Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was an experimental physicist, an astronomer, a mathematician, a practicing critic both of art and literature. As satirical writer, he is the best known for his ridicule of metaphysical and romantic excesses. He discovered in 1777 the basic principle of modern xerographic copying; the images that he reproduced are still called "Lichtenberg figures."

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was born in Oberramstadt, near Darmstadt, on July 1, 1742. Lichtenberg was the first of seventeen children, most of whom died at an early age. Lichtenberg's father, Johann Conrad Lichtenberg, was a Lutheran clergyman, who taught him mathematics and natural sciences. He died in 1751 when Lichtenberg was nine. Henrietta Catharina (Eckard) Lichtenberg, his mother, came also from a clerical family. She died in 1764. Later Lichtenberg said, that he had dreams of his mother every night.
 

Lichtenberg's father

Lichtenberg's brother

The house of Lichtenberg's family where Georg was born in 1742, Oberramstadt

 

His formal primary education Georg received in Gymnasium in Darmstadt. In 1763 he entered Göttingen University, where he studied mathematics and natural sciences under supervision Prof. Kästner (1719 – 1800) till 1766. His first printed work was 'Von dem Nutzen, den die Mathematik einem Bel Esprit bringen kann' (1766), which was published in Hannoverische Magazin. After graduating, he worked as a tutor for three years. During this period Lichtenberg started to read Kant, but later Spinoza become more important philosopher for him. Darmstadt  Gymnasium where Georg Christoph Lichtenberg received his primary education

In 1769 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg became assistant professor (extraordinary professor) of physics and in 1775 professor (ordinary professor) of the University of Göttingen. This post he held until his death. In 1770 Lichtenberg was appointed assistant professor of physics at Göttingen and in 1775 he become Professor Ordinarius. He taught mathematics, physics, astronomy, and a variety of other subjects. As his fame spread, his lectures on physics started to attract students from different parts of Europe. At that time it was very common that physicist were also mathematicians, and passed readily from mechanics to astronomy. Lichtenberg did research in a wide variety of fields - including geophysics, volcanology, meteorology, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics - but most important were his investigations into physics. In 1793 he was elected a member of the Royal Society.

Lichtenberg's work in the area of electricity held the most promise. Lichtenberg put up the first lightning rod in the town of Göttingen, and his experiments with electricity attracted many other scientists, including Volta (for whom our electrical word "volt" is named). Lichtenberg's only true scientific discovery related to electricity: in 1777, he found that discharges of static electricity can form remarkable patterns in bits of dust. The basic principle behind these so-called "Lichtenberg figures" is employed in modern photocopying machines, but Lichtenberg himself found no use for the discovery.
 

Original Lichtenberg figure

Original Lichtenberg figure

Notably, Lichtenberg constructed a huge electrophorus and, in the course of experimentations, discovered in 1777 the basic principle of modern xerographic copying; the images that he reproduced are still called "Lichtenberg figures." These are radial patterns formed when sharp, pointed conducting bodies at high voltage get near enough to insulators to discharge electrically. They look a bit like pressed basket-fish, and are now of some interest because they are fractals.

 

Lichtenberg's big electrostatic machine Lichtenberg taught chemistry, geology, physics, meteorology and astronomy. Lichtenberg lectured well enough that people came to hear Lichtenberg (doubtless being one of the first to add demonstrations with apparatus to his lectures helped), and apparently talked very well.

