, Fresnel extended his fixed design by adding a rotating array outside the fixed array.[33] Each panel of the rotating array refracted part of the fixed light from a horizontal fan into a narrow beam.

To reduce the loss of light in the reflecting elements, Fresnel proposed to replace each mirror with a catadioptric prism, through which the light would travel by refraction through the first surface, then total internal reflection off the second surface, then refraction through the third surface.[49] The result was the lighthouse lens as we now know it. In 1826 he assembled a small model for use on the Canal Saint-Martin,[50] but he did not live to see a full-sized version.
The first large catadioptric lenses were made in 1842 for the lighthouses at Gravelines and Île Vierge; these were fixed third-order lenses whose catadoptric rings (made in segments) were one metre in diameter. The first-order Skerryvore lens, installed in 1844, was only partly catadoptric; it was similar to the Cordouan lens except that the lower slats were replaced by French-made catadioptric prisms, while mirrors were retained at the top. The first fully catadioptric first-order lens, installed at Ailly in 1852, also gave eight rotating beams plus a fixed light at the bottom; but its top section had eight catadioptric panels focusing the light about 4 degrees ahead of the main beams, in order to lengthen the flashes. The first fully catadioptric lens with purely revolving beams — also of first order — was installed at Saint-Clément-des-Baleines in 1854, and marked the completion of Fresnel's original Carte des phares.[51]
Later developments
Production of one-piece stepped lenses (roughly as envisaged by Buffon) eventually became profitable. By the 1870s, in the United States, such lenses were made of pressed glass and used with small lights on ships and piers.[26] Similar lenses, with finer steps, serve as condensers in overhead projectors. Still finer steps can be found in low-cost plastic "sheet" magnifiers.
Honors

In 1823, Fresnel was unanimously elected a member of the Académie des Sciences.[1][19] In 1824[52] he was made a chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour).[8] Meanwhile in Britain, the wave theory was yet to take hold; late in 1824, Fresnel wrote to Thomas Young, saying in part:
I am far from denying the value that I attach to the praise of English scholars, or pretending that they would not have flattered me agreeably. But for a long time this sensibility, or vanity, which is called the love of glory, has been much blunted in me: I work far less to capture the public's votes than to obtain an inner approbation which has always been the sweetest reward of my efforts. Doubtless I have often needed the sting of vanity to excite me to pursue my researches in moments of disgust or discouragement; but all the compliments I received from MM. Arago, Laplace, and Biot never gave me as much pleasure as the discovery of a theoretical truth and the confirmation of my calculations by experiment.[53]
But the "praise of English scholars" soon followed. On 9 June 1825, Fresnel was made a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London.[54] In 1827[19][23] he was awarded the Society's Rumford Medal for the year 1824, "For his Development of the Undulatory Theory as applied to the Phenomena of Polarized Light, and for his various important discoveries in Physical Optics."[55]
The monument to Fresnel at his birthplace (see above) was dedicated on 14 September 1884 with a speech by Jules Jamin, permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences.[8][56] "FRESNEL" is among the 72 names embossed on the Eiffel Tower (on the south-east side, fourth from the left). In the 19th century, as every lighthouse in France acquired a Fresnel lens, every one acquired a bust of Fresnel, seemingly watching over the coastline that he had made safer.[57]
Decline and death
Fresnel's health, which had always been poor, deteriorated in the winter of 1822-3, increasing the urgency of his original research, and causing him to turn down an invitation from Thomas Young to write an article on double refraction for the Encyclopædia Britannica. In the spring he recovered enough, in his own view, to supervise the installation at Cordouan. Soon afterwards, it became clear that his condition was tuberculosis.[58]
In 1824 he was told that if he wanted to live longer, he needed to scale back his activities. Perceiving his lighthouse work to be his most important duty, he resigned from the École Polytechnique. His last note to the Académie, read on 13 June 1825, described the first radiometer and attributed the observed repulsive force to a temperature difference.[14]: 601–2 In 1826 he found time to answer some queries from the British astronomer John Herschel for an article on light, which was eventually published in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana.[59] It was Herschel who recommended Fresnel for the Royal Society's Rumford Medal.[14]: 603
Fresnel's cough worsened in the winter of 1826-7. In the spring, being too ill to return to Mathieu, he was carried to Ville-d'Avray, 12km west of Paris, where he was joined by his mother. On 6 July, Arago arrived to deliver the Rumford Medal. Sensing Arago's distress, Fresnel whispered that "the most beautiful crown means little, when it is laid on the grave of a friend." Fresnel did not have the strength to reply to the Royal Society. He died eight days later, on Bastille Day.[60][14]: 602
Fresnel is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. The inscription on his headstone is partly eroded away; the legible part says, when translated, "To the memory of Augustin Jean FRESNEL, member of the Institute of France."
