Translation of S. D. Poisson's Premiere Memoire sur la Distribution de l'Electricite a la surface des Corps conducteurs; (1812)
One of my pet projects over the last couple years has been translating the two parts of Simeon-Denis Poisson's Mémoire Sur la Distribution de l'Électricité à la surface des Corps conducteurs ; (read 1812) into English. I didn't dedicate all that much time to it, the full memoires together are only 200 pages or so, so it shouldn't have taken so long, but in any case, 2021 has been a good year of translations for me, so I thought, I might as well put an hour every day into the translation. And now the first memoir is complete! Translator's Preface The story of this work begins, for our purposes, with Charles Augustin Coulomb (1736-1806), the military engineer-turned-natural philosopher, who, beginning in 1785, published a series of seven memoirs on the topics of electricity and magnetism. Coulomb used his recently developed torsion balance to make some of the earliest quantitative measurements of the electrostatic force. He performed these measurements using a fine