Augustin-Jean Fresnel

choi

Henry Petrosky, Crafting an Rx for Shipwrecks; Their faint beams made lighthouses largely useless until the 1819 invention of a lens that vastly improved safety for sailors near shore. Wall Street Journal, Sept  23, 2013
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323608504579025281572493694.html
(book review on Theresa Levitt, A Short Bright Flash; Augustin Fresnel and the birth of the modern lighthouse. Norton, 2013)

Note:
(a) "The first formal school of civil (as opposed to military) engineering anywhere was France's École nationale des ponts et chaussées, established in 1747, which focused on bridges and roads. In the early 19th century, students typically entered this postgraduate school after leaving the École polytechnique, whose scientific and technical curriculum served as a model for West Point."
(i) École des ponts ParisTech
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_des_ponts_ParisTech
(originally called École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées or ENPS; Founded in 1747, it is the world's oldest civil engineering school; headquartered in Marne-la-Vallée (suburb of Paris) and a member of ParisTech (Paris Institute of Technology).

(ii) French-English dictionary:
* école (noun feminine): "school"

By the way, the etymology of English noun school, which apparently is derived from Greek because “ch” is pronounced the same as that in “chaos.”
school (Middle English scole, from Old English scōl, from Latin schola, from Greek scholē leisure, discussion, lecture, school; First Known Use: before 12th century)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/school  
* pont (noun masculine): "bridge"
* chaussée (noun feminine): "causeway"

A related organization Corps des Ponts et Chaussées is translated into English as Bridges and Highways/Roads Corps. But French has its word for road: "chemin" (noun masculine).
(iii) civil engineering
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_engineering
(In the 18th century, the term civil engineering was coined to incorporate all things civilian as opposed to military engineering)

Quote: "The first private college to teach Civil Engineering in the United States was Norwich University founded in 1819 by Captain Alden Partridge. The first degree in Civil Engineering in the United States was awarded by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1835. The first such degree to be awarded to a woman was granted by Cornell University to Nora Stanton Blatch in 1905.
(iv) "In the early 19th century, students typically entered this postgraduate school after leaving the École polytechnique"

École polytechnique
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique
(state-run)

Quote: "Polytechnique was established during the French Revolution in 1794 by Gaspard Monge, and it became a military school under Napoleon in 1804. It is still under the control of the French Ministry of Defence today. Initially, the school was located in the Latin Quarter of central Paris, and it moved to Palaiseau on the Saclay Plateau about 14 km (8.7 mi) southwest of Paris in 1976. It is a founding member of the ParisTech grouping of leading Paris-area engineering schools, established in 2007.

(v) History of the United States Military Academy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Military_Academy
(section 1 Revolutionary War and founding: Despite his earlier misgivings, when Jefferson became president, he called for and signed legislation establishing a "Corps of Engineers" which "shall be stationed at West Point and constitute a Military Academy" on Mar 16, 1802)
(vi) Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Cheussees. American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), undated
www.asce.org/People-and-Projects ... Ponts-et-Cheussees/
("In contrast to the 18th-century British tradition, wherein members of the trades and professions received their educations primarily through a system of apprenticeships, the French believed in the establishment of formal training schools, where a standard curriculum based on fundamental disciplines would be taught. It was this approach to engineering education that provided the model and inspiration to those who established formal training for American engineers at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the early 19th century")

(b) Augustin-Jean Fresnel
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustin-Jean_Fresnel
(1788-1827; contributed significantly to the establishment of the theory of wave optics; is perhaps best known as the inventor of the Fresnel lens, first adopted in lighthouses while he was a French commissioner of lighthouses, and found in many applications today; died of tuberculosis)

(c) “he [Fresnel] soon became interested in the physics of light, a subject that at the time was dominated by Newton's particulate theory.”

light
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light
(section 7.4 Particle [or Corpuscular] theory; section 7.5 Wave theory)

The Academy was founded in 1802 and had its official graduate, Joseph Gardner Swift, in October 1802.

(d) “His persistence and his brilliant analysis and demonstration, however, won him the Grand Prize from the Académie des sciences in an 1819 competition.”
(i) French Academy of Sciences
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Academy_of_Sciences
(French: Académie des sciences; founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert)
(ii) Royal Society
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society
(the oldest such society still in existence; Founded in 1660)’

(e) “Lighthouses had existed from ancient times, but they remained few and largely ineffective. The consequences of this deficiency were captured by the Romantic painter Théodore Géricault, whose greater-than-life-size ‘The Raft of the Medusa" was the talk of Paris in 1819. The raft had been constructed to supplement lifeboats as the naval frigate La Méduse was sinking after it ran aground four miles from the coast of Mauritania, which lacked an adequate warning light. The raft and the 147 people aboard it were at the mercy of sea currents. After two weeks, during which some of the castaways resorted to cannibalism, only 15 survived.”
(i) Théodore Géricault (1791-1824; French)
(ii) The Raft of the Medusa
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raft_of_the_Medusa

(f) “Fresnel turned his mind to lighthouses, and especially the lights within them. The source of illumination had progressed from a simple fire to candles, oil and gas, but the visibility of the light remained limited, even with reflecting devices to concentrate the beam. Fresnel's idea was to use carefully crafted lenses to focus the light. He soon realized, however, that a sufficiently thick lens would dim the light and limit the light's range significantly. Using his knowledge of optics and his ingenuity, he designed in 1819 a relatively thin lens with a stepped profile that acted like a collection of prisms to direct a great deal of the light from its source into a strong parallel beam. The Fresnel lens was so far superior to pre-existing technology that it provided an opportunity for France to outshine its rival Britain in engineering achievement. The first Fresnel-equipped lighthouse was at Cordouan, on the western coast of France, an elegant construction that dated from the 17th century. With the new lens in place, a lookout atop a ship's mast could see the light from more than 30 nautical miles away. The success of the Cordouan light would enable France to go in half a century from having about 20 lighthouses to having enough lights along its coasts so that no ship was ever out of sight of one. Furthermore, with each light beam rotating at a characteristic frequency, a ship could tell exactly where along the coast it was. But even as his lighthouse lens was beginning to flourish, Fresnel took ill and died, at the age of 39.”
(i) Fresnel lens
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens
(section 3 Types: section 3.1 Imaging: spherical or cylindrical)

collectorsworldcapecod.com/harbour/hspecial.html
shows miniatures of both shapes (particularly toward the bottom of the Web page).
(ii) Cordouan lighthouse
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordouan
(an active lighthouse located 7 km at sea, near the mouth of the Gironde estuary in France; The first Fresnel lens rotating system, the invention of Augustin-Jean Fresnel, was installed in Cordouan in 1823; The Fresnel lens was replaced by the present lens in 1854

(g) James K Polk (1795-1849; US president 1845-1849)