Posthumous publications
Unfinished business
Ether models
Conical refraction
Legacy

With a century after Fresnel's initial proposal, more than 10,000 lights with Fresnel lenses marked coastlines around the world.[62] The numbers of lives saved can only be guessed at. Concerning the other benefits, the science historian Theresa H. Levitt has remarked:
Everywhere I looked, the story repeated itself. The moment a Fresnel lens appeared at a location was the moment that region becamed linked into the world economy.[63]
In the history of physical optics, Fresnel's successful revival of the wave theory seems to identify him as the pivotal figure between Newton, who held that light consisted of corpuscles, and Maxwell, who established that light waves are electromagnetic. Whereas Einstein described Maxwell's work as "the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton,"[64] commentators of the era between Fresnel and Maxwell made similarly strong statements about Fresnel:
- MacCullagh, as early as 1830, wrote that Fresnel's mechanical theory of double refraction "would do honour to the sagacity of Newton".[65]: 78 .
- Lloyd, after his experimental confirmation of conical refraction, lived for another 48 years. In 1834, in his Report on the progress and present state of physical optics for the British Science Association, he wrote:
In 1841 Lloyd published his Lectures on the Wave-theory of Light, in which he described Fresnel's transverse-wave theory as "the noblest fabric which has ever adorned the domain of physical science, Newton's system of the universe alone excepted."[5] The same description was retained in the "second edition", published under the title Elementary Treatise on the Wave-theory of Light (1857), and in the "third edition",[67] which appeared in the same year as Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873).The theory of Fresnel… will, I am persuaded, be regarded as the finest generalization in physical science which has been made since the discovery of universal gravitation.[66]: 382
- William Whewell, in all three editions of his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837, 1847, and 1857), at the end of Book IX, compared the histories of physical astronomy and physical optics and concluded:
It would, perhaps, be too fanciful to attempt to establish a parallelism between the prominent persons who figure in these two histories. If we were to do this, we must consider Huyghens and Hooke as standing in the place of Copernicus, since, like him, they announced the true theory, but left it to a future age to give it development and mechanical confirmation; Malus and Brewster, grouping them together, correspond to Tycho Brahe and Kepler, laborious in accumulating observations, inventive and happy in discovering laws of phenomena; and Young and Fresnel combined, make up the Newton of optical science.[68]: 370-71
What Whewell called the "true theory" has since undergone two major revisions. The first, by Maxwell, specified the physical fields whose variations constitute the waves of light. The second, initiated by Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect, supposed that the energy of light waves was divided into quanta, which were eventually identified with particles called photons. But photons did not exactly correspond to Newton's corpuscles; for example, Newton's explanation of ordinary refraction required the corpuscles to travel faster in media of higher refractive index, which photons do not. Nor did photons displace waves; rather, they led to the paradox of wave–particle duality.
Although Fresnel did not know that light waves are electromagnetic, he managed to construct the world's first coherent theory of light. In retrospect, this shows that his methods are applicable to multiple types of waves. And although light is now known to have both wavelike and particle-like aspects, it is the wavelike aspect that more easily explains the phenomena studied by Fresnel. In these respects, Fresnel's theory has stood the test of time, and Whewell's premature triumphalism contains an abiding truth.
References
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- ^ Darrigol, 2012, pp. 220–23.
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- ^ Darrigol, 2012, p. 205.
- ^ a b H. Lloyd, Lectures on the Wave-theory of Light, Dublin: Milliken, 1841, Part II, Lecture III, p.26.
- ^ a b 'martan' (author), "Eure (27)", Guide National des Maisons Natales, 30 May 2014.
- ^ Bibliothèques et Médiathèque, "Inauguration à Broglie, le 14 septembre 1884 du buste d'Augustin Fresnel", accessed 4 September 2017.
- ^ a b c Académie des Sciences, Membres… "Augustin Fresnel", accessed 21 August 2017; archived 15 February 2017.
- ^ D. Perchet, "Monument à Augustin Fresnel – Broglie", e-monumen.net, 5 July 2011.
- ^ a b J.H. Favre, "Augustin Fresnel", gw.geneanet.org, accessed 30 August 2017.
- ^ a b c 'jeanelie' (author), "Augustine Charlotte Marie Louise Merimee" and "Louis Jacques Fresnel", gw.geneanet.org, accessed 30 August 2017.
- ^ Levitt, 2013, p. 23.
- ^ a b R.H. Silliman, "Fresnel, Augustin Jean", Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008, v.5, pp. 165–71. (The version at encyclopedia.com lacks the diagram and equations.)
- ^ a b c d e f G.-A. Boutry, "Augustin Fresnel: His time, life and work, 1788–1827", Science Progress, v.36, no.144 (October 1948), pp. 587–604; jstor.org/stable/43413515.
