Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 –
24 February 1799) was a German scientist, satirist and
Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to
experimental physics in Germany. Today, he is remembered for his notebooks
published posthumously, which he himself called "waste books", using the English
bookkeeping term.
Life
Lichtenberg was the youngest of eighteen children of a pastor of the same name. His father,
ascending through the ranks of the church hierarchy, eventually became superintendent for
Darmstadt. Unusually for a priest in those times, he seems to have possessed a fair amount of scientific knowledge. Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg was educated at his parent's house until ten years of age, when he joined the Lateinschule in Darmstadt. His intelligence and wit became obvious at a very early age. He wanted to study
mathematics, but his family could not afford to pay for lessons. In 1762 his mother applied to Ludwig VIII, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, who granted sufficient funds. In
1763, Lichtenberg entered Göttingen University, where in 1769 he
became extraordinary professor of physics, and six years
later ordinary professor. He held this post till his death.
Lichtenberg became a hunchback owing to a malformation of the spine. This left him unusually short, even by eighteenth-century standards. Over time this malformation
grew worse, ultimately affecting even his breathing.
One of the first scientists to introduce experiments with apparatus in their lectures,
Lichtenberg was a most popular and respected figure in the European intellectual circles of his time. He maintained good
relations with most of the great figures of that era, including Goethe and
Kant. In 1784 Alessandro Volta visited Göttingen
especially to see the man and his experiments. The eminent mathematician Karl Friedrich
Gauss was one of the hearers of his lectures. In 1793 he was elected a member of the Royal
Society.
As a physicist, today he is remembered for his investigations in electricity, for
discovering branching discharge patterns on dielectrics now called Lichtenberg figures. In 1777, he built a large Electrophorus in order to generate static electricity through
induction. With it, he discovered the basic principle of modern Xerography copy machine technology. This discovery was also the
forerunner of modern day Plasma Physics. By discharging a high voltage point near an insulator, he was able to record the
resulting radial pattern in fixed dust. The Lichtenberg figures are considered today to be examples of fractals.
He was one of the first to introduce Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod to Germany
by installing such devices to his house in Göttingen and his garden sheds. He also proposed the standardized paper size system
used all over the world today (except in the US and Canada), known as ISO 216, which has A4 as the most commonly used size.[1]
Invited by his students, he visited England twice, from Easter to early summer 1770 and from
August 1774 to Christmas 1775, where he was received cordially by George
III and Queen Charlotte. He led the King through the royal
observatory in Richmond, upon which the king proposed that he become professor of
philosophy. He also met with participants of Cook's voyages. Great Britain impressed him, and
he became a well-known Anglophile after the visits.
He had many romances. Most of the women were from poor families. In 1777 he met Maria Stechard, then aged 13, who lived with
the professor permanently after 1780. She died in 1782.[2]
In the following year he met the 22-year-old Margarethe Kellner. He married her in 1789, in order to give her a pension, as he thought he was to die soon. She gave him six children, and outlived him by 49 years.
Lichtenberg was prone to procrastination. He failed to launch the first ever
hydrogen balloon, and although he always dreamed of writing a novel à la Fielding's Tom Jones, he never
finished more than a few pages. He died at the age of 56, after a short illness.
Lichtenberg's monument at the marketplace in Göttingen. This "Monument" is life size, and from the rubbish bin nearby it can be
discerned that Lichtenberg was about 155 cm.
Waste books
The "waste books" (Lichtenberg rendered it roughly as Sudelbücher in German)
are the notebooks he kept from his student days until the end of his life. Each volume was accorded a letter of the alphabet from
A, which begun in 1765, to L, which broke off at Lichtenberg's death in 1799.
These notebooks first became known to the world after the man's death, when the first and second editions of Lichtenbergs
Vermischte Schriften (1800-06 and 1844-53) were published by his sons and brothers. Since the initial publications, however,
notebooks G and H, and most of notebook K, were destroyed or disappeared. Those missing parts are believed to contain sensitive
materials. The manuscripts of the remaining notebooks are now preserved in Göttingen University.
The notebooks contain quotations that struck Lichtenberg, titles of books to read, autobiographical sketches, and short or
long reflections. It is those reflections that help Lichtenberg earn his posthumous fame. Today he is regarded as one of the best
aphorists in the Western intellectual history.
Some scholars have attempted to distil a system of thought out of Lichtenberg's scattered musings. However, Lichtenberg was
not a professional philosopher, and had no need to present, or to have, any consistent philosophy.
The waste books nevertheless reveal a critical and analytical way of thinking and emphasize on experimental evidence in
physics, through which he became one of the early founders and advocates of modern scientific methodology.