Lichtenberg's experiment with static electricity

 

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

 

Göttinger Taschenkalendar

Lichtenberg visited England twice - in 1770 and 1774-1775. These journeys made him an Anglophile; especially he enjoyed the atmosphere of political freedom. Lichtenberg visited the court of King George III. According to a story, George III once arrived unannounced on his doorstep one morning, asking in German whether the Herr Professor was at home. Lichtenberg's Briefe aus England (1776-78; "Letters from England") are the most attractive of his writings. From 1778 he contributed to the Göttinger Taschenkalender ("Göttingen Pocket Almanac"), a publication intended to spread the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Lichtenberg also contributed to the Göttingisches Magazin der Literatur und Wissenschaft ("Göttingen Magazine of Literature and Science"), which he edited for three years (1780-82) with J.G.A. Forster. He also published in 1794-99 an Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthschen Kupferstiche ("Full Explanation of Hogarthian Copper Engravings"). He wrote on just about everything, especially Hogarth; like many recipients of the Enlightenment on the Continent, he was a pronounced Anglophile; his sex life is described by his translator as "very irregular,'' and today would almost certain have put him in jail.

Lichtenberg has been credited with introducing the aphorism into German literature. However, his notebooks in which he wrote his aphorism for his own amusement, were published posthumously. The names of the volumes followed the alphabets from A to L, which has several pages missing. Notebooks G and H have disappeared. It is possible that Lichtenberg began keeping his notebooks, or Südelbücher ("waste books") as he called them, while still in school, but his earliest surviving notes are from the mid-1760s. He also kept a diary. Lichtenberg's aphorism were first collected in the posthumpus edition Vermischte Schriften (1800-05). It consisted of nine volumes. Lichtenberg's style is intimate and direct. Human nature and its foibles provided much material for his observations. "Soothsayers make a better living in the world than truthsayers," he once said. Lichtenberg ironized the Sturm und Drang school of writers and admired such English writers as Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding. From the French writers Michel de Montaigne was the only one, whom he read with a pencil in his hand. Writers at that time seldom recorded their dreams, but Lichtenberg showed genuine interest in them. "I know from endeniable experience that dreams lead to self-knowledge," he wrote. Later Freud referred to him several times.
 

With unflagging intelligence and encyclopedic curiosity, Lichtenberg wittily deflates the pretensions of learning and society, examines a range of philosophical questions, and tracks his own thoughts down hidden pathways to disconcerting and sometimes hilarious conclusions. Lichtenberg's Waste Books have been greatly admired by writers as very different as Tolstoy, Einstein, and André Breton, while Nietzsche and Wittgenstein acknowledged them as a significant inspiration for their own radical work in philosophy. The record of a brilliant and subtle mind in action, The Waste Books are above all a powerful testament to the necessity, and pleasure, of unfettered thought. Nietzsche credited Lichtenberg as the greatest German aphorist. The Waste Books, a collection of 1,085 aphorisms written over the course of Lichtenberg's adult life, amply attests to that. The pieces cover every conceivable topic - from science, religion and philosophy to daily observations ("An amen face") and meditations about girls: "Even the gentlest, most modest and best of girls are always better, gentler and more modest if their mirrors have told them they are looking more beautiful than ever."

These are gems of the aphorist's art, endlessly quotable and very trenchant, but strangely little-known in English (the last translation before Hollingdale's was in 1959, and has long been out of print). A few quotations of the shorter ones may give some idea of the flavor of the whole.

He marvelled at the fact that cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were.
Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists.
We must not seek to abstract from the busts of the great Greeks and Romans rules for the visible form of genius as long as we cannot contrast them with Greek blockheads.
Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?
Why are young widows in mourning so beautiful?
Not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn't even afraid of them.
The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of a plant.
The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.
There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another... The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.
 

As a satirist and humorist Lichtenberg takes high rank among the German writers of the 18th century. His biting wit involved him in many controversies with well-known contemporaries, such as Johann Kaspar Lavater, whose science of physiognomy he ridiculed, and Johann Heinrich Voss, whose views on Greek pronunciation called forth a powerful satire, Über die Pronunciation der Schöpse des alten Griechenlandes (1782; "On the Pronunciation of the Muttonheads of Old Greece"). This caricature was probably done by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), who, as an anthropologist and zoologist, was a colleague of Lichtenberg at the University of Göttingen.

