Gabriel Lippmann

Origins and early life

Gabriel Lippmann was born on 16 August 1845 to Jewish parents at Hollerich, near Luxembourg City, where his father managed a glove-making business.

Work and career

The family moved to Paris in 1848; his mother taught him at home until he entered the Lycée Napoléon in 1858, where he was remembered as an inattentive but thoughtful pupil with a taste for mathematics. He was admitted to the École normale supérieure in 1868 and promptly failed the examination that would have made him a teacher, preferring to do physics. Sent to Germany in 1873 on a government mission to study how science was taught there, he worked with Kirchhoff at Heidelberg and took a doctorate summa cum laude, then returned to Paris, where he joined the Faculty of Science in 1878 and held the chair of experimental physics from 1886.

His first invention came out of the link he found between electrical and capillary effects: the Lippmann electrometer, a column of mercury in a capillary tube so sensitive that it recorded the first human electrocardiogram. In 1881 he predicted the converse piezoelectric effect.

Recognition

But he is remembered for colour photography without dyes: he let light interfere with its own reflection inside a fine emulsion backed by mercury, so that the plate recorded the wavelengths themselves, and in February 1891 announced to the Academy of Sciences that he had fixed the colours of the spectrum on a plate that would not fade in daylight. It brought him the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics. He died at sea on 12 July 1921, on the way home from Canada.