Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist and Anglophile, born on 1 July 1742 in Ober-Ramstadt near Darmstadt, the youngest of seventeen children of a pastor. In 1769 he became extraordinary professor of physics and six years later ordinary professor, and he was the first person in Germany to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics. He investigated electricity and discovered the tree-like electrical discharge patterns on dielectrics that are now called Lichtenberg figures. He was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1793. He is also remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, the Sudelbücher, a name he modelled on the English bookkeeping term waste books, which earned him a lasting reputation among German speaking thinkers.