Who the heck
is Coulomb?
When Charles-Augustin de
Coulomb (1736-1806) was a young boy, he attended the College des Quatre-Nations
in Paris. He
studied mathematics, and that led him into an interest in the sciences. From
1757 to 1759, he helped his dad at his job in the Royal Fields (a section of
the French military). He later left the military school called Mezierez to
create Fort Bourbon, a French colony, during the
Seven Years War. After he finished building the colony, he began to focus more
on his love of science. He started experimenting, which eventually led to his
discovery of the inverse relationship between the charges of the atoms and
their distance from each other. He lived a very quiet life after that, until he
became an inspector of public instruction for the French National Institute in
1802. He was in poor health for the next four years, and eventually died in
1806.