Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World

For my purposes I include as Viennese in this book all those who were educated in the city and contributed to its intellectual achievements, even if they were not born there.
In 1867, the emperor proclaimed the December Constitution, which included a bill of rights guaranteeing equality before the law for all of the empire’s ethnicities, as well as freedomes of expression, religion and assembly. This was one of the most progressive documents of its time and is still in force today.
The Spanish Influenza killed Klimt and Egon Schiele.
Clemens von Pirquet, in 1906, coined the term « allergy » to describe hypersensitive reactions of immunological origin.
Eager to dissolve boundaries between biology and mathematics, psychology and art, sex and endocrinology, or mathematics and philosophy, the Viennes consequently sparked off. and delineated entirely new fields of study. They were not necessarily aiming to invent new disciplines, but that was nonetheless the natural result of their intellectual style.
Nothing was more odious to them than a hazy expression of presumed truths… Metaphysical depth raised in them a strong instinctive distrust even before logical analysis revealed that it was not depth that characterised such speculations, but emptiness of cognitive content.
Neurath workd on the pictorial representation of statistics, from which are descended infographics. His primary innovation was to show quantity by repetition rather than enlargement.
Gödel’s breakthrough ranks with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in terms of its transformational effect of mathematics, physics, and science more generally. He had dissolved in one fell swoop the rigid distinction between syntax and data.
Menger - Value does not exist outside the consciousness of men.
Margarete Lihotzky invents the fitted kitchen
Hedy Lamarr developed Spread Spectrum technology, the technology that led to BlueTooth, Wifi, and GPS.
Whereas Freudians believed in a chronological psychosexual development in five stages from the oral to the genital, Melanie Klein posited a psychic-position theory, whereby young children as they grew up oscillated between certain positions such as the paranoid-schizoid and depressive.
William Bateson and others merged Mendelian « genetics » with Darwin’s theory of natural selection to produce a solid account of evolutionary biology based on genetic inheritance, later called the « modern synthesis », or « central dogma » of evolution.

Books Cited

The Analysis of Sensations (1886) - Ernst Mach - the ego was « not a definite, unalterable, sharply-bounded unity’, but rather a bundle of sense impressions of the world »
Man’s Search for Meaning - (1946) Viktor Frankel
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) - Willhelm Reich
The Authoritarian Personality (1950) - Adorno et al
An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis (1927) - Anna Freud
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) - Anna Freud