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Jean-Baptiste Biot made optical rotation a practical subject of chemical measurement. His 1845 instructions addressed both observation and quantitative measurement of rotatory optical properties, with applications to scientific, industrial and medical chemistry. In polarimetry, a polarimeter compares the orientation of transmitted polarized light with a reference. Controlling path length, wavelength, temperature and concentration makes the measured optical rotation useful for comparing samples; a rotation reading alone does not identify all these quantities independently.^[ref]

A physicist associated with optical rotation and Biot's saccharimeter.