Carl Otto Reventlow

Carl Otto Reventlow ( born December 10, 1817 in Store Heddinge ( Zealand ), † April 19, 1873 in Kempten, full name Karl Christian Otto ) was a memory researcher and journalist.

Life

The son of a painter studied philology 1838/39 at the Christian -Albrechts -University of Kiel. Otto was with others in Schleswig-Holstein desire for independence assets such as Rudolf Schleiden, Friedrich Dead Ringers, Andreas Springborn and Traugott Graf zu Reventlow member of the Corps Saxonia Kiel .. In Kiel he was relegated because of a duel and traveled as a publicist to England and Switzerland. Through the intervention of his college friends, he returned to study further back to Denmark in 1844 at the University of Copenhagen.

Already in 1843 he published his first book on mnemonics. The method he developed the pictorial memory techniques has been used in schools to mathematical and historical knowledge ` einzupauken '. His textbooks reached high volumes and have been extended over three decades and over again and re-issued. On many tours through Germany and Western Europe including Berlin, Leipzig, Danzig and Prague, he presented his methods. Critics of the education of language teachers as Carl Wilhelm Nauck (1813-1890) and the Swiss Eduard Pick (1862-1926) saw Otto first one epigones of the French jurists and co- inventor of the stenography Aimé Paris ( 1798-1866 ). The peculiarity of his system easy to learn ' mnemonics ' admiration however, it is appreciated by both contemporary peers such as Hermann Kothe and Ignatz Bernhard Monday and the then very popular time critics like Eduard Maria Oettinger and he is still regarded with his technique of ` non-separable Wallpaper ' as reminders crucial in the development of mnemonics.

Otto participated in the German Revolution of 1848/ 49 and was under police observation and lasted until 1850 in Sweden and Norway. Emigrated to Cincinnati in 1853, he was editor and publisher of various emigrant leaves, first in Syracuse, then in Albany. He took the Germans free blades of religious emigrants in Cincinnati, in 1857 the high guard. The journal was actually