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- ^ Levitt, 2013, p. 24.
- ^ a b G.E. Rines (ed.), "Fresnel, Augustin Jean", Encyclopedia Americana, 1918–20, v.12 (1919), p.93. (This entry inaccurately describes Fresnel as the "discoverer" of polarization of light and as a "Fellow" of the Royal Society, whereas in fact he explained polarization and was a "Foreign Member" of the Society; see text.)
- ^ A. Fresnel, "Mémoire sur la diffraction de la lumière" (deposited 1818, "crowned" 1819), in Oeuvres complètes, v.1, pp. 247–364, partly translated as "Fresnel's prize memoir on the diffraction of light", in Crew, 1900, pp. 81–144. (Not to be confused with the earlier memoir of the same title in Annales de Chimie et de Physique, 1:239–81, 1816.)
- ^ M. Born & E. Wolf, Principles of Optics, 1999, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
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- ^ Levitt, 2013, p. 57.
- ^ Levitt, 2013, p. 59.
- ^ Nicolas de Condorcet, Éloge de M. le Comte de Buffon, Paris: Chez Buisson, 1790, pp. 11–12.
- ^ a b D. Appleton & Co., "Sea-lights", Dictionary of Machines, Mechanics, Engine-work, and Engineering, 1861, v.2.
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- ^ Levitt, 2013, p. 71.
- ^ a b H. Chisholm (ed.), "Brewster, Sir David", Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Ed., 1911, v.4, pt.3.
- ^ Levitt, 2013, pp. 49–50.
- ^ Levitt, 2013, pp. 56,58.
- ^ Levitt, 2013, p. 59.
- ^ a b c d A. Fresnel, "Mémoire sur un nouveau système d'éclairage des phares", read at the Académie des Sciences on 29 July 1822, translated by T. Tag as "Memoir Upon A New System Of Lighthouse Illumination", U.S. Lighthouse Society, accessed 26 August 2017; archived 19 August 2016.
- ^ Levitt, 2013, pp. 59–66.
- ^ Levitt, 2013, p. 71.
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- ^ Levitt, 2013, pp. 72–3.
- ^ Levitt, 2013, p. 97.
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- ^ Levitt, 2013, pp. 79–80.
- ^ Musée national de la Marine, "Appareil catadioptrique, Appareil du canal Saint-Martin", accessed 26 August 2017; archived 26 August 2017.
- ^ Levitt, 2013, pp. 108–10, 113–16.
- ^ Levitt, 2013, p. 77.
- ^ Fresnel to Young, 26 November 1824, in Young, 1855, pp. 402–3
- ^ Royal Society, List of Fellows of the Royal Society 1660–2007, A–J, July 2001, p. 130.
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- ^ Levitt, 2013, p. 233
- ^ Levitt, 2013, pp. 75–6, 97
- ^ Darrigol, 2012, pp. 220–21.
- ^ Levitt, 2013, p. 98.
- ^ Phare de Cordouan, "The lighting systems of the Cordouan Lighthouse", accessed 26 August 2017; archived 22 September 2016.
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- ^ Levitt, 2013, p. 8.
- ^ James Clerk Maxwell Foundation, "Who was James Clerk Maxwell?", accessed 6 August 2017; archived 30 June 2017.
- ^ J. MacCullagh, "On the Double Refraction of Light in a Crystallized Medium, according to the Principles of Fresnel", Trans. Royal Irish Academy, v.16 (1830), pp. 65–78; jstor.org/stable/30079025.
- ^ H. Lloyd, "Report on the progress and present state of physical optics", Report of the Fourth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (held at Edinburgh in 1834), London: J. Murray, 1835, pp. 295–413.
- ^ H. Lloyd, Elementary Treatise on the Wave-theory of Light, 3rd Ed., London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1873, p.167. (Cf. 2nd Ed., 1857, p.136.)
- ^ W. Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences: From the Earliest to the Present Time, 3rd Ed., London: J.W. Parker & Son, 1857, v.2.
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Bibliography
- H. Crew (ed.), 1900, The Wave Theory of Light: Memoirs by Huygens, Young and Fresnel, American Book Co.
- O. Darrigol, 2012, A History of Optics: From Greek Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, Oxford.
- A. Fresnel (ed. H. de Senarmont, E. Verdet, L. Frenel), 1866–70, Oeuvres complètes d'Augustin Fresnel (3 vols.), Paris: Imprimerie Impériale; v.1 (1866), v.2 (1868), v.3 (1870).
- T.H. Levitt, 2013, A Short Bright Flash: Augustin Fresnel and the Birth of the Modern Lighthouse, New York: W.W. Norton.
External links
Quotations related to Plane of polarization at Wikiquote
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