LAMBERT, DANIEL (1770-1809), an Englishman famous for his great size, was born near Leicester on the 13th of March 1770, the son of the keeper of the jail, to which post he succeeded in 1791. About this time his size and weight increased enormously, and though he had led an active and athletic life he weighed in 1793 thirty-two stone (448 ℔). In 1806 he resolved to profit by his notoriety, and resigning his office went up to London and exhibited himself. He died on the 21st of July 1809, and at the time measured 5 ft. 11 in. in height and weighed 52¾ stone (739 ℔). His waistcoat, now in the Kings Lynn Museum, measures 102 in. round the waist. His coffin contained 112 ft. of elm and was built on wheels. His name has been used as a synonym for immensity. George Meredith describes London as the “Daniel Lambert of cities,” and Herbert Spencer uses the phrase “a Daniel Lambert of learning.” His enormous proportions were depicted on a number of tavern signs, but the best portrait of him, a large mezzotint, is preserved at the British Museum in Lyson’s Collectanea.
LAMBERT, FRANCIS (c. 1486-1530), Protestant reformer, was the son of a papal official at Avignon, where he was born between 1485 and 1487. At the age of 15 he entered the Franciscan monastery at Avignon, and after 1517 he was an itinerant preacher, travelling through France, Italy and Switzerland. His study of the Scriptures shook his faith in Roman Catholic theology, and by 1522 he had abandoned his order, and became known to the leaders of the Reformation in Switzerland and Germany. He did not, however, identify himself either with Zwinglianism or Lutheranism; he disputed with Zwingli at Zürich in 1522, and then made his way to Eisenach and Wittenberg, where he married in 1523. He returned to Strassburg in 1524, being anxious to spread the doctrines of the Reformation among the French-speaking population of the neighbourhood. By the Germans he was distrusted, and in 1526 his activities were prohibited by the city of Strassburg. He was, however, befriended by Jacob Sturm, who recommended him to the Landgraf Philip of Hesse, the most liberal of the German reforming princes. With Philip’s encouragement he drafted that scheme of ecclesiastical reform for which he is famous. Its basis was essentially democratic and congregational, though it provided for the government of the whole church by means of a synod. Pastors were to be elected by the congregation, and the whole system of canon-law was repudiated. This scheme was submitted by Philip to a synod at Homburg; but Luther intervened and persuaded the Landgraf to abandon it. It was far too democratic to commend itself to the Lutherans, who had by this time bound the Lutheran cause to the support of princes rather than to that of the people. Philip continued to favour Lambert, who was appointed professor and head of the theological faculty in the Landgraf’s new university of Marburg. Patrick Hamilton (q.v.), the Scottish martyr, was one of his pupils; and it was at Lambert’s instigation that Hamilton composed his Loci communes, or Patrick’s Pleas as they were popularly called in Scotland. Lambert was also one of the divines who took part in the great conference of Marburg in 1529; he had long wavered between the Lutheran and the Zwinglian view of the Lord’s Supper, but at this conference he definitely adopted the Zwinglian view. He died of the plague on the 18th of April 1530, and was buried at Marburg.
A catalogue of Lambert’s writings is given in Haag’s La France protestante. See also lives of Lambert by Baum (Strassburg, 1840); F. W. Hessencamp (Elberfeld, 1860), Stieve (Breslau, 1867) and Louis Ruffet (Paris, 1873); Lorimer, Life of Patrick Hamilton (1857); A. L. Richter, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrh. (Weimar, 1846); Hessencamp, Hessische Kirchenordnungen im Zeitalter der Reformation; Philip of Hesse’s Correspondence with Bucer, ed. M. Lenz; Lindsay, Hist. Reformation; Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.
(A. F. P.)
LAMBERT, JOHANN HEINRICH (1728-1777), German physicist, mathematician and astronomer, was born at Mulhausen, Alsace, on the 26th of August 1728. He was the son of a tailor; and the slight elementary instruction he obtained at the free school of his native town was supplemented by his own private reading. He became book-keeper at Montbéliard ironworks, and subsequently (1745) secretary to Professor Iselin, the editor of a newspaper at Basel, who three years later recommended him as private tutor to the family of Count A. von Salis of Coire. Coming thus into virtual possession of a good library, Lambert had peculiar opportunities for improving himself in his literary and scientific studies. In 1759, after completing with his pupils a tour of two years’ duration through Göttingen, Utrecht, Paris, Marseilles and Turin, he resigned his tutorship and settled at Augsburg. Munich, Erlangen, Coire and Leipzig became for brief successive intervals his home. In 1764 he removed to Berlin, where he received many favours at the hand of Frederick the Great and was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin, and in 1774 edited the Berlin Ephemeris. He died of consumption on the 25th of September 1777. His publications show him to have been a man of original and active mind with a singular facility in applying mathematics to practical questions.
His mathematical discoveries were extended and overshadowed by his contemporaries. His development of the equation xm + px = q in an infinite series was extended by Leonhard Euler, and particularly by Joseph Louis Lagrange. In 1761 he proved the irrationality of π; a simpler proof was given somewhat later by Legendre. The introduction of hyperbolic functions into trigonometry was also due to him. His geometrical discoveries are of great value, his Die freie Perspective (1759-1774) being a work of great merit. Astronomy was also enriched by his investigations, and he was led to several remarkable theorems on conics which bear his name. The most important are: (1) To express the time of describing an elliptic arc under the Newtonian law of gravitation in terms of the focal distances of the initial and final points, and the length of the chord joining them. (2) A theorem relating to the apparent curvature of the geocentric path of a comet.