Charles Coulomb, the great French physicist after whom the unit of electric charge called the coulomb was named, was born in Angoulême in 1736. He was educated at the École du Génie in Mézieres, graduating in 1761 as a military engineer with a rank of First Lieutenant. Coulomb served in the West Indies for nine years, where he supervised the building of fortifications in Martinique.
In 1774, Coulomb became a correspondent to the Paris Academy of Science. There he shared the Academy's first prize for his paper on magnetic compasses and also received first prize for his classic work on friction, a study that was unsurpassed for 150 years. During the next 25 years, he presented 25 papers to the Academy on electricity, magnetism, torsion, and applications to the torsion balance, as well as several hundred committee reports on engineering and civil projects.
Coulomb took full advantage of the various positions he held during his lifetime. For example, his experience as an engineer led him to investigate the strengths of materials and determine the forces that affect objects on beams, thereby contributing to the field of structural mechanics. He also contributed to the field of ergonomics. His research provided a fundamental understanding of the ways in which people and animals can best do work and greatly influenced the subsequent research of Gaspard Coriolis (1792-1843).
Coulomb's major contribution to science was in the field of electrostatics and magnetism, in which he made use of the torsion balance he developed. The paper describing this invention also contained a design for a compass using the principle of torsion suspension. His next paper gave proof of the inverse square law for the electrostatic force between two charges.
Coulomb died in 1806, five years after becoming president of the Institut de France (formerly the Paris Academy of Science). His research on electricity and magnetism brought this area of physics out of traditional natural philosophy and made it an exact science.