Johan Wilcke

Johan Carl Wilcke bdd|September|6|1732|April|18|1796 was a Swedish physicist.

Wilcke was born in Wismar, son of a clergyman who in 1739 was appointed second pastor of the German Church in Stockholm. He went to the German school in Stockholm and enrolled at the University of Uppsala in 1749. He spent the years from 1751 travelling abroad and received the "magister" degree from the University of Rostock in 1757, after having published the dissertation "De electricitatibus contrariis". In 1759 he became the first "Thamian lecturer" of experimental physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, a position created through a donation from the wealthy merchant Sebastian Tham. He became a titular professor in 1770, and permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences in 1784. He died in Stockholm in 1796.

His two areas of significant research were electricity and caloric theory. In 1764 he invented the electrophorus, an electrostatic generator named and popularized in 1775 by Alessandro Volta. [cite book
last=Pancaldi
first=Giuliano
date=2003
title=Volta, Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment
publisher=Princeton Univ. Press
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=hGoYB1Twx4sC&pg=PA73, p.73] In 1772 he calculated the latent heat of ice.

References

*"Svenskt biografiskt handlexikon, vol 2, p. 732 [http://runeberg.org/sbh/b0732.html] (Swedish)