40 Fun Facts About Wilhelm Wundt

In which German city did Wilhelm Wundt open the world's first psychology laboratory in 1879?

Leipzig gave Wundt a room in 1876 just to store instruments he had brought from Switzerland; by 1879 it was the first laboratory devoted purely to psychological research.

Hugo Eckener earned a psychology doctorate under Wilhelm Wundt, then won world fame commanding what kind of craft?

Airships made Eckener a household name: he commanded the Graf Zeppelin on the first airship flight around the world, decades after finishing his thesis in 1892.

Wilhelm Wundt's first scientific paper, published in 1853 while he studied medicine, measured the salt content of what?

Urine was the subject: Wundt's debut measured its sodium chloride content and appeared in only his third year as a medical student.

Vundtia, which carries the number 635 and honours Wilhelm Wundt, is what kind of object?

An asteroid: 635 Vundtia orbits the Sun, and its opening V matches how Germans pronounce the first letter of Wundt.

Which method did Wilhelm Wundt pair with strict laboratory controls to study conscious experience at first hand?

Introspection, for Wundt, had firm rules: observers had to know when the event was coming, and each observation had to be repeatable under the same conditions.

After World War I, most of Wilhelm Wundt's personal library was sold to a university in which country?

Japan's Tohoku University in Sendai bought the books during Germany's postwar hardship and still holds more than 6,700 volumes from Wundt's shelves.

For which honour was the physician-turned-psychologist Wilhelm Wundt nominated three times without ever winning?

A Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was the target of all three nominations, a nod to Wundt's first career as a doctor and nerve researcher.

By psychologist Edwin Boring's count, roughly how many pages did Wilhelm Wundt publish over 68 years?

About 50,000 is the right scale: Boring's tally came to 53,735 pages, or 2.2 pages written or revised every single day for 68 years.

Sigmund Freud often quoted Wilhelm Wundt, but which concept did Wundt refuse to build his own psychology on?

The unconscious left Wundt sceptical: he held that the exact description of consciousness was the sole aim of experimental psychology.

Wilhelm Wundt, a trained physician, served as an army doctor during which nineteenth-century conflict?

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 put Wundt back in a doctor's role; within four years he had published the textbook that launched experimental psychology.

Pleasant–unpleasant, tense–relaxed and excited–depressed were the three dimensions in Wilhelm Wundt's theory of what?

Emotions, Wundt argued, could be placed along three separate scales, and he tested the idea by recording pulse and breathing while feelings were provoked.

Which physicist, famed for his work on the conservation of energy, took Wilhelm Wundt on as assistant in 1858?

Hermann von Helmholtz had Wundt teach the physiology laboratory course, a post that drilled him in the standards of experimental research he later applied to the mind.

Which English student of Wilhelm Wundt carried a version of his teacher's ideas to Cornell University as structuralism?

Edward Titchener translated Wundt into English while still at Oxford, then built what was then America's largest psychology doctoral program at Cornell.

Which early visitor to Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory became the first president of the American Psychological Association?

G. Stanley Hall had just earned America's first psychology doctorate, found no university jobs in the field, and sailed to Germany to see the new science at work.

Which American assistant to Wilhelm Wundt later became the first professor of psychology in the United States?

James McKeen Cattell took that chair at the University of Pennsylvania after his doctorate under Wundt, then spent decades as editor and publisher of the journal Science.

Emil Kraepelin, who trained in Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory, helped lay the foundations of which branch of medicine?

Psychiatry was Kraepelin's field, yet he stayed a disciple of Wundt for life, and his qualifying thesis argued for the place of psychology within it.

Wilhelm Wundt's student Hugo Münsterberg left Germany in 1892 to run the psychology laboratory at which university?

Harvard invited him although he spoke no English at the time; he learned fast, and his push to apply psychology to everyday problems set him against Wundt's pure-science view.

Charles Spearman, an English army officer who studied under Wilhelm Wundt, later proposed which famous idea?

General intelligence, a single g factor behind varied test scores, was proposed by Spearman, who had quit the army after 15 years to take up experimental psychology.

In which Swiss city was Wilhelm Wundt professor of inductive philosophy just before his famous German appointment?

Zurich kept Wundt only briefly; in 1875 he carried his instruments north, and that equipment seeded the first psychology laboratory.

What was the profession of Maximilian Wundt, father of Wilhelm Wundt, in the Baden village where Wilhelm was born?

