ABSTRACT
Charles-Edouard Guillaume was born on February 15, 1861, in Fleurier, in the canton of Neuchatel in western Switzerland, about eighty-five kilometers from Geneva. He received his doctorate in 1883, with a thesis on electrolytic capacitors. In the same year, after a few months as an artillery officer, he entered the International Bureau of Weights and Measures at Sevres, France, where he would spend his entire scientific career. The first task that the bureau gave him was the study of the mercury-in-glass thermometer, its calibration and its stem correction. During his long tenure as assistant director and director of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures at Sevres, Guillaume was indefatigable as researcher and administrator in refining instruments and methods of measurement to the greatest possible precision, and in publishing to the world the current status of metricization and metric standards. For his efforts, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1920.
