born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France
died Aug. 23, 1806, Paris
French physicist.
After serving as a military engineer in the West Indies, he returned to France in the 1780s to pursue scientific research. To investigate Coulomb's law . He also did research on friction of machinery, on windmills, and on the elasticity of metal and silk fibres. The coulomb, a unit of electric charge, was named in his honour.