Printed tribute card with portrait commemorating Augustin Fresnel, created by the International Telecommunication Union, 1955. In English. The card has four pages with the title on the front, tribute inside front page, portrait of Fresnel inside back - half length, turned to the right, in jacket, shirt and cravat.

One of a set of tribute leaflets with portraits commemorating figures who contributed to the development of telecommunications, produced by the International Telecommunication Union between 1955 and 1964. The ITU was formed in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, a body to work internationally to prevent bottlenecks and disruptions across national borders by having twenty European states sign a treaty to agree common standards in telegraph signals and codes and to harmonize telegraph services. The group later expanded the scope of their agreements to incorporate new developments in communications such as radio, television and digital developments. Since 1947 the ITU has been a part of the UN as an international specialized agency for information and communication technologies to produce regulatory strategies and policies and an understanding of future technical, social and economic trends.

The leaflet text reads:

Tribute to Augustin Fresnel by the International Telecommunications Union

Published in the series of portraits of distinguished figures in the telecommunication world

YEAR 1955

AUGUSTIN FRESNEL

French physicist

1788-1827

Following up the achievements of Huygens, Fresnel introduced the conception of interference in order to apply it to the principle of periodic vibrations and thereby established a body of theory from which important developments have derived. His discoveries in connection with the diffraction, polarization and double refraction of light have become classical. He showed that light waves have fields which are perpendicular to the direction of propagation of the waves. Fresnel reflection coefficients, Fresnel zones and Fresnel integrals are well known. It is to him that we owe the invention of special lenses for lighthouses.

Modern science, especially electrical engineering and its application to telecommunication, is in many ways indebted to Fresnel. His light-vector, for example, corresponds to one aspect of the electromagnetic wave, and the combination of vibrations of the same frequency but of different phases is always effected by a construction first given by Fresnel.