Physicist and priest, born in Dijon, E France. One of the earliest members of the Academy of Sciences, he wrote on percussion, air and its pressure, the movements of fluid bodies and of pendulums, and colours. He coined the word barometer in his Discours de la nature de l'air (1676) in which he independently stated Boyle's law of 1662 (long known in France as Mariotte's law).
Mariotte is best known for his recognition in 1676 of Boyle's Law about the inverse relationship of volume and pressures in gases. The first volume of the Histoire et memoires de l'Academie (1733) contains many original papers by him upon a great variety of physical subjects, such as the motion of fluids, the nature of colour, the notes of the trumpet, the barometer, the fall of bodies, the recoil of guns, the freezing of water etc.
His Essais de physique, four in number, of which the first three were published at Paris between 1676 and 1679, are his most important works, and form, together with a Traite de la percussion des corps, the first volume of the Oeuvres de Mariotte (2 vols., Leiden, 1717). The second of these essays (De la nature de l'air) contains the statement of the law that the volume of a gas varies inversely as the pressure, which, though very generally called by the name of Mariotte, had been discovered in 1660 by Robert Boyle. The fourth essay is a systematic treatment of the nature of colour, with a description of many curious experiments and a discussion of the rainbow, halos, parhelia, diffraction, and the more purely physiological phenomena of colour.
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