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Fresnel was given the Rumford medal of the Royal Society of England in 1825, and chosen one of the foreign members of the society two years later, while Young in turn was elected one of the eight foreign members of the French Academy.
I am a fool, perhaps, but I have a reluctance to shed blood. Go into the house, Fresnel. Go, man. I follow you." In the shabby main room of that dwelling, Andre-Louis halted him again. "Get me a length of rope," he commanded, and was readily obeyed.
In the history of the applications of electrical undulations, the names of Young, Fresnel, Fizeau, and Foucault must be inscribed; without these scholars, the assimilation between electrical and luminous phenomena which they discovered and studied would evidently have been impossible.
With profound sagacity, Fresnel, to whose genius we mainly owe the expansion and final triumph of the undulatory theory of light, reproduced mentally the mechanism of these crystals, and showed their action to be due to the circumstance that, in them, the waves of ether so act upon each other as to produce the condition represented by our rotating pendulum.
The mould being reopened presently displayed a large, heavy lantern, whose curiously elaborate flutings and pencillings were, as the intelligent artisan averred, arranged upon the principle of the famous Fresnel light, whose introduction some years ago marked an epoch in the history of light-houses.
Maxwell did not admit the existence of open currents. To his mind, therefore, an electrical vibration could not produce condensations of electricity. It was, in consequence, necessarily transverse, and thus coincided with the vibration of Fresnel; while the corresponding magnetic vibration was perpendicular to it, and would coincide with the luminous vibration of Neumann.
It has, indeed, been tentatively suggested, by Professor J. Oliver Lodge, that there may be two ethers, representing the two opposite kinds of electricity, but even the author of this hypothesis would hardly claim for it a high degree of probability. The most recent speculations regarding the properties of the ether have departed but little from the early ideas of Young and Fresnel.
He shows, too, by very close analysis, that the atomic hypothesis is essential to the optics of Fresnel and of Cauchy; that it penetrates into the study of heat; and that, in its general features, it presided at the birth of modern chemistry and is linked with all its progress.
I should like to read to you a brief extract from a letter written by Fresnel to Young in 1824, as it throws a pleasant light upon the character of the French philosopher. 'For a long time, says Fresnel, 'that sensibility, or that vanity, which people call love of glory has been much blunted in me.
Fresnel had done much; Fresnel had settled the fixed light apparatus on a principle that still seems unimprovable; and when Thomas Stevenson stepped in and brought to a comparable perfection the revolving light, a not unnatural jealousy and much painful controversy rose in France. It had its hour; and, as I have told already, even in France it has blown by.
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