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Portrait of Jean Henri van Swinden (1746-1823). Van Swinden was born in The Hague and received private education at home, and from 1763 to 1766 studied philosophy, physics, anatomy, physiology, botany and chemistry at Leiden University. On June 12, 1766, he was promoted to Doctor of Philosophy with a dissertation on attraction. That same year he became professor of physics and philosophy in Franeker. In 1785 Van Swinden moved from Franeker to Amsterdam, where he became professor at the Athenaeum Illustre. Van Swinden introduced house numbering in Amsterdam, was in charge of the first Amsterdam census in 1795, and was chairman of a committee that reported on the state of public health in 1798. He was a member of the (international) commission for the determination of the meter, which at the initiative of the French government held a conference in Paris from November 1798 to July 1799, after which he endeavored to introduce the metric system in the Netherlands Etching by Reinier Vinkeles (1741-1816), after Adriaan de Lelie (1755-1820). Published in Amsterdam by Cornelis Sebille Roos in 1803. Source: Rijksmuseum, 2015.
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