Johann Heinrich Lambert was born in 1728 in Mülhausen, now Mulhouse, in the Alsace region in France. After receiving very limited formal schooling, Lambert initially held a variety of odd jobs: helping his father (who was a tailor), serving as a clerk in an ironwork, working as a scribe for a law professor in a Swiss Chancellery for five years, and finally acting as a tutor to a private family in Chur (from 1748 to 1758). These last two jobs provided him with the opportunity to read intensively in mathematics and physics and to travel throughout Europe. In 1759, while in Augsburg, he received a position in the newly formed Bavarian Academy of Sciences, in which capacity he worked out his views on photometry and traveled to Erlangen and Switzerland to help with various geological projects. In 1763, after refusing to leave Augsburg for Munich, where the Bavarian Academy was located, his association with the academy there was dissolved. He went first to Leipzig in 1764 and then to Berlin in 1765, where he became a member of the Physical Class of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and remained until his death in 1777.

Although Lambert published two important articles on topics in applied physics in the late 1750s, the majority of his most significant publications came in the 1760s.