Guillaume Amontons

Guillaume Amontons, who lived from 1663 to 1705, was a French scientific instrument inventor and physicist and one of the pioneers in studying friction. Born in Paris, he lost his hearing while young and never attended a university, yet he studied mathematics, the physical sciences and celestial mechanics and was supported by the government and employed on public works. He improved the barometer, hygrometer and thermometer for use at sea, demonstrated an optical telegraph and proposed a water clock for keeping time on a ship. Studying how the pressure of a gas changes with temperature, he came close to the idea of absolute zero, which he estimated at about minus 240 degrees Celsius, and in 1699 he built a hot air engine, his fire mill, more than a century before the Stirling engine. In that year he also published his rediscovery of the laws of friction, now called Amontons' laws, which Coulomb verified in 1781.