Huette Louis
Contenu
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Nom
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Huette Louis
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Date de naissance
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21 October 1756
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Date de mort
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2 September 1805
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Lieu de naissance
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Rennes
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Couverture temporelle
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2/2 18th century
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Biographie
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was born at Rennes and educated by the Frères de la Doctrine Chrétien. For a period he worked with his father as a wood-turner. At the age of 15 he began to travel first in the Low Countries where in Holland he learned the first elements of the optician's trade, then in Prussia, Poland, Russia and Italy where he remained for five years. Thereafter he went to Egypt, Arabia and Syria, only returning to France after some fifteen years of travelling. Between 1786 and 1788 he perfected his skills as an optician in Paris and London, returning to Rennes in 1788 where he married Jeanne-Julienne Guerrin the following year. In 1793 however he set up business in Nantes where the following year, the first in France, he applied achromatic lenses to his microscopes. On 21 Thermidor An VI [8 August 1798] he showed plane glasses with parallel faces of 8 - 10 cm diameter to the Institut which when examined were found to be of an irreproachable precision, and in the same year he became a founding member of the Institut Départmental de la Loire Inférieure, later the Société Académique. In 1800 he wrote an unpublished memoire, 'Sur les amusemens galvaniques' and in 1802 a 'Description d'un nouvel horison artificiel' which included its own spirit level. In 1804 he made an achromatic objective lens in French flint glass of 56cm diameter and 70 cm focal length which he had conceived after seeing a crystal lens made from Creusot glass, the weight of which 'led him to calculate the curvature in relation with the dispersive power of the material, so as to render it achromatic with Paris glass'.1 The high quality of Huette's lenses was indicated to the Académie des Sciences by Borda, Bory & Levêque, but the report which they were ordered to make on them in collaboration with J. B. Le Roy was not presented until 1812.2 He left manuscript accounts of his travels and of an ascension to the summit of Mount Ætna.
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Notes biographiques
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1 Levot 922 which is the primary source for this notice. See also C. Meyer in DBF, xvii 1435. For a barometer by him see Ranndier 24. 7. 99 lot 94.
2 Procès verbaux I, 444, 447; Mascart 374-5.
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Identifiant
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2244
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ark:/18469/1t189