The more experience and experiments are accumulated during the exploration of nature, the more faltering its theories become.
It is always good though not to abandon them instantly. For every hypothesis which used to be good at least serves the purpose of
duly summarizing and keeping all phenomena until its own time. One should lay down the conflicting experience separately, until
it has accumulated sufficiently to justify the efforts necessary to edifice a new theory. (Lichtenberg: waste book JII/1602)
The reflections also include keen observations on human nature, à la the 17th-century French moralists.
Schopenhauer admired Lichtenberg for what he had written in his notebooks
greatly. He called Lichtenberg one of those who "think ... for their own instruction", who are "genuine thinkers for
themselves in both senses of the words".[3]Other
admirers of Lichtenberg's notebooks include Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein.[4] Lichtenberg is not read by many outside Germany. Leo Tolstoy held Lichtenberg's writings in high esteem, expressing his perplexity of "why the Germans of the
present day neglect this writer so much."[5] The Chinese
scholar and wit Qian Zhongshu quotes the Waste books in his works several
times.[6] A crater on the Moon, Crater Lichtenberg, has been named in his honour.
Other works
As a satirist, 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 the Swiss physiognomist
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.
In 1777, Lichtenberg opposed the apparent misrepresentation of science by Jacob
Philadelphia. Lichtenberg considered him to be a magician, not a physicist, and created a satirical poster that was
intended to prevent Philadelphia from performing his exhibition in Göttingen. The placard, called "Lichtenberg's Avertissement", described extravagant and miraculous tricks that were to be
performed. As a result, Philadelphia left the city without a performance.
In 1784 he took over the publication of the textbook Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre ("Foundations of the Natural
Sciences") from his friend and colleague Johann Christian Erxleben upon his premature death in 1777. Until 1794, three further
editions had followed. For many years, the Anfangsgründe remained the standard textbook for physics in German.
He contributed to the Göttinger Taschen Calender from 1778 onwards, and to the Göttingisches Magazin der
Wissenschaften und Literatur, which he edited for three years (1780-1782) with J. G. A.
Forster. The Göttinger Taschen Calendar, beside being a usual Calendar for everyday usage, contained not only short
writings on natural phenomena and new scientific discoveries (which would be termed popular science today), but also essays in
which he contests quackery and superstition. In the spirit of enlightenment, he strives to educate the common people to use
logic, wit and the power of their own senses.
Based on his visits to England, his Briefe aus England, with admirable descriptions of Garrick's acting, are the most attractive of his writings published during his lifetime. He also published
in 1794-1799 an Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche in which he described the satirical details in
William Hogarth's prints.
Freud (in his "Why War?" letter to Einstein) mentions Lichtenberg's invention of a "Compass of Motives" in a discussion on the
combination of human compounded motives and quotes him as saying, "The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like
the the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, 'food-food-fame' or 'fame-fame-food'."
Selected bibliography
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
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Works published during his lifetime
- Briefe aus England, 1776-78
- Über Physiognomik, wider die Physiognomen, 1778
- Göttingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und Litteratur, 1780-85 (ed. by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Georg
Forster)
- Über die Pronunciation der Schöpse des alten Griechenlandes, 1782
- Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche, 1794-1799
Complete works in German
- Schriften und Briefe, 1968-72 (4 vols., ed. by Wolfgang Promies)
English translations
- The Lichtenberg Reader, 1959 (trans. and ed. by Franz H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield)
- The World of Hogarth. Lichtenberg's Commentaries on Hogarth's Engravings, 1966 (trans. by Innes and Gustav
Herdan)
- Hogarth on High Life. The Marriage à la Mode Series, from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Commentaries, 1970 (trans. and
ed. by Arthur S. Wensinger and W. B. Coley)
- Aphorisms, 1990 (trans. with an introduction and notes by R. J.
Hollingdale), ISBN 0-14-044519-6, reprinted as The Waste Books, 2000
Notes
- ^ In one of his letters dated October 25, 1786 to Johann Beckmann.
- ^ The relation between the man and his "little daughter" was made into a
novel by Gert Hofmann. The work has been translated by his son Michael Hofmann into English, with the title Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl.
- ^ Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Essays and Arphorisms,
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970, p. 93.
- ^ For Lichtenberg's influences on German writers, see Dieter Lamping,
Lichtenbergs literarisches Nachleben, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992.
- ^ Carl Brinitzer, trans. Bernard Smith, A Reasonable Rebel, New York:
Macmillan, 1960, p. 194.
- ^ For example, in his essay Zhongguo Shi Yu Zhongguo Hua
(中国诗与中国画 "Chinese poetry and Chiense paintings").
External links
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