Concept

Auguste Arthur de la Rive

Summary
Prof Auguste Arthur de la Rive ForMemRS, HFRSE (9 October 1801 - 27 November 1873) was a Swiss physicist. He was President of the Helvetic Society of Natural Science in 1845. De la Rive's first scientific publication was on the influence of the Earth's magnetism upon a movable frame traversed by a voltaic current, published in 1822, and followed by a memoir upon Caustics, which appeared in 1823. Over a period of fifty years, De la Rive made numerous contributions to science, which were published in the Mémoires de la Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève or in the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève. De la Rive was born in Geneva, the son of Charles-Gaspard de la Rive (1770–1834). His father had studied medicine at Edinburgh University, and after practising for a few years in London, became professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the academy of Geneva in 1802. He served as its rector between 1823 and 1825. At the age of twenty-two, Auguste was appointed to the chair of natural philosophy in the same academy. For some years after his appointment he devoted himself specially, with François Marcet (1803–1883), to the investigation of the specific heat of gases, and to observations for determining the temperature of the earth's crust. Electrical studies, however, engaged most of his attention, especially in connexion with the theory of the voltaic cell and the electric discharge in rarefied gases. De la Rive began his scientific labors soon after the new era was opened in the history of electricity and magnetism by the discovery of electro-magnetism, and by Ampere's electro-dynamical theory. His father had a share in this discovery, and his house was visited by others eminent in the same line of research. This may account for the preference which the son early manifested for the study of electricity, and which he continued to cultivate in its manifold relations to the end of his scientific career. Indeed, there are very few among his many printed papers which are upon other subjects.
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