Amédée Guillemin

From 1850 to 1860[1] he taught mathematics in a private school while writing articles for the Liberal press criticizing the Second French Empire.

In 1860, he moved to Chambéry where he became a junior deputy editor of the weekly political magazine La Savoie.

His publisher, Hachette, encouraged him to write a series of booklets about astronomy and physics under the title "Small popular encyclopaedia", a scientifically sound but accessible collection about sciences and their applications.

French astronomer Jacques Crovisier from the Observatoire de Paris suggests he may have been a source of inspiration for Jules Verne's 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon.

It was Guillemin who drafted the entry on astronomy in the second edition of Dorbigny's Dictionary of natural history.