Jean Charles Athanase Peltier

Jean Charles Athanase Peltier was a French physicist, born February 22, 1785 in Ham, Somme and died October 27, 1845 in Paris, who discovered the reversible thermoelectric phenomenon that carries his name. Trained and initially employed as a watchmaker in Paris, working for a time with the celebrated watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet, he retired from trade at about thirty years old to devote himself to physics. In 1834 he found that passing an electric current through a junction of two different metals produces heating at one junction and cooling at the other depending on the current's direction, the opposite effect to the electricity-from-heat phenomenon Thomas Seebeck had already described; the German physicist Emil Lenz confirmed and quantified the effect in 1838. The Peltier effect became the operating principle behind solid-state thermoelectric cooling devices and, run in reverse, thermoelectric generators that convert a temperature difference directly into electricity. Peltier also introduced the concept of electrostatic induction in 1840 and published research on atmospheric electricity, waterspouts and the boiling point of water at altitude.