Andre-Marie Ampere was a French physicist and mathematician, who made the revolutionary discovery that a wire carrying electric current, can attract or repel another wire next to it, that’s also carrying electric current. The attraction is magnetic, but no magnets are necessary for the effect to be seen.
Ampere went on to formulate Ampere’s law of electromagnetism and produced the best definition of electric current of his time. He also proposed the existence of a particle we now recognize as the electron, discovered the chemical element fluorine, and grouped elements by their properties.
In recognition of Ampere’s contribution to modern electrical science, the ‘ampere’ was established as a standard unit of electrical measurement, in 1881, forty-five years after his death