Jan Ingenhousz was born on December 8,1730 in Breda, Netherlands. At the age of 16 he moved to Belgium to study medicine. Ingenhousz received his MD in 1753 from the University of Leuven. He started out his career as a physician but his main interest was smallpox inoculations, which is the process that makes people immune to smallpox. During his time as a physician, he tried to find modern-day ways to give the smallpox vaccinations. In 1767, he administered the smallpox inoculation to 700 people in the village of Hertfordshire. Because of this, he was made the physician to the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria in 1768. During his time serving the Empress, Ingenhousz stayed at Vienna, where he met his wife, Agatha Maria Jacquin. After ten years…show more content… During his experiment in 1779, he discovered that when placed underwater the green plants release gases but when in the dark they don’t. This led to his discovery that light was necessary for this process to occur, and only the green parts of the plants can perform this process. His discovery of this process, now called photosynthesis, led to other discoveries in the following years. He later discovered that the gases given off by the green parts of the plants were oxygen. Throughout his lifetime, Ingenhousz traveled to many places, including France, England, Scotland, and Switzerland, where he made other discoveries. For example, Ingenhousz made the fist quantitative measurements on the thermal conductivity of metals. Through this discovery he also discovered that silver is one of the best conductors while lead is one of the worst. During his lifetime Ingenhousz also improved the equipment used to create static electricity. During this experiment Ingenhousz accidentally sent electricity to his brain and the following day he felt unusually elated so he decided to encourage French and British electrical “operators” to try that on mentally ill
