Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Early Years
Background • The Early Years • Cambridge • Norway • First World War • Tractatus and Teaching • Architect • Return to Cambridge • In Russia and Norway etc. • Professor of Philosophy • Final Years
1889
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born in Vienna, at Alleegasse 16 (now Argentinierstraße), on 26 April 1889 at 8.30 in the evening.
Baptised as a catholic, in his mother’s faith, Ludwig was the youngest of eight siblings. His sisters were: Hermine (Mining, 1874-1950), Helene (Lenka, 1879-1956, married name Salzer) and Margarethe (Gretl, 1882-1958, married name Stonborough) and his brothers: Hans (1877-1902), Kurt (1878-1918), Rudi (1881-1904) and Paul (1887-1961).
The five brothers and sisters: Hermine, Helene, Margarete, Paul and Ludwig
His childhood and early youth were spent in Vienna and at the Hochreith, the family’s summer residence near Vienna. Like his brothers and sisters, he was first taught by private tutors according to a plan devised by his strict father. Following the presumed suicide of his eldest brother Hans, who disappeared aboard a boat in Chesapeake Bay, Massachusets, in April 1902 at the age of 26, the two youngest sons were sent to a state school.
1903
Because he had had inadequate preparatory education for a Viennese Gymnasium, a kind of school corresponding to an English grammar school, Ludwig Wittgenstein started in the autumn at the k.u.k. Staatsoberrealschule in Linz, a state senior high school specializing in modern subjects. There he received a less classical and a more practical education than in a Gymnasium.
After the suicide of their brother Rudi in Berlin in
1904, their father showed more understanding and patience
for his two youngest sons. He acceded to Ludwig’s wish
to stay away from school. His father instructed his wife in
a letter that Lucki ... is to come to Vienna so as to
have for the present a chance to laze about properly. If
Lucki wants to learn at home, that’s fine; if he wants
to go into a workshop for the next few months, which he
needs to do sometime in any case, that’s fine too. ...
He should laze around all he wants, sleep, eat, let off
steam, go to the theatre, etc.
1906
In summer Ludwig finished school in Linz and got his matriculation. His first intention had been to study Physics in Vienna with Ludwig Boltzmann, but after Boltzmann’s suicide that summer, he decided, possibly as a result of having earlier read Franz Reuleaux’ Theoretische Kinematik, Braunschweig 1875 (The Kinematics of Machinery, London 1876), to study engineering in Berlin. On 23 October he enroled in the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, in Berlin, as a student of mechanical engineering. It seems, however, that studying in Berlin did not satisfy him. He later described the time there as wasted.
1908-1910
On his father’s advice, Wittgenstein went to England, where he enrolled in the spring at the College of Technology in Manchester. At an outpost of the university, in Glossop, a small place on the edge of the Derbyshire moors, he initially busied himself with kite-flying experiments. In the autumn he started at Manchester University as a research student in the Department of Engineering, working on the development of a ‘motorless’ aero-engine, that is, one not driven by a conventional piston engine, but which had the propeller itself as the motor, driven by repulsion jets on the propeller tips - initially from a variable combustion chamber arranged centrally on the propeller shaft, later with combustion chambers in the jets themselves.
A propulsion mechanism of this kind had been proposed in Antiquity, in the 1st century BC, by Hero of Alexandria in his Aeolipile. Ludwig Wittgenstein had already as a child studied an 18th century German translation of this work from his father’s library with great interest.
In his aeronautical studies, Wittgenstein followed the path which had been proposed by Boltzmann: in Berlin he studied the properties of flying objects with reference to hot air balloons, in Derbyshire the stabilisation and steering of flying objects, while in Manchester he devoted himself to the central problem of aeronautics, the development of an aero-engine. In this regard, there were two problems associated with conventional motors which had to be overcome; firstly, the large weight of the crankshaft, power plant and drive-shaft; and secondly, the destabilising torque from propellers driven from a central shaft. Wittgenstein’s original construction concept solved both problems.
On 22 November 1910 Wittgenstein registered his invention at the patent office under: Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Improvements in Propellers applicable for Aerial Machines.” Patent No. 27.087, - AD 1910 GB. About thirty years later another Austrian, Friedrich Doblhoff, reinvented the engine without knowing of Wittgenstein’s work. The invention led to a completely new concept for a helicopter, which was successfully tested for the first time in 1943.
The mathematical problems associated with the development of the propeller profile interested him more than the further technical development of the motor itself, and he began discussing questions of mathematics, especially about the foundations of mathematics, with two colleagues from the engineering laboratory. They first met once a week, and later more frequently. Bertrand Russell’s book The Principles of Mathematics, published in 1903, prompted Wittgenstein to write to Russell.
The years preceding the First World War were years of intense intellectual activity in Cambridge. Russell was at the height of his activities in the field of logic; in 1910 he published the first volume of the Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead, a milestone in the history of Logic. G. E. Moore, then the most influential philosopher in Cambridge, had already published the Principia Ethica in 1903, and in the same year Frege had published the second volume of the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik. The new logic as represented by Russell and Frege was Wittgenstein’s point of entry into philosophy. His inclination towards philosophy and his interest in it were already present. In his parents’ home he had read, among others, Schopenhauer, the philosophical aspects of Reuleaux’ Kinematics of Machinery and Boltzmann’s writings.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Hochreith
Wittgenstein's Aero Engine. From the patent paper of 1910
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Portrait from 1910 with a dedication to his friend Eccles