Josef Popper-Lynkeus was an Austrian scholar, writer, and inventor. Josef Popper was born in the Jewish quarter in Kolín, Austrian Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic). He was the uncle of Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper.
Background
Josef was born to an impoverished Jewish family of tradespeople who placed a high value on education. He was the uncle of the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. After a highly religious early education he was sent to the German Polytechnikum Prague. Four years later he the started at the Imperial Polytechnikum, Vienna to study Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy. However, despite doing well, the Concordat of 1855 enabled the Vatican to impose restrictions to Jews, and so he could only support himself by taking on low paid menial work.
Education
After graduating from the Vienna Polytechnikum, Popper-Lynkeus worked for two years as an engineer in a private firm. From 1862 – 1866, he tutored and occasionally lectured, and from 1867 - 1897, he privately pursued various inventions. In 1868, he contrived a system of gaskets to prevent the buildup of scales on the inner walls of steam boilers. This and some other inventions prepared the ground for his work in engineering, physics, and social and moral philosophy – independently of establishment and closed academic groups.
Career
He took a job as a clerk in Hungary, but later returned to Vienna and became a private tutor. To supplement his earnings he attended scientific lectures and conlerenccs, took notes in long hand, copied them over, and sold the reviews to newspapers. He later compared this type of tedious, low-paving work to the worst kind of unskilled labor.
At the age of'thirty Popper invented a device to eliminate deposits from collecting in engine boilers. He and his brother, David, traveled throughout Germany and Austria to sell the invention. Their perseverence paid off and after inventing other devices that improved the capacity of engine boilers, surface condensers, and water-cooling apparatus, Popper was able, at the age of fifty-nine, to retire on his modest earnings.
He devoted the rest of his life to scientific, theoretical, and philosophical writing and thinking. As a scientist. Popper proved to be a visionary with a penetrating understanding of energy. As early as 1860 he was writing about Hying machines, a subject that continued to interest him for the rest of his life. Two years later he realized the potential electrical energy in natural water sources and the possibility of transmitting energy. He proposed a system of transmitting energy electrically in his thesis On the Utilization of Natural Forces for the Autrian imperial academy of sciences in Vienna in 1862, but it was not published until 1882, after Popper witnessed the transmission of energy by French engineer Marcel Desprez at the electrical exposition in Munich. Popper was the first to develop the concept that all energy is the product of mass and level in his paper The Fundamentals of Electrical Power Transmission (1882). In 1884 he questioned whether the law of conservation of matter was related to the law of conservation of energy and suggested the existence of quanta of energy before Max Planck’s quantum theory was ever stated.
Popper’s writings on social reform dealt with the rights and obligations of the individual in society.
I le saw the life of the individual as the highest value and rejected the claim that a citizen must be ready to be killed when ordered, and argued for the freedom and dignity of every person — regardless of his capabilities or qualifications — within a highly organized social system. Each member of society should minimally contribute to a labor force that would be responsible for “all that physiology and hygiene show to be absolutely indispensable” and thus eliminate class enmity and related social problems. In such a state, religion in its traditional forms would be abolished because of its antagonism to humanitarianism and especially to the value of the individual. In its place, the study of the history of religions might well bring about a generation without the taint of superstition.
Popper’s most popular work was a text he published under the pseudonym Lynkcus, the mythological helmsman of the Argonauts noted for his remarkable sight. Phantasien eines Realisten (Fantasies of a Realist”; 1889) contains eighty stories written over a period of thirty-five years. The book went through twenty-one editions in German and was translated into several languages, but was banned in Austria for moral reasons. According to Popper, one-sixth of these stories were conceived and committed to paper from his dreams. Sigmund Freud expressed gratitude to Popper for the text, which formed the basis for Freud’s theory of dreams. His reputation as a brilliant thinker and national figure found expression in Vienna’s Rathauspark, where his bust stood until 1938, when it was destroyed by the Nazis.
Having suffered severe discrimination most of his life for maintaining his Jewish identity, Popper accused the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, of furthering anti-Semitism in “Fürst Bismarck und der Antisemitismus” (1886). Popper believed the answer to the Jewish question was the establishment of an independent state and although never active as a Zionist in his lifetime, he bequeathed a significant book collection to the National Library in Jerusalem.
Views
Popper-Lynkeus's ideas were innovative for his time. In engineering, he thought of the possibility of electric power transmission, the conversion of mechanical energy of waterfalls and rising tides into electrical power (1862). In physics, he thought of the mass-energy relation (1883) and the idea of a quantum of energy (1884), the principle of unavoidable distortion of the parameters of objects under investigation by measuring instruments. In psychology, he thought of the interpretations of dreams based on analysis of the conflict between the social consciousness of an individual and his or her animal instincts (short story Dreaming like Waking, 1889). Several years before Theodor Herzl, in the work Prince Bismarck and anti-Semitism (1886), Popper-Lynkeus came to the conclusion that the Jews could be saved from anti-Semitism only if they possessed their own state. He considered creation of such a state an urgent need, and that the type of regime in the beginning did not matter, that even a monarchy would be satisfactory.[citation needed]
The aforementioned short story was included in the collection of philosophical stories under the common title Fantasies of a Realist, which was published in 1899 and ran through twenty editions. Since then, Popper-Lynkeus used the pseudonym Lynkeus – after the keen-sighted watchman from the Argonaut's ship, appearing also in Goethe's Faust. Three of the many ideas Popper-Lynkeus suggested in this collection were:
Influence of marching music on the masses;
On the expediency of some punishments;
On the right of every individual to exist.
Popper-Lynkeus mentions the great power that music has over the masses. He stated that marching music often serves as a support of tyranny, transforming the masses into a paste anything can be made from.[citation needed] This idea of Popper-Lynkeus is similar to an idea of Leo Tolstoy, who said, "Those who want to have more slaves should compose more marching music."
In the sphere of justice, Popper-Lynkeus maintained that publicity should be the main punishment for committing a crime, and only recidivists should be isolated. According to Popper-Lynkeus, the right to exist is the primary and natural right of any human being, and for this reason, the state should not be allowed to send an individual to death without his or her consent. He was an advocate of compulsory military service, but provided that only volunteers would be sent to battlefields.