Hermann Ebbinghaus

Hermann Ebbinghaus was born on January 24, 1850, in Bremen, a small place near Bonn, situated in Rhenish Prussia, Germany. His education was the usual as in Bremen. At the age of 17, he entered the University of Bonn, where he developed interest in Philosophy. However, his studies were temporarily interrupted in 1870 at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, when he enlisted in the Prussian army. He studied at the University of Bonn before attending Halle and Berlin Universities between 1867 to 1870. He resumed his studies a year later and he received his doctorate in 1873 from the University of Bonn. Ebbinghaus then returned to Berlin for a few years before moving to France and England for three years, both studying and lecturing.

During his travel of the continent, studying and teaching intermittently, he came across a copy of Psychophysics in a second hand book store, which brought upon him something like an illumination and resolved to tackle the "higher mental processes" that Wilhelm Wundt (who had first established the laboratory for the experiments in psychology at Leipzig in 1879) had excluded from experimental treatment. Using himself as his only subject, Ebbinghaus set out in 1879, to demonstrate Wundt's error. The result was his classic work on Memory (1885).

In 1880, he became a private instructor at the University of Berlin. A year later he was appointed Ausserordentlicher Professor at the University of Berlin. Though his tenure lasted eight years, for some reason, Ebbinghaus was not promoted to the Chair of Philosophy, including psychology when it was vacant in 1894. At that time, the chair was offered to Stumpf who was then at Munich. Ebbinghaus accepted Lipp's chair at Breslau where he remained until 1905.