Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau
Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (born October 14, 1801 in Brussels , † September 15, 1883 in Ghent ) was a Belgian physicist and photography pioneer. He was one of the first to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. For this purpose, he used two counter-rotating disks with repetitive drawn images in small steps of movement on one side and with slots arranged at regular intervals on the other. He called this device the phenakistiscope from 1832 .
Life
After the early death of his parents, Plateau attended the Atheneum in Brussels between 1817 and 1822 and then moved to the University of Liège , where he first studied law and languages and later natural sciences. In 1827 he became a teacher of mathematics at the Atheneum and published his first scientific publications: Construire un triangle équilatéral qui ait ses sommets sur trois circonférences quelconques ("Construction of an equilateral triangle whose corners lie on three given circles") and Sur les sensations produites dans l 'oeil par les différentes couleurs , in which he deals with the visual perception of people.
In 1828, Plateau became aware of the findings of the English doctor Peter Marc Roget , who was the first to describe the phenomenon that was called the persistence of vision and was long considered the basis of movement perception in moving images . He wrote a treatise on it called Dissertation sur quelques propriétés des impressions produites par la lumière sur l'organe de la vue , with which he received his doctorate in 1829. It was also the first scientific dissertation at the University of Liège that was written in French and not in Latin.
Four years later, in 1832, the idea occurred to him “ to feed the stroboscope with 16 drawings by a dancer, which were always shifted by one phase of movement and returned to the starting position after sixteen phases.” He described this device, known today as a phenakistiscope , in the writings Sur un nouveau genre d'illusions d'optique (1832) and Des illusions optiques sur lesquelles se fonde le petit appareil appelé récemment Phénakisticope (1831). The painter Jean Baptiste Madou made drawings for the phenakistiscope , which were marketed together with the device by Ackerman in London from 1833 under the name Fantascope and by Alphonse Giroux in Paris as phénakisticope and later as phénakistiscope . Similar developments were achieved almost simultaneously by the Austrian Simon Stampfer (Phenakistiskop) and the British William Horner .
In 1835, Plateau moved to the University of Ghent , where he initially taught physics and later specialized in experimental physics and astronomy.
In 1836 he presented the anorthoscope , which he described in detail in the publication Deuxième (troisième et quatrième) note sur de nouvelles applications curieuses de la persistance des impressions de la rétine (1849).
Plateau went blind in 1843 or 1844. He considered this to be the late consequence of an experiment he had carried out in 1829; he had been looking straight into the sun for more than 25 seconds. Such a late consequence is to be regarded as improbable; he may have suffered from chronic uveitis instead . He published detailed descriptions of his experiences with his own blindness and stated that he still had “visual sensory impressions” years after he was blind. One of his last writings was Statique experimentale et théorique des liquides soumis aux seules forces molecules (1873), a study of capillary forces and surface tension . In this work he created the descriptions of the structure of soap bubbles in foam, known as the Plateau's Rules . His investigations were fruitful for a long time for the mathematical theory of minimal areas , where the plateau problem is named after him.
In 1852 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris and in 1869 of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . In 1870 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society . In 1876 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences .
Plateau died in Ghent in 1883 and was buried in the Mariakerke cemetery.
Works
- Mémoire sur l'irradiation , Brussels 1839.
- Statique experimentale et theorique des liquides soumis aux seules molecular forces. Gauthiers-Villars, Paris 1873.
Others
In honor of Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau, Google presented him with a Google Doodle on his 218th birthday on October 14, 2019 .
See also
Web links
- Anne M. Haasis: Historical Review. Sapo Media, accessed March 11, 2014 .
- Ulrike Füsslin: Optical toys - moving pictures. Optical toys, moving pictures from the Biedermeier period. Early precursors to the film. Optiker Online !, accessed on March 11, 2014 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Yves Galifret: Visual persistence and cinema? In: Comptes Rendus Biologies. , Volume 329, Nos. 5-6, 2006, pp. 369-385 ( abstract ).
- ^ Friedrich Kittler : Optical media. P. 205.
- ↑ List of members since 1666: Letter P. Académie des sciences, accessed on February 4, 2020 (French).
- ^ Entry on Plateau, Joseph Antoine Ferdinand (1801–1883) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
- ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 191.
- ↑ 218th birthday of Joseph Plateau. In: Doodle . Retrieved October 14, 2019 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Plateau, Joseph Antoine Ferdinand |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Belgian physicist and photography pioneer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 14, 1801 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Brussels |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 15, 1883 |
| Place of death | Ghent |