Born into what some have called a ‘clamorous’ nation because of its long history of conflict with the British, Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774–1862) fought in the French army for a year when he was 18. After this ‘gap year’ he studied at the École Polytechnique, one of the most selective scientific establishments in France.
Clamorousness was in his blood, and in 1795 he took part in a street riot, which was crushed by the authorities. Biot was arrested and imprisoned. He was more successful at physics, and did ground-breaking work on the way terrestrial magnetism varied with height above Earth’s surface. He also studied polarised light. Interestingly, he was not a supporter of the wave theory of light, which gives the only proper explanation of the effect (Figure 1), though it was an idea held by many scientists on the continent. This lack of understanding did not hamper him, and his investigations into the rotation of polarised light by organic compounds (either as liquids or in solution) marked the start of the science of polarimetry.
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