Thinkers Timeline

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was an Austrian composer. He is one of the most celebrated composers in European classical music. He was born in 1756 in Salzburg, then a small city in the Holy Roman Empire. He died in 1791 in Vienna, aged only 35. Mozart was a child prodigy. He showed an astonishing musical gift very young. By the age of five he was composing simple pieces. His father, Leopold Mozart, was also a musician. Leopold took young Wolfgang and his older sister Maria Anna, also gifted, on long tours across Europe. They performed for kings, queens, and audiences in many cities. As an adult, Mozart settled in Vienna, the musical capital of his time. He worked as a freelance musician. He gave concerts, taught pupils, and wrote music on commission. This was a difficult way to live. Mozart often had money worries, even though his music was admired. In a short career he wrote an enormous amount: over 600 works, including operas, symphonies, concertos, chamber music, and church music. He died young, possibly of a fever or kidney illness. The exact cause is not known. He was buried in a common grave, in the standard way of his time. He was not poor or forgotten when he died, despite later myths.

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. He was born in 1770 in Bonn, in what is now Germany. He is one of the most important composers in the history of Western music. He was baptised on 17 December, so he was probably born a day or two earlier. He came from a musical family. His grandfather was a respected court musician. His father, Johann, was also a musician but a difficult man and a heavy drinker. Johann saw young Ludwig's talent and pushed him hard, sometimes cruelly, hoping to create a child star like Mozart. Beethoven gave his first public performance at the age of seven. In 1792, aged 21, he moved to Vienna, the music capital of Europe. He studied briefly with Joseph Haydn. He soon became famous in Vienna, first as a pianist and then as a composer. Wealthy noble families paid him to write music. He never took a full court post. He preferred to work as a freelance composer, which was unusual for his time. In his late twenties, he began to lose his hearing. By his forties he was almost completely deaf. He kept composing, often using a notebook to communicate with visitors. His later works, including the Ninth Symphony, were written when he could no longer hear them properly performed. He never married, though he loved several women, often unhappily. He died in Vienna in 1827, aged 56. Around 20,000 people attended his funeral.

Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) was a Hungarian physician working in Vienna. He was born in Buda, in what is now Budapest, and studied medicine at the University of Vienna, where he became a senior assistant in the maternity ward of the Vienna General Hospital. There he confronted one of the most disturbing puzzles in medicine: women giving birth in the First Maternity Division of the hospital, which was staffed by medical students and doctors, died of childbed fever at a rate of about ten percent, sometimes much higher. Women giving birth in the Second Division, staffed by midwives, died at a rate of about four percent. Women who gave birth in the street before reaching the hospital had even lower mortality. Semmelweis spent years trying to understand why. In 1847, after the death of his colleague and friend Jakob Kolletschka from a wound infection during an autopsy, he made the connection: childbed fever was caused by cadaverous particles, infectious matter from corpses, carried from the autopsy room to the maternity ward on the hands of doctors and students who had been dissecting bodies. He introduced mandatory handwashing with a chlorinated lime solution and mortality in his ward fell dramatically. He never received the recognition his discovery deserved in his lifetime and was eventually committed to a mental institution, where he died at forty-seven, possibly from the same kind of infection his work had shown how to prevent.

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was an Augustinian friar, botanist, and the founder of genetics. He was born Johann Mendel in what is now the Czech Republic, in a region then part of the Austrian Empire. His family were farmers and he grew up working in the fields and learning about plants from an early age. He entered the Augustinian monastery at Brno in 1843, taking the name Gregor, and was sent to the University of Vienna, where he studied mathematics, physics, and natural history. He returned to the monastery, taught at the local high school, and devoted his spare time to a series of careful experiments on pea plants in the monastery garden. Between 1856 and 1863 he grew and analysed around ten thousand pea plants, tracking the inheritance of seven distinct traits across multiple generations. He presented his findings to the local natural history society in 1865 and published them in 1866. His paper was politely received and then essentially forgotten. He became abbot of the monastery in 1868 and spent the rest of his life in administrative work, never knowing that his discoveries would eventually be recognised as one of the foundations of modern biology. He died in 1884.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was an electrical engineer and inventor whose work on alternating current, induction motors, and wireless power transmission helped shape the modern electrical infrastructure of the world. He was born to an ethnic Serbian family in Smiljan, a village in the Military Frontier of the Habsburg Empire, in what is now Croatia. His father was a Serbian Orthodox priest, his mother an unschooled woman with a remarkable memory and a gift for making household tools. Tesla studied engineering at the Polytechnic in Graz and briefly at the University of Prague, though he did not complete a formal degree. He worked in Budapest and Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1884. He worked briefly for Thomas Edison in New York, then set out on his own. In 1888 he patented a practical alternating current induction motor and a polyphase power system; these patents were acquired by George Westinghouse, and the system they made possible became the backbone of modern electrical power distribution. During the 1890s Tesla also demonstrated wireless lighting, developed the Tesla coil, and experimented with the transmission of energy through the atmosphere. His later career was marked by increasingly ambitious and often impractical projects, financial difficulties, and growing eccentricity. He died alone and nearly forgotten in a New York hotel in 1943, aged eighty-six. His reputation has been rebuilt in the decades since, though not always with the precision his work deserves.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis — one of the most influential and contested intellectual movements of the 20th century. Born into a Jewish family in Moravia (now the Czech Republic), he spent most of his life in Vienna, where he developed his theories about the unconscious mind, dream interpretation, and the psychological origins of mental illness. He was forced to flee Vienna in 1938 when the Nazis annexed Austria and died in London the following year. His ideas transformed not only psychiatry and psychology but also literature, art, anthropology, philosophy, and popular culture. Almost every time someone speaks of repression, the unconscious, denial, or a Freudian slip, they are using concepts he introduced.

