Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

A keen anglophile, Lichtenberg met Priestley, Solander, Banks, Aubert and Raspe in London. He went to Drury Lane with Johann Reinhold Forster, admiring and meeting Garrick, and regretted when he visited Bath (bored with tea-drinking and card-playing) that he hadn’t known that his future correspondent Herschel lived there. Goethe and Kant were friends and correspondents, Humboldt a grateful student, and Georg Forster a close friend and fellow-editor. Blumenbach and Gmelin were colleagues in Göttingen. Volta (full of ideas) dedicated a body of research to him: he joked about Volta’s understanding of sexual electricity.