Ernst Heinrich Weber

Ernst Heinrich Weber was a German physician and anatomist, born in Wittenberg in 1795 and dead in Leipzig in 1878, whose measurements of touch and weight discrimination made him one of the founders of experimental psychology. He took his medical degree at Halle in 1815 and spent his whole academic career at the University of Leipzig, where he became professor of comparative anatomy in 1818, held the chair of human anatomy from 1821, and later taught physiology and anatomy until his retirement in 1871. With his brother Wilhelm he ran experiments on the physics of fluids and applied them to the flow of blood through elastic vessels. His work on the senses led to the idea of the just-noticeable difference, the smallest change in a stimulus that a person can detect, and to the two-point threshold test for touch. Gustav Theodor Fechner later named the regularity Weber's law and built on it.