Wolfgang Köhler, the German Gestalt psychologist, was born in Tallinn, Estonia. He studied first at the University of Tübingen and then at Bonn. He next studied physics under Max Planck and psychology under Carl Stumpf at the University of Berlin, and received his PhD from that school in 1909 for investigations on hearing. In 1911 he became Privatdozent at Frankfurt. Max Wertheimer came to Frankfurt in 1912, and in the same year Köhler and Kurt Koffka served as the subjects for Wertheimer's famous experiments on stroboscopic motion that are widely regarded as the beginning of Gestalt psychology.

In 1913 Köhler became director of the anthropoid experiment station operated by the Prussian Academy of Sciences at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and he remained there, throughout World War I, until 1920. The pioneering studies in the psychology of chimpanzees that...