Johann Friedrich Böttger

Johann Friedrich Böttger, who lived from 1682 to 1719, was a German alchemist, born in Schleiz and died in Dresden, who is normally credited with being the first European to discover the secret of making hard paste porcelain, in 1708. Apprenticed as a chemist to a pharmacist in Berlin, he was soon regarded as an adept in alchemy, and Augustus II of Poland, known as Augustus the Strong, who was always short of money, held him in Dresden and demanded that he make gold. In 1704 the scientist Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus was ordered to oversee him, and from 1707 Böttger cooperated in experiments with clays that reached a breakthrough in 1708 with fine white kaolin from Schneeberg and alabaster as flux. The Meissen factory, established in 1710, was the first to make porcelain in Europe in large quantities, and Böttger kept the recipe a trade secret for his company, although it has also been claimed that English makers or Tschirnhaus produced porcelain first.