Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost

Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost was a German physician and theologian, born in Rosperwenda in 1715 and dying in Duisburg in 1794. He began studying theology at Gießen, switched to medicine, studied at Leipzig and Halle, and received his medical doctorate in 1741 for a treatise on the movement of the human body. He served as a field physician in the first Silesian War and from 1743 held a professorship at the University of Duisburg, where he taught medicine, physics and chemistry, served as rector and kept a private medical practice. A member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences from 1756, he published more than seventy manuscripts. In a 1756 tract on common water he first described the effect that bears his name, an insulating vapor layer under a liquid drop on a very hot surface.