A Lutheran minister, Maximilian Wundt left much of his son's schooling to his assistant vicar, and the boy grew up to choose medicine over the pulpit.

Neckarau, the birthplace of Wilhelm Wundt, is today a district of which German city on the Rhine?

Mannheim now includes Neckarau, which sits directly on the river in the city's southwest; Wundt left at about six when his family moved to another small Baden town.

Which Baden town did Wilhelm Wundt, then a university teacher, represent in the state assembly from 1866 to 1869?

Heidelberg sent Wundt to the assembly as a member of the liberal Progressive Party, and he also co-founded a federation of German workers' associations.

Which founder of psychophysics had made his career at the university Wilhelm Wundt joined as professor in 1875?

Gustav Fechner had shown that the mind could be measured and treated mathematically, the very premise on which Wundt built his new laboratory.

Whom did Wilhelm Wundt himself, writing his memoirs, name as the true father of experimental psychology?

Ernst Weber earned the title, Wundt wrote, for being the first to think of measuring mental quantities and showing the exact relationships between them.

Which American thinker ranked second, behind Wilhelm Wundt, in a 1991 survey of psychology's all-time eminence?

William James and Sigmund Freud were ranked a distant second and third when 31 American historians of psychology rated the field's greatest names.

Which German philosopher did Wilhelm Wundt quote on the title page of his 1862 book on sense perception?

Gottfried Leibniz supplied the motto: nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself. Wundt aimed it at pure empiricism.

Wilhelm Wundt placed a centre for which attention-directing process, the core of his theory, in the frontal cortex?

Apperception was Wundt's name for the mind's active, selective grip on its contents, and he ranked it above the passive linking of ideas.

Which name is given to Wilhelm Wundt's own school of psychology for its stress on will and deliberate attention?

Voluntarism treated the mind as active, with acts of will moving content into consciousness, a point his best-known English pupil later rejected.

Wilhelm Wundt's ten-volume Völkerpsychologie, written over his last two decades, traced the mind through which trio?

Language, myth and custom were, in Wundt's view, history's own experiments: where the laboratory could not reach, culture showed how higher thought develops.

A German history museum holds a 1918 shellac disc on which Wilhelm Wundt can be heard doing what?

Reading a lecture: in his mid-eighties Wundt repeated the closing words of the inaugural address he had first given in Switzerland in 1874.

In the optical illusion named after Wilhelm Wundt, two straight lines crossed by radiating lines seem to do what?

Bow inward is the effect; the Hering illusion, its mirror image described decades earlier, makes straight lines appear to bulge the other way.

Philosophische Studien, which Wilhelm Wundt founded in the 1880s, was the first what devoted to experimental psychology?

Academic journal: it carried his laboratory's research for two decades until a successor named Psychologische Studien took its place.

Which senior office at his own university did Wilhelm Wundt hold from 1889 to 1890?

Rector was a striking honour for Wundt: the university had only officially recognised his laboratory as part of the campus six years earlier.

The tachistoscopes that Wilhelm Wundt collected for his laboratory were built to do which job?

Flashing images briefly let experimenters control exactly how long an observer saw a picture or text, using a moving screen with a window cut in it.

Which relative of Wilhelm Wundt worked as his assistant and published a short biography of him in 1928?

His daughter Eleonore helped him in many ways, shared his library with her brother Max after his death, and is buried beside her parents.

Erlebtes und Erkanntes, published in 1920, the year Wilhelm Wundt died, is what kind of book?

An autobiography from his late eighties, it capped a list of nearly 500 publications; he had retired only three years earlier to concentrate on writing.

Which German order, nicknamed the Blue Max in wartime, admitted Wilhelm Wundt to its class for sciences and arts?

Pour le Mérite began in 1740 as an order of Frederick the Great; the civil class that honoured Wundt was added a century later for scholars and artists.

In which city did Wilhelm Wundt spend a semester under the physiologist Johannes Müller in 1856?

Berlin gave Wundt one term with Müller, who has been called the father of experimental physiology, after he decided that doctoring was not his vocation.

Which French social thinker studied in Germany in the 1880s and came home impressed by Wilhelm Wundt?

Émile Durkheim spent the 1885–86 school year at German universities, then wrote articles on German social science that helped win him a teaching post at Bordeaux.

A few months before Wilhelm Wundt died, his home city's council planted what in a park in his honour?

An oak tree was the council's choice, planted in what is now Clara Zetkin Park and marked with a memorial plaque.