Pierre Méchain was born on August 16, 1774 in Laon which is in Northern France. Pierre’s father was a ceiling plasterer and his mother had attempted to follow a similar architectural career, but did not succeed. At a young age, Pierre Méchain was recognized for his talents in mathematics and was sent by the French nobility to école des Ponts et Chaussées, located in Paris. However, his studies ended early after two years due to his family’s lack of finances to support him. Shortly after this interruption, Pierre accepted a tutorship for two young nobleman. At some unknown point Pierre became friends with Jérôme de Lalande who was finishing his book L'Astronomie and let Méchain read segments of it. As Pierre quickly proved he had promising potential in the field of Astronomy, Lalande offered him a temporary position as hydrographer at the naval archives in Versailles, which forced Pierre to supplement his income teaching mathematics. Although Méchain was removed twice since his position was not meant to last for very long, he was continually reinstated for his exceptional talent at map making and his maps were used to chart the shoreline from Nieuwpoort in Flanders to Saint-Mato.
During his time creating these naval archives, Pierre Méchain intently studied Astronomy and made significant achievements in the field, such as the discovery of two comets and calculated their orbits and also proved that the comets appearing in 1532 and 1661 were not the same object contrary to popular belief, earning him the award Académic Royale des Sciences in 1782. After being recognized for his efforts, Pierre decided to invest more and more time into working towards new astronomical discoveries and he was able to find nine more comets and thirty deep sky objects, resulting in Méchain coordinating efforts with Charles Messier to catalog these new celestial objects. Pierre earned the position as editor of the French almanac “Connoissance des temps” in 1785, which he held for six years.
In 1787 a project developed attempting to improve the precision and accuracy of various scientific instruments that would be orchestrated by both the British and the French, ho are well known rivals. Méchain was chosen to work on the project along with the astronomers Cassini and Legendre. The group was able to lessen the distortion of telescopes by clamping a circle to it and by using it to measure angles at multiple segments of the circle, graduation errors were greatly diminished. Another famous and revolutionary achievement made by Pierre Méchain was the fact that he was chosen as a member of the committee to create a decimal system of measurement, which was a project approved by the National Assembly, the legislative body of the French government at that time. As the French Revolution wreaked havoc all around Méchain, he was arrested because he was carrying suspicious equipment, such as parabolic mirrors for reflecting signals in order to measure the meridian, and was suspected of being a traitor of the Revolution. After two months spent in incarceration, Méchain and his associates were released and travelled to Spain to continue their scientific progress. However, Pierre’s astronomical work was interrupted when he was asked to inspect a hydraulic pump and got caught in the machine, resulting in the breaking of his ribs, collarbone and the inability to use his right arm as well as the loss of consciousness for three days. After the accident and the loss of many of his friends, who died at the guillotine, Pierre Méchain became a strange and cantankerous man. Méchain was able to discover two more comets, became the director of the Paris Observatory before his death from yellow fever in Spain on September 20, 1804.
No comments:
Post a Comment