Paul Langevin
French physicist (1872–1946)
- 3 min read
- 5 chapters
Related on Lably
Through World War II, Submarine and Paris
He was a doctoral student of Pierre Curie and later a lover of widowed Marie Curie. He is also known for his two US patents with Constantin Chilowsky in 1916 and 1917 involving ultrasonic submarine detection. He is entombed at the Panthéon.
Biography
Paul Langevin was born on 23 January 1872 in Paris. In 1888, he entered ESPCI Paris, graduating with a licence ès sciences in Physics in 1892. He then studied at École normale supérieure de Paris, where he passed the agrégation in 1897. The following year, he went to the University of Cambridge, where he studied under J. J. Thomson in the Cavendish Laboratory. While working as a preparator in the Physics Teaching Laboratory at the University of Paris, Langevin received a Doctor of Philosophy in 1902, supervised by Pierre Curie.
From 1903 to 1905, Langevin served as Curie's assistant at ESPCI Paris, where he became a professor in 1905 and Director of Studies in 1908. He was also a lecturer at École normale supérieure de Sèvres from 1905 to 1933. In 1909, Langevin was appointed to the Chair of General and Experimental Physics at the Collège de France, where he remained until his death in 1946.
Sign in to keep reading
4 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
Research
Langevin is noted for his work on paramagnetism and diamagnetism, and devised the modern interpretation of this phenomenon in terms of electron spin. His most famous work was in the use of ultrasound using Pierre Curie's piezoelectric effect. During World War I, he began working on the use of these sounds to detect submarines through echo location, though the war ended before the system became operational. During his career, Paul Langevin also spread the theory of relativity in academic circles in France and created what is now called the twin paradox.
Personal life
In 1898, he married Emma Jeanne Desfosses, and together they had four children, Jean, André, Madeleine and Hélène.
In 1910, he had an affair with the then-widowed Marie Curie; some decades later, their respective grandchildren, grandson Michel Langevin and granddaughter Hélène Langevin-Joliot married one another. He was also noted for being an outspoken opponent of Nazism, and was removed from his post by the Vichy government following the occupation of the country by Nazi Germany. He was later restored to his position in 1944. He died in Paris in 1946, two years after living to see the Liberation of Paris. He is buried near several other prominent French scientists in the Panthéon in Paris.
In 1933, he had a son with physicist Éliane Montel (1898–1993), Paul-Gilbert Langevin, who became a renowned musicologist.
His daughter, Hélène Solomon-Langevin, was arrested for Resistance activity and survived several concentration camps. She was on the same convoy of female political prisoners as Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier and Charlotte Delbo.
Submarine detection
In 1916 and 1917, Paul Langevin and Chilowsky filed two US patents disclosing the first ultrasonic submarine detector using an electrostatic method (singing condenser) for one patent and thin quartz crystals for the other. The amount of time taken by the signal to travel to the enemy submarine and echo back to the ship on which the device was mounted was used to calculate the distance under water.
In 1916, Lord Ernest Rutherford, working in the UK with his former McGill University PhD student Robert William Boyle, revealed that they were developing a quartz piezoelectric detector for submarine detection. Langevin's successful application of the use of piezoelectricity in the generation and detection of ultrasound waves was followed by further development.