Léon Foucault Léon Foucault Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (; 18 September 1819 – 11 February 1868) was a French physicist best known for his demonstration of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of the Earth's rotation. He also made an early measurement of the speed of light, discovered eddy currents, and is credited with naming the gyroscope. Foucault was the son of a publisher in Paris, where he was born on 18 September 1819. After an education received chiefly at home, he studied medicine, which he abandoned in favour of physics due to a blood phobia. He first directed his
Pierre-François-Victor Foucault Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, then he showed it at The Great Exhibition (1851) in London. Pierre-François-Victor Foucault Pierre-François-Victor Foucault (1797-1871) was the inventor in 1843 of the first printing machine for braille, the . A pupil of the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, Foucault married Thérèse-Adèle Husson, a blind author, in 1826. This marriage gave birth to two daughters. After his wife's death in 1831, following a fire, he married a seamstress (non blind) in 1832, Adélaïde Louise Juteau. This allowed him to become a resident of the Quinze-Vingts (marriages between blind people were prohibited), which gave him the