Musée Ampère, Electricity museum in Poleymieux-au-Mont-d'Or, France.
The Ampère Museum is housed in the former residence of scientist André-Marie Ampère and displays equipment and instruments that illustrate his work in electricity and magnetism. The rooms contain objects that document both his personal history and the scientific methods of his era.
André-Marie Ampère spent part of his childhood and youth in this house, which his family owned. In 1928 the American businessmen Hernand and Sosthenes Behn bought the former property and gave it to the Société française des électriciens, which in 1930 entrusted it to the Société des Amis d'André-Marie Ampère. The museum opened here on 1 July 1931, the first interactive science museum in France.
The museum is run by the Society of Friends of André-Marie Ampère, which took charge of the house in 1930 and opened the museum on 1 July 1931. It was France's first interactive science museum in the modern sense, with a dozen hands-on experiments on electrodynamics. The garden holds a 17th-century family chapel.
The museum is located in a rural area and is best reached by car or public transport from Poleymieux-au-Mont-d'Or. Plan for an unhurried visit since it is a smaller house and cannot accommodate large crowds at once.
The museum holds the original apparatus of the Einstein–de Haas experiment, the only fundamental research experiment conceived, carried out and published by Albert Einstein. Performed in 1915 with Wander Johannes de Haas, it gave experimental support to Ampère's theory of molecular currents and the electronic origin of magnetism.
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