Josef Popper - Lynkeus 21 February β 22 December was an Austrian scholar, writer, and inventor. He was the uncle of Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. Josef was born to an impoverished Jewish family of tradespeople who placed a high value on education. After a highly religious early education he was sent to the Polytechnic in Prague. However, despite doing well, the Concordat of enabled the Vatican to impose restrictions to Jews, and so he could only support himself by taking on low paid menial work.
After graduating from the Vienna Polytechnikum, Popper-Lynkeus worked for two years as an engineer in a private firm. From β , he tutored and occasionally lectured, and from - , he privately pursued various inventions.
In , he contrived a system of gaskets to prevent the buildup of scale 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 β independently of establishment and closed academic groups.
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 In physics, he thought of the mass-energy relation and the idea of a quantum of energy , 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 , Several years before Theodor Herzl , in the work Prince Bismarck and anti-Semitism , Popper-Lynkeus came to the conclusion that the Jews could be saved from anti-Semitism only if they possessed their own state.
