Jean-Baptiste Biot - Biot's Work

Biot's Work

Jean-Baptiste Biot made many contributions to the scientific community in his lifetime – most notably in optics, magnetism, and astronomy. The Biot-Savart Law in magnetism is named after Biot and his colleague Félix Savart for their work in 1820. In their experiment they showed a connection between electricity and magnetism by "starting with a long vertical wire and a magnetic needle some horizontal distance apart that running a current through the wire caused the needle to move" (Parsley).

In 1803 Biot was sent by the French Academy to report back on 3000 meteorites that fell on L’aigle, France. He found that the meteorites, or stones at the time, were from outer space. With his report, Biot helped support Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni's argument that meteorites were debris from space, which he had published in 1794. Biot also helped further the field of optics in 1815 with a study in polarized light. In his experiment Biot studied the effects of polarized light as it penetrated organic substances and determined that light "could be rotated clockwise or counterclockwise, dependent upon the optical axis of the material" (Molecular).