 

From his childhood Lichtenberg suffered from a malformation of the spine. In spite of becoming a hunchback and the target of crude and offensive remarks, his writing do not show bitter attitude toward life. And as much as his own outlook was observed by other people, he observed their behavior. His physical handicap Lichtenberg also could deal with humour in his notebooks.

 

In the spirit of Enlightenment Lichtenberg was an empiricist, who opposed dogmatism and wanted to substitute knowledge for fancy. "Superstition," he explained, "originates among ordinary people in the early and all too zealous instruction they receive in religion: they hear of mysteries, miracles, deeds of the Devil, and consider it very probable that things of this sort could occur in everything anywhere." Lichtenberg questioned accepted truths, but his ironic rationalism was balanced and cultivated. In geometry he come to the conclusion that Euclid's axioms based on common sense might not be the only right ones. At the age of sixteen Lichtenberg lost his Christian faith. In the light of his notebook it seems that he was not an unshakable atheist. Once he noted: "Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessing of heaven."

 

Lichtenberg's first important work was Über Physiognomik, wider die Physiognomen (1778), a satire on Johann Caspar Lavater's Physiognomische Fragmente. Lavater's theory, that people's characters can be read from their portrait silhouettes, prompted also 'Fragment von Schwänzen', published in Baldingers Neues Magazin für Aerzte in 1783. Imitating Lavater's pretentious language, Lichtenberg examined the "expressive" qualities of tails, tails of dogs and pigs, and "pigtails" of men, all presented as silhouettes. "What kindliness in the silky tender slope," he wrote of an pigtail, "effective without any masking hemp-hiding ribbon, and yet smiling bliss like plaited sunbeams. Soaring as far above even crowned heads as saint's halo over a nightcap..." Also the early satire, Von Konrad Photorin (1773), was directed against Lavater.

Lichtenberg's first sexual encounter Lichtenberg may have experienced in 1766 with Maria Justine Schulzen, a cleaning woman. In 1777 he met Maria Stechard, a weaver’s daughter, who was then about thirteen years old. She started to visit his house daily as a housekeeper. She become Lichtenberg's mistress and from 1780 she lived with him permanently. Maria died in 1782. Her death depressed Lichtenberg deeply but soon he found another love, Margarethe Kellner, again a much younger woman with a working class background. They lived together from 1786 and were married in 1789. Margarethe gave him six children and outlived him by 49 years.
 

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was married on Margarethe Kellner and the couple had a son born in 1786.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and his family lived in this house from 1789.

 

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, 1790

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, 1791

In 1793 Lichtenberg started an affair with his servant girl, Dolly. Probably he recorded in one of his notebooks (the K book) intimate details of this amorous adventure, but most of the book has been destroyed. Throughout his life Lichtenberg suffered from poor health, but he had hypochondriac tendencies, too. During his last years he drank more than before. One of his neighbors have told, that Lichtenberg woke up late, had coffee, bitter, and wine. With lunch he drank wine, and in the afternoon he drank wine and liqueur. And in the evenings he read and wrote.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a charming, hunchbacked, lecherous hypochondriac. His friends and admirers included Goethe, Kant and England's King George III. He had many ideas, an insatiable curiosity and wrote about art, philosophy, psychology, morality, but rarely brought books or inventions to completion. For science, therefore, he remains a mere historical footnote. But he is well remembered for thousands of creative aphorisms he jotted in his notebooks.
 

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg died in Göttingen on February 24, 1799. His grave and the grave of his wife, Margarethe Lichtenberg (nee Kellner) are on the Bartholomaus Friedhof cemetery of Göttingen.

Two bronze statues commemorating Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, were erected in Göttingen on the Markt Platz and also in the Hof of the Library in about 1997. Both statues are unique reflecting the character of Lichtenberg.
 

Lichtenberg's statue near the city library	Lichtenberg's statue on the Market square
Lichtenberg's statue on the Market square	Lichtenberg's statue (fragment) on the Market square

 

German postal stamp memorizing Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

This text has been compiled from the biographies of Lichtenberg available in the Internet:
( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 ) Aphorims of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg