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Concept
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Summary
Hermann Ebbinghaus (24 January 1850 - 26 February 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was also the first person to describe the learning curve. He was the father of the neo-Kantian philosopher Julius Ebbinghaus.
Ebbinghaus was born in Barmen, in the Rhine Province of the Kingdom of Prussia, as the son of a wealthy merchant, Carl Ebbinghaus. Little is known about his infancy except that he was brought up in the Lutheran faith and was a pupil at the town Gymnasium. At the age of 17 (1867), he began attending the University of Bonn, where he had planned to study history and philology. However, during his time there he developed an interest in philosophy. In 1870, his studies were interrupted when he served with the Prussian Army in the Franco-Prussian War. Following this short stint in the military, Ebbinghaus finished his dissertation on Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten (philosophy of the unconscious) and received his doctorate on 16 August 1873, when he was 23 years old. During the next three years, he spent time at Halle and Berlin.
After acquiring his PhD, Ebbinghaus moved around England and France, tutoring students to support himself. In England, he may have taught in two small schools in the south of the country (Gorfein, 1885). In London, in a used bookstore, he came across Gustav Fechner's book Elemente der Psychophysik (Elements of Psychophysics), which spurred him to conduct his famous memory experiments. After beginning his studies at the University of Berlin, he founded the third psychological testing lab in Germany (third to Wilhelm Wundt and Georg Elias Müller). He began his memory studies here in 1879. In 1885 — the same year that he published his monumental work, Über das Gedächtnis. Untersuchungen zur experimentellen Psychologie, later published in English under the title Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology — he was made a professor at the University of Berlin, most likely in recognition of this publication.
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