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Middle years

In 1850, he did an experiment using a rotating mirror to measure the speed of light; it was viewed as "driving the last nail in the coffin" of Newton 's corpuscular theory of light when it showed that light travels more slowly through water than through air. In 1851, he provided an experimental demonstration of the rotation of the Earth on its axis (diurnal motion). This experimental setup had been used by Vincenzo Viviani but became well known to the public by Foucault's work. Foucault achieved the demonstration by showing the rotation of the plane of oscillation of a long and heavy pendulum suspended from the roof of the Panthéon, Paris. The experiment caused a sensation in both the learned and popular worlds, and " Foucault pendulums " were suspended in major cities across Europe and America and attracted crowds. In the following year he used (and named) the gyroscope as a conceptually simpler experimental proof (see Foucault's gyroscope experiment). In 1855, he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society for his 'very remarkable experimental researches'. Earlier in the same year he was made physicien (physicist) at the imperial observatory at Paris.

In September 1855 he discovered that the force required for the rotation of a copper disc becomes greater when it is made to rotate with its rim between the poles of a magnet, the disc at the same time becoming heated by the eddy current or "Foucault currents" induced in the metal.

In 1857 Foucault invented the polarizer which bears his name, and in the succeeding year devised a method of testing the mirror of a reflecting telescope to determine its shape. The so-called " Foucault knife-edge test " allows the worker to tell if the mirror is perfectly spherical or has non-spherical deviation in its figure. Prior to Foucault's publication of his findings, the testing of reflecting telescope mirrors was a "hit or miss" proposition.

Foucault's knife edge test determines the shape of a mirror by finding the focal lengths of its areas, commonly called zones and measured from the mirror center. In the test, light from a point source is focused onto the center of curvature of the mirror and reflected back to a knife edge. The test enables the tester to quantify the conic section of the mirror, thereby allowing the tester to validate the actual shape of the mirror, which is necessary to obtain optimal performance of the optical system. The Foucault test is in use to this date, most notably by amateur and smaller commercial telescope makers as it is inexpensive and uses simple, easily made equipment.

With Charles Wheatstone ’s revolving mirror he, in 1862, determined the speed of light to be 298,000 km / s – 10,000 km/s less than that obtained by previous experimenters and only 0.6% in error of the currently accepted value.