Dan Older's List: Physics Project

• He was now a trained engineer with the rank of lieutenant in the Corps du Génie
• Coulomb was put in charge of the building of the new Fort Bourbon and this task occupied him until June 1772
• his experiences would play a major role in the later theoretical memoirs he wrote on mechanics

• While he was there he wrote a famous memoir on the magnetic compass which he submitted for the Grand Prix of the Académie des Sciences in 1777.  

   This 1777 paper won Coulomb a share of the prize and it contained his first work on the torsion balance [1]:- 

   ... his simple, elegant solution to the problem of torsion in cylinders and his use of the torsion balance in physical applications were important to numerous physicists in succeeding years. ... Coulomb developed a theory of torsion in thin silk and hair threads. Here he was the first to show how the torsion suspension could provide physicists with a method of accurately measuring extremely small forces.
• His studies into friction in Rochefort led to Coulomb's major work on friction Théorie des machines simples which won him the Grand Prix from the Académie des Sciences in 1781
• He was elected to the mechanics section of the Académie des Sciences as a result of this work, and he moved to Paris where he now held a permanent post.

• had obtained some remarkable results by using the torsion balance method: law of attraction and repulsion, the electric point charges, magnetic poles, distribution of electricity on the surface of charged bodies and others. The importance of Coulomb's law for the development of electromagnetism is examined and discussed. 

• In these he developed a theory of attraction and repulsion between bodies of the same and opposite electrical charge. He demonstrated an inverse square law for such forces and went on to examine perfect conductors and dielectrics. He suggested that there was no perfect dielectric, proposing that every substance has a limit above which it will conduct electricity. These fundamental papers put forward the case for action at a distance between electrical charges in a similar way as Newton's theory of gravitation was based on action at a distance between masses. 

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