page_title: Nicolas Fatio de Duillier
section_title: Participation in the Royal Society
hierarchical_section_title: Nicolas Fatio de Duillier / Career in Holland and England / Participation in the Royal Society
caption_attribution_description: English: Screening And Shading
context_page_description: Nicolas Fatio de Duillier FRS was a mathematician, natural philosopher, astronomer, inventor, and religious campaigner. Born in Basel, Switzerland, Fatio mostly grew up in the then-independent Republic of Geneva, before spending much of his adult life in England and Holland. Fatio is known for his collaboration with Giovanni Domenico Cassini on the correct explanation of the astronomical phenomenon of zodiacal light, for inventing the "push" or "shadow" theory of gravitation, for his close association with both Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton, and for his role in the Newton v. Leibniz calculus controversy. He also invented and developed the first method for fabricating jewel bearings for mechanical watches and clocks.
  Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London at the age of 24, Fatio never achieved the position and reputation that his early achievements and connections had promised. In 1706 he became involved with a millenarian religious sect, known in London as the "French prophets", and the following year he was sentenced to the pillory for sedition over his role in the publication of the prophecies of Élie Marion, the leader of that sect.
context_section_description: Aged only 24, Fatio was elected fellow of the Royal Society on 2 May 1688. That year, Fatio gave an account of Huygens's mechanical explanation of gravitation before the Royal Society, in which he tried to connect Huygens' theory with Isaac Newton's work on universal gravitation. Fatio's personal prospects seemed to brighten even further as a result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, which marked the ascendancy of the Whigs and culminated with Parliament deposing the Catholic King James II and giving the English throne jointly to James's Protestant daughter Mary and to her husband, the Dutch Prince William of Orange. Fatio also had an opportunity to enhance his intellectual reputation during Huygen's visit to London in the summer of 1698.
  Fatio met Newton, probably for the first time, at a meeting of the Royal Society on 12 June 1689.  Newton and Fatio soon became friends and Newton even suggested that the two share rooms in London while Newton attended the post-Revolutionary session of Parliament, to which he had been elected as member for the University of Cambridge. In 1690, Fatio wrote to Huygens outlining his own understanding of the physical cause of gravity, which would later become known as "Le Sage's theory of gravitation".  Soon after that, he read his letter to Huygens before the Royal Society. Fatio's theory, on which he continued to work until his death, is based on minute particles streaming through space and pushing upon gross bodies, an idea that Fatio probably derived in part from his successful explanation of zodiacal light as sunlight scattered by a cloud of fine dust surrounding the Sun.
  Fatio turned down Newton's offer to reside in Cambridge as his assistant, seeking instead academic preferment in the Netherlands. In the spring of 1690 he traveled to The Hague as tutor to two of John Hampden's nephews. There, Fatio shared with Huygens a list that he had compiled of errata to Newton's Principia.  Fatio and Huygens collaborated on problems relating to differential equations, gravity, and optics.  At this time, Huygens shared with Gottfried Leibniz some of Fatio's work on differential equations.  Fatio returned to London in September 1691, following the death of one of his pupils. He vied unsuccessfully for the Savilian Professorship of Astronomy at Oxford, a post that had been left vacant by the death of his friend Edward Bernard.
  Fatio convinced Newton to write a new treatise on a general method of integration, De quadratura curvarum. Initially, he also expected to collaborate with Newton on a new edition of the Principia that would include Fatio's mechanical explanation of gravity.  By the end of 1691, Fatio realised that Newton would not proceed with that project, but he still hoped to collaborate with Newton on corrections to the text of the Principia. In a letter to Huygens, Fatio wrote, concerning those corrections, "I may possibly undertake it myself, as I know no one who so well and thoroughly understands a good part of this book as I do."
  Newton and Fatio also corresponded extensively on alchemy between 1689 and 1694, with Fatio acting as an intermediary between Newton and an unnamed Huguenot alchemist, whom modern historians have tentatively identified as M. de Tegny, a captain in the infantry regiment led by Colonel François Dupuy de Cambon. By the summer of 1694, Fatio was employed as a tutor to Wriothesley Russell, the heir of the Duke of Bedford, a position for which he had been recommended by Locke. Fatio accompanied his pupil to Oxford and, during 1697–8, to Holland.
caption: Fatio's "push-shadow" explanation of gravity: the shadows that two nearby bulky bodies make in the omnidirectional stream of aetherial corpuscles cause an imbalance in the net forces that each bulky body is subject to, leading to their mutual attraction.
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