Edmund Husserl was a German philosopher. He is the founder of phenomenology, one of the most important schools of twentieth-century thought. He was born on 8 April 1859 in Prossnitz, a town in Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire (today Prostějov in the Czech Republic). His family was Jewish and middle class. They spoke German rather than Czech. His father ran a business. As a young man, he studied mathematics in Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna. He earned a doctorate in mathematics in 1883. He could have had a career as a mathematician. But he became interested in deeper questions: what does it mean to know something? What are the foundations of mathematics itself? In 1884, he attended lectures by the philosopher Franz Brentano in Vienna and was so impressed that he switched to philosophy. He taught at the University of Halle from 1887. In 1891 he published Philosophy of Arithmetic. The mathematician Gottlob Frege criticised it sharply. The criticism pushed Husserl in new directions. In 1900-1901 he published Logical Investigations, the work that founded phenomenology. He taught at Göttingen from 1901 to 1916, then at Freiburg from 1916 to 1928. Many of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century were his students or were shaped by his work. In 1933 the Nazis came to power. Although Husserl had converted to Lutheran Protestantism in 1887, the Nazi racial laws still classified him as Jewish. He was banned from his own university library. He died on 27 April 1938 in Freiburg, aged 79.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher. Many consider him the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. He was born on 26 April 1889 in Vienna, Austria, into one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a powerful steel industrialist. His mother was a gifted musician. The family home was visited by composers like Brahms and Mahler. Three of his brothers died by suicide. Ludwig was first trained as an engineer in Berlin and Manchester, where he worked on aeroplane design. While studying, he became fascinated by the foundations of mathematics. In 1911 he travelled to Cambridge to work with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who quickly recognised his genius. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army. He fought bravely and was decorated. While at the front and in a prisoner-of-war camp, he wrote his first book. That book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in 1921. He believed it had solved all the major problems of philosophy. He gave away his vast inherited fortune and became a primary school teacher in remote Austrian villages. He also designed an austere house for his sister in Vienna. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge, having decided his earlier work contained serious mistakes. He spent the rest of his life developing a very different philosophy. He served as a hospital porter during the Second World War. He died of prostate cancer in Cambridge on 29 April 1951, aged 62. His last words to his housekeeper were: 'Tell them I've had a wonderful life.'

Friedrich Hayek was an economist and political thinker. He was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1899 and died in 1992. His full name was Friedrich August von Hayek. Hayek grew up in a Europe that was about to change violently. He served briefly in the First World War as a young man. Afterwards he studied at the University of Vienna, where he was part of a group of economists known as the 'Austrian School'. In 1931 Hayek moved to Britain to teach at the London School of Economics. There he became the main rival of John Maynard Keynes, the most famous economist of the age. The two men disagreed deeply about how economies work. In 1944 Hayek published 'The Road to Serfdom', a warning that government planning of the economy could lead to the loss of political freedom. The book made him famous far beyond economics. After the war he worked in the United States and later in Germany. For many years Hayek's ideas were out of fashion. Then, in the 1970s, they returned to influence. He shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. In the 1980s political leaders in Britain and the United States drew on his thinking. Hayek lived long enough to see his ideas move from the margins to the centre of debate.

Karl Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher of science and politics. He was born in 1902 in Vienna into a well-off, secular Jewish family that had converted to Lutheran Christianity. His parents loved books, and Popper grew up reading widely. As a young man he tried out many of the big intellectual movements of his time. He attended Marxist meetings, studied Freudian psychology, and worked briefly with the Adlerian school of psychology. He was struck by something that bothered him for the rest of his life. The followers of these movements seemed able to explain everything. Whatever happened in the world, Marxism, Freudianism, and Adlerian theory could fit it into their system. Popper began to wonder whether this was a strength or a weakness. He trained as a teacher and earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1928. In 1934 he published his first major book, Logic of Scientific Discovery, which made his name in philosophy of science. As Hitler rose to power, Popper, with his Jewish background, knew he had to leave Europe. In 1937 he took a teaching post in New Zealand. There, during the Second World War, he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, his great defence of liberal democracy. In 1946 he moved to the London School of Economics, where he stayed for the rest of his career. He was knighted in 1965. He wrote on philosophy of science, politics, the mind, and many other subjects. He died in 1994 in London at the age of 92.

Kurt Gödel was an Austrian-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher. He is widely considered the greatest logician of the 20th century. His incompleteness theorems changed how mathematicians and philosophers understand the foundations of mathematics. He was born in 1906 in Brunn, then part of Austria-Hungary (now Brno in the Czech Republic). His parents were ethnic Germans living in a mostly Czech city. His father managed a textile factory. The family was comfortable. Young Kurt was a quiet, curious child. He asked so many questions that his family nicknamed him 'Mr. Why'. He suffered through a serious illness with rheumatic fever at age six, which he believed had permanently damaged his heart, even though doctors found no lasting damage. The belief shaped his fearful approach to his own health for the rest of his life. He studied at the University of Vienna in the 1920s. He attended the famous Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers and scientists who met to discuss the foundations of knowledge. He earned his doctorate in mathematics in 1929. The next year, he proved his most famous result, the incompleteness theorems. He was 24. In the 1930s, the rise of Nazism made Vienna dangerous. Gödel was not Jewish but had Jewish friends and colleagues. After the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 and the start of World War II, he and his wife Adele fled to America. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein also worked. The two became close friends. Gödel did important later work in cosmology and philosophy. He died in 1978 of malnutrition. He had become so paranoid about poisoning that he stopped eating after his wife was hospitalised.

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (1909-2005) was an Austrian-American writer and teacher whose books and articles over seven decades shaped the practice of management and helped establish it as a distinct field of study. He was born in Vienna in 1909 to an educated middle-class family — his father a senior civil servant, his mother one of the first women to study medicine in Austria. The Drucker home was a meeting place for intellectuals, and the young Peter grew up among people like the economist Joseph Schumpeter and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He studied law in Hamburg and Frankfurt, earned a doctorate in international law in 1931, and worked briefly as a financial journalist. The rise of Nazism drove him out of Germany in 1933; he moved first to London, then in 1937 to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life. His 1939 book The End of Economic Man analysed the rise of fascism. In 1943 General Motors invited him to spend two years studying the company, producing Concept of the Corporation in 1946, one of the first serious studies of how a large modern business actually works. Over the following decades he wrote thirty-nine books and hundreds of articles covering management, innovation, the non-profit sector, economics, and the rise of the knowledge worker. He taught at New York University and for most of his later career at the Claremont Graduate School in California, which named its management school after him. He advised corporations, governments, non-profits, and religious organisations. He died in Claremont in 2005 at the age of ninety-five.

Eric Hobsbawm was a British historian and one of the most influential historians of the 20th century. He wrote about the rise of capitalism, the development of the modern world, and the major political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was a lifelong Marxist and Communist Party member. His writing was clear, ambitious, and read by both academics and general audiences. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917. He died in London in 2012, aged 95. He came from a Jewish family. His father was British. His mother was Austrian. He was born in Alexandria where his father worked. The family moved to Vienna, then to Berlin. Both his parents died young. He was orphaned by 14. An aunt brought him to England in 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany. His timing was lucky. The move to England saved his life. Most of his Central European Jewish family who stayed behind were eventually killed in the Holocaust. He studied history at Cambridge from 1936. He joined the Communist Party as a young man and remained a member for the rest of his life, despite the party's decline and the revelations of Stalin's crimes. He served in the British army during the Second World War. After the war, he became a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he taught for over 50 years. He wrote many books. His most famous are the four-volume series on the modern world: The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), The Age of Empire (1987), and The Age of Extremes (1994). Together these books cover European and world history from 1789 to 1991. He also wrote on bandits, on jazz, on nationalism, and on many other subjects. His autobiography Interesting Times came out in 2002. He continued writing into his nineties.