Jean Alexander Heinrich Clapier de Colongue (; ) (–) was a Baltic German marine engineer and founder of a theory of magnetic deviation for magnetic compasses, living and working in Imperial Russia. Ivan Petrovich de Collong was born in 1839 in Dünaburg (now Daugavpils) into a Baltic German noble family originally of Franco-Portuguese origin.[citation needed] He studied at the Naval Academy in Saint Petersburg and from 1870 he worked there as a lecturer. Starting in 1878 he was head of the Navy's Main Hydrographical Administration. In 1875 he constructed deflector (a new type of compass baffle) and later improved upon its design.