The Ampère house and museum in Poleymieux near Lyon, France. Photo: Christian Barberon/Wikimedia Commons

Author: Alfonso San Miguel

Wednesday, October 6 2021, the Ampère Museum was inaugurated as an EPS Historic Site. This is the fifth site in France and it is dedicated to André-Marie Ampère.

The Ampère family home, where André-Marie spent his childhood and studied brilliantly with his father, had an exceptional destiny. The state of Poleymieux-au-Mont-d'Or (Rhône) where it is located, about fifteen kilometers from Lyon, was sequestered for the benefit of the Nation in 1793, when the French Revolution condemned the future scientist's father to death. Restored to the family two years later, it fell to Ampère in 1812, after the death of his mother. He relinquished it ten years later when he settled permanently in Paris.

André-Marie Ampère spent a very large part of his childhood and youth in this house, soon after his birth in 1775 until he was 29 years old. Without attending school, he read Diderot’s Encyclopedia and learned to scrutinize Nature and to understand the mathematics, physics and chemistry of his time. It was during this period that emerged his first ideas about the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Few years later, in 1820 he established the first mathematical relationships between these two physical phenomena. By giving the name of Ampère to the international unit of electrical current, the whole world saluted his fundamental discoveries, which gave rise to electrodynamics.

It took a century for the Poleymieux estate to regain the memory of its prestigious former owner. It was on the advice of Paul Janet, a member of the French Academy of Sciences, that two wealthy American industrialists, Hernand and Sosthène Behn, bought the estate in 1928. They donated the estate to the French Society of Electricians (SEE), which entrusted it to the Society of the Friends of André-Marie Ampère (SAAMA), an association created to manage and develop a Museum of Electricity and to perpetuate the memory of the illustrious Lyon native.  The Museum of Electricity was inaugurated on 1st July 1931.

The EPS Historic Site ceremony, which was part of the "Ampère 200 ans" (Ampère 200 years) programme of commemorations for the bicentenary of André-Marie Ampère's discoveries in electrodynamics, was sponsored by Serge Haroche, 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics. In the morning, Serge Haroche gave a lecture at the University of Sciences of Lyon  to more than 400 participants on the history of light. He highlighted the importance of André-Marie Ampère's discoveries in the unification of electricity, magnetism and optics. At the end of the day, the ceremony continued at the Ampère Museum where the commemorative plaque was unveiled by Serge Haroche and Luc Bergé in front of a hundred people, representatives of the academic world of Lyon, the electricity industry and learned societies. The ceremony was conducted together by François Gerin, president of the SEE, who also read a message from Gérard Mourou, 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics and sponsor of “Ampère 200 ans”, and by the President of the Society of the Friends of André-Marie Ampère, Alfonso San Miguel, who nominated the site.

FLTR: Guy Wormser (SFP), François Gerin (SEE), Serge Haroche, Luc Bergé (EPS), Gabriel Fioni (representative of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research),
Corinne Cardona (major of Poleymieux) and Alfonso San Miguel (SAAMA and SFP) - Photo: Alfonso San Miguel