but also, especially for the translation of the most difficult part, the Kaogongji, he himself visited many workshops and questioned artisans and craftsmen about their methods and vocabulary in order to verify his son's work. Biot's translation remains to this day the only translation into a Western language of this book. He died in Paris on 3 February 1862. Work Electromagnetism Jean-Baptiste Biot made many contributions to the scientific community in his lifetime – most notably in optics, magnetism, and astronomy. The Biot–Savart law in magnetism is named after Biot and his colleague Félix Savart for their work in 1820. In their experiment they showed a connection between electricity and magnetism by "starting with a long vertical wire and a magnetic needle some horizontal distance apart [and showing] that running a current through the wire caused the needle to move" (Parsley). Meteorites In 1803 Biot was sent by the Académie française to report back on 3000 meteorites that fell on L'Aigle, in Normandy, France (see L'Aigle (meteorite)). He found that the meteorites, called "stones" at the time, were from outer space. With his report, Biot helped support the German physicist Ernst Chladni's argument, published in 1794, that meteorites were debris from space. Prior to Biot's thorough investigation of the meteorites that fell near l'Aigle, France in 1803, very few truly believed that rocks found on Earth could have extraterrestrial origins. There were anecdotal tales of unusual rocks found on the ground after fireballs had been seen in the sky, but such stories were often dismissed as fantasy. Serious debate concerning the unusual rocks began in 1794 when Ernst Chladni published a book claiming that such rocks had an extraterrestrial origin (Westrum). Only after Biot was able to analyse the rocks at l'Aigle was it commonly accepted that the fireballs seen in the sky were meteors falling through the atmosphere. Since Biot's time, analysis of meteorites has resulted in accurate measurements of the chemical composition of the solar system. The composition and position of meteors in the solar system have also given astronomers clues as to how the solar system formed. Polarized light In 1812, Biot turned his attention to the study of optics, particularly the polarization of light. Prior to the 19th century, light was believed to consist of discrete packets called corpuscles. During the early 19th century, many scientists began to disregard the corpuscular theory in favor of the