Plateau is known for his research into vision and into the mathematics of soap-film surfaces, and for the development of early cinematic devices. Quetelet taught and befriended him, drew him into his scientific circle, and was generally strongly influential. Plateau met Arago in France, while sourcing good laboratory equipment (he probably met his fellow-researcher into colour, Chevreul, on the same trip). He adapted ideas of Faraday’s and Roget’s, Faraday — a friend — writing sympathetically in his blindness. Despite Plateau’s staring into the sun for experimental purposes, his eventual blindness probably had other primary causes.