Auguste Arthur De la Rive

Prof Auguste Arthur De la Rive ForMemRS, HFRSE (9 October 180127 November 1873) was a Swiss physicist. He was President of the Helvetic Society of Natural Science in 1845.

De la Rive's first scientific publication was on the influence of the Earth's magnetism upon a movable frame traversed by a voltaic current, published in 1822, and followed by a memoir upon Caustics, which appeared in 1823. Over a period of fifty years, De la Rive made numerous contributions to science, which were published in the Mémoires de la Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève or in the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève. (1770–1834). His father had studied medicine at Edinburgh University, and after practising for a few years in London, became professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the academy of Geneva in 1802. He served as its rector between 1823 and 1825. At the age of twenty-two, Auguste was appointed to the chair of natural philosophy in the same academy. For some years after his appointment he devoted himself specially, with François Marcet (1803–1883), to the investigation of the specific heat of gases, and to observations for determining the temperature of the Earth's crust.

Electrical studies, however, engaged most of his attention, especially in connexion with the theory of the voltaic cell and the electric discharge in rarefied gases. which appeared in the years 1854–58. De la Rive described his theory of the cause of the Aurora Borealis, first published as a memoir in 1854, and illustrated by the experiment, now familiar to physicists, of rotating the voltaic arc of light around the pole of a magnet as any other ponderable conductor would rotate. The Treatise on Electricity was considered "accurate and comprehensive, and is indispensable for the scientific student of electricity".

Family On August 18, 1826, he married writer Jeanne-Mathilde Duppa (March 14, 1808August 18, 1850). Their son, Lucien de la Rive, born in Choulex on 3 April 1834, published papers on various mathematical and physical subjects, and with Edouard Sarasin carried out investigations on the propagation of electric waves.