Charles Edouard Guillaume

Guillaume, Charles Edouard, 1861–1938, Swiss physicist and metrologist, Ph.D. Zurich Polytechnic (now the Federal Institute of Technology), 1882. Guillaume joined the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, France, in 1883 and was appointed associate director in 1902, director in 1905, and honorary director in 1936 when he retired. Guillaume was the recipient of the 1920 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on nickel-steel alloys, which led to the development of two new materials, invar and elinvar, for applications in clocks, watches, and other precision instruments. He exploited anomalies in these alloys to enable their use in measurement applications.

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