The French physicist André Marie Ampère (1775-1836), with his original and penetrating analysis of the magnetic effects of current-carrying wires, was the founder of electrodynamics.

Born on Jan. 20, 1775, in Lyons, André Marie Ampère was the second child of Jean Jacques Ampère, a prosperous businessman, and Jeanne Antoinette Desutières-Sarcey Ampère. Once the boy had mastered the art of reading under his father's guidance, he showed a voracious appetite for everything in printed form. His principal love was mathematics and geometry. In these subjects his father's library soon failed to provide suitable material, so his father took him to the Lyons library, only to find that some of the best works in mathematics, such as most treatises by Leonhard Euler and Daniel Bernoulli, were in Latin. Young Ampère mastered Latin in a few weeks, as he...