Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann was a Franco-Luxembourgish physicist and inventor, and Nobel laureate in physics for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference.
22 Facts About Gabriel Lippmann
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Gabriel Lippmann was born in Bonnevoie, Luxembourg, on 16 August 1845.
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In 1848, the family moved to Paris where Lippmann was initially tutored by his mother, Miriam Rose, before attending the Lycee Napoleon.
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Gabriel Lippmann was said to have been a rather inattentive but thoughtful pupil with a special interest in mathematics.
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Gabriel Lippmann then returned to Paris in 1875, where he continued to study until 1878, when he became professor of physics at the Sorbonne.
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Gabriel Lippmann made several important contributions to various branches of physics over the years.
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Above all, Gabriel Lippmann is remembered as the inventor of a method for reproducing colours by photography, based on the interference phenomenon, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1908.
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In 1886, Gabriel Lippmann's interest turned to a method of fixing the colours of the solar spectrum on a photographic plate.
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Gabriel Lippmann presented his theory of colour photography using the interference method in two papers to the Academy, one in 1894, the other in 1906.
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Gabriel Lippmann made use of this phenomenon by projecting an image onto a special photographic plate capable of recording detail smaller than the wavelengths of visible light.
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In practice, the Gabriel Lippmann process was not easy to use.
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Gabriel Lippmann's process foreshadowed laser holography, which is based on recording standing waves in a photographic medium.
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In 1908, Gabriel Lippmann introduced what he called "integral photography", in which a plane array of closely spaced, small, spherical lenses is used to photograph a scene, recording images of the scene as it appears from many slightly different horizontal and vertical locations.
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When Gabriel Lippmann presented the theoretical foundations of his "integral photography" in March 1908, it was impossible to accompany them with concrete results.
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In 1895, Gabriel Lippmann evolved a method of eliminating the personal equation in measurements of time, using photographic registration, and he studied the eradication of irregularities of pendulum clocks, devising a method of comparing the times of oscillation of two pendulums of nearly equal period.
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Gabriel Lippmann invented the coelostat, an astronomical tool that compensated for the Earth's rotation and allowed a region of the sky to be photographed without apparent movement.
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Gabriel Lippmann was a member of the Academy of Sciences from 8 February 1886 until his death, serving as its president in 1912.
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Gabriel Lippmann became a member of the Societe francaise de photographie in 1892 and its president from 1896 to 1899.
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Gabriel Lippmann was one of the founders of the Institut d'optique theorique et appliquee in France.
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In Luxembourg City an Institute for fundamental scientific research was named after Lippmann which merged on 1 January 2015 with another major research centre to form the new Luxembourg Institute for Science and Technology.
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Gabriel Lippmann married the daughter of the novelist Victor Cherbuliez in 1888.
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Gabriel Lippmann died on 13 July 1921 aboard the steamer France while en route from Canada.