Konrad Zacharias Lorenz, 7 November 1903 - 27 February 1989

Abstract

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was born on 7 November 1903 in Vienna. His father, Adolf Lorenz (1854-1946), was a successful and wealthy orthopaedic surgeon, bom in a small town in the northern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire known as Austrian Silesia, now part of Czechoslovakia. Adolf Lorenz was from a modest background (his father was a harness maker and inn-keeper), but had an excellent singing voice and was hence sent at the age of 11 to a Catholic monastery school in the parish of St Paul in Carinthia, where his uncle was a Benedictine monk. From there he proceeded to Vienna to study medicine. As a student he met Emma Lecher (1861-1938) who later became, in succession, his medical assistant and his wife. Whereas Adolf Lorenz was very much a self-made man, Emma Lecher came from a somewhat impoverished liberal upper-middle-class family connected with intellectual circles in Vienna. Her father, Zacharias Lecher, was the editor of a liberal Viennese newspaper ( Die Freie Presse ) and President of the Literary Society ‘Concordia’, an important part of late 19th-century Viennese intellectual life. Her brother, Ernst Lecher, who devised the ‘Lecherleitung’ for measuring the frequency of short-wave radiation, was a professor of physics at the Universities of Innsbruck, Prague and Vienna, and no doubt had some influence in developing Konrad’s interest in mechanical things and in physics. This in turn may have influenced his thinking in formulating models of mechanisms controlling behaviour: