Although he was most remembered for his research on electricity, Lichtenberg also became known for his cutting wit as a satirist, which often got him mixed up in many disputes.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1743-1799) was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a physicist, Lichtenberg was the first person to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. Lichtenberg is probably best known for the notebooks, called sudelbücher, that were posthumously published. These notebooks were seen as ‘waste books’ or ‘scrap books’ but they showcased his discovery of tree-like electrical discharge patterns, now called Lichtenberg figures.