Jean Alexander Heinrich Clapier de Colongue

Jean Alexander Heinrich Clapier de Colongue
Jean Alexander Heinrich Clapier de Colongue
Born	6 March [O.S. 22 February] 1838 Dünaburg, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire (now Daugavpils, Latvia)
Died	26 May [O.S. 13 May] 1901 Saint Petersburg, Russia

Jean Alexander Heinrich Clapier de Colongue (Russian: Ivan Petrovich de-Kolong; Иван Петрович де-Колонг; Latvian: Johans Aleksandrs Heinrihs Klapje de Kolongs) (6 March [O.S. 22 February] 1838–26 May [O.S. 13 May] 1901) was a Baltic German marine engineer and founder of a theory of magnetic deviation for magnetic compasses, living and working in Imperial Russia.

Biography

Ivan Petrovich de Collong was born in 1839 in Dünaburg (now Daugavpils) into a Baltic German noble family originally of Franco-Portuguese origin. He studied at the Naval Academy in Saint Petersburg and from 1870 he worked there as a lecturer. Starting in 1878 he was head of the Navy's Main Hydrographical Administration. In 1875, he constructed a deflector (a new type of compass baffle) and later improved upon its design.

De Collong was a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (from 1896) and a Major-General of the Imperial Russian Navy. He was awarded the Lomonosov Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

See also

• List of Russian inventors
• List of Baltic German scientists

External links

• Memoirs of Alexei Krylov (in Russian)
• Genealogy handbook of Baltic nobility Clapier de Colongue's (in German)