honour of Charles W. Foster, whose son Charles Foster (1828–1904), governor of the state from 1880 to 1884 and secretary of the United States treasury from 1891 to 1893, did much to promote its growth. Fostoria was chartered as a city in 1854.
FOTHERGILL, JOHN (1712–1780), English physician, was
born of a Quaker family on the 8th of March 1712 at Carr End
in Yorkshire. He took the degree of M.D. at Edinburgh in 1736,
and after visiting the continent of Europe he in 1740 settled in
London, where he gained an extensive practice. In the epidemics
of influenza in 1775 and 1776 he is said to have had sixty patients
daily. In his leisure he made a study of conchology and botany;
and at Upton, near Stratford, he had an extensive botanical
garden where he grew many rare plants obtained from various
parts of the world. He was the patron of Sidney Parkinson, the
South Sea voyager. A translation of the Bible (1764 sq.) by
Anthony Purver, a Quaker, was made and printed at his expense.
His pamphlet entitled “Account of the Sore Throat attended
with Ulcers” (1748) contains one of the first descriptions of
diphtheria in English, and was translated into several languages.
He died in London on the 26th of December 1780.
FOTHERINGHAY, a village of Northamptonshire, England,
picturesquely situated on the left bank of the river Nene, 112 m.
from Elton station on the Peterborough branch of the London
& North-Western railway. The castle, of which nothing but the
earthworks and foundations remain, is famous as the scene
of the imprisonment of Mary queen of Scots from September
1586 to her trial and execution on the 8th of February 1587. The
earthworks, commanding a ford of the river, are apparently of
very early date, and probably bore a castle from Norman times.
It became an important stronghold of the Plantagenets from
the time of Edward III., and was the birthplace of Richard III.
in 1452. The church of St Mary and All Saints, originally
collegiate, is Perpendicular, and only the nave with aisles, and
the tower surmounted by an octagon, remain; but the building
is in the best style of its period. Edward, second duke of York,
who was killed at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, Richard, the
third duke, and his duchess, Cicely (d. 1495), also his son the
earl of Rutland, who with Richard himself, fell at the battle of
Wakefield in 1460, are buried in the church. Their monuments
were erected by Queen Elizabeth, who found the choir and tombs
in ruins.
FOUCAULT, JEAN BERNARD LEON (1819–1868), French
physicist, was the son of a publisher at Paris, where he was born
on the 18th of September 1819. After an education received
chiefly at home, he studied medicine, which, however, he speedily
abandoned for physical science, the improvement of L. J. M.
Daguerre’s photographic processes being the object to which
he first directed his attention. During three years he was experimental
assistant to Alfred Donné (1801–1878) in his course of
lectures on microscopic anatomy. With A. H. L. Fizeau he
carried on a series of investigations on the intensity of the light
of the sun, as compared with that of carbon in the electric arc,
and of lime in the flame of the oxyhydrogen blowpipe; on the
interference of heat rays, and of light rays differing greatly in
lengths of path; and on the chromatic polarization of light.
In 1849 he contributed to the Comptes Rendus a description
of an electromagnetic regulator for the electric arc lamp, and,
in conjunction with H. V. Regnault, a paper on binocular vision.
By the use of a revolving mirror similar to that used by Sir
Charles Wheatstone for measuring the rapidity of electric
currents, he was enabled in 1850 to demonstrate the greater
velocity of light in air than in water, and to establish that the
velocity of light in different media is inversely as the refractive
indices of the media. For his demonstration in 1851 of the
diurnal motion of the earth by the rotation of the plane of oscillation
of a freely suspended, long and heavy pendulum exhibited
by him at the Pantheon in Paris, and again in the following
year by means of his invention the gyroscope, he received the
Copley medal of the Royal Society in 1855, and in the same year
he was made physical assistant in the imperial observatory at
Paris. In September of that year he discovered that the force
required for the rotation of a copper disk becomes greater when
it is made to rotate with its rim between the poles of a magnet,
the disk at the same time becoming heated by the eddy or
“Foucault currents” induced in its metal. Foucault invented
in 1857 the polarizer which bears his name, and in the succeeding
year devised a method of giving to the speculum of reflecting
telescopes the form of a spheroid or a paraboloid of revolution.
With Wheatstone’s revolving mirror he in 1862 determined the
absolute velocity of light to be 298,000 kilometres (about 185,000
m.) a second, or 10,000 kilom. less than that obtained by previous
experimenters. He was created in that year a member of the
Bureau des Longitudes and an officer of the Legion of Honour,
in 1864 a foreign member of the Royal Society of London,
and next year a member of the mechanical section of the
Institute. In 1865 appeared his papers on a modification of
Watt’s governor, upon which he had for some time been experimenting
with a view to making its period of revolution constant,
and on a new apparatus for regulating the electric light; and in
the following year (Compt. Rend. lxiii.) he showed how, by the
deposition of a transparently thin film of silver on the outer side
of the object glass of a telescope, the sun could be viewed without
injuring the eye by excess of light. Foucault died of paralysis
on the 11th of February 1868 at Paris. From the year 1845
he edited the scientific portion of the Journal des Débats. His
chief scientific papers are to be found in the Comptes Rendus,
1847–1869.
See Revue cours scient. vi. (1869), pp. 484-489; Proc. Roy. Soc. xvii. (1869), pp. lxxxiii.-lxxxiv.; Lissajous, Notice historique sur la vie et les travaux de Léon Foucault (Paris, 1875).
FOUCHÉ, JOSEPH, Duke of Otranto (1763–1820), French
statesman, was born in a small village near Nantes on the 21st
of May 1763. His father, a seafaring man, destined him for the
sea; but the weakness of his frame and the precocity of his
talents soon caused this idea to be given up. He was educated
at the college of the Oratorians at Nantes, and showed marked
aptitude for studies both literary and scientific. Desiring to
enter the teaching profession he was sent to an institution kept
by brethren of the same order at Paris. There also he made
rapid progress, and soon entered upon tutorial duties at the
colleges of Niort, Saumur, Vendôme, Juilly and Arras. At Arras
he had some dealings with Robespierre at the time of the beginning
of the French Revolution (1789).
In October 1790 he was transferred by the Oratorians to their college at Nantes, owing to irregularities due to his zeal for revolutionary principles; but at Nantes he showed even more democratic fervour. His abilities and the zeal with which he espoused the most subversive notions brought him into favour with the populace at Nantes; he became a leading member of the local Jacobin club; and on the dissolution of the college of the Oratorians at Nantes in May 1792, Fouché gave up all connexion with the church, whose major vows he had not taken. After the downfall of the monarchy on the 10th of August 1792, he was elected as deputy for the department of the Lower Loire to the National Convention which met at the autumnal equinox and proclaimed the republic. The literary and pedagogic sympathies of Fouché at first brought him into touch with Condorcet and the party, or group, of the Girondists; but their vacillation at the time of the trial and execution of Louis XVI. (December 1792–January 21, 1793) led him to espouse the cause of the Jacobins, the less scrupulous and more thoroughgoing champions of revolutionary doctrine. On the question of the execution of the king, Fouché, after some preliminary hesitations, expressed himself with the utmost vigour in favour of immediate execution, and denounced those who “wavered before the shadow of a king.”
The crisis which resulted from the declaration of war by the Convention against England and Holland (Feb. 1, 1793), and a little later against Spain, brought Fouché into notoriety as one of the fiercest of the Jacobinical fanatics who then held power at Paris. While the armies of the first coalition threatened the north-east of France, a revolt of the royalist peasants of Brittany and la Vendée menaced the Convention on the west. That body deputed Fouché with a colleague, Villers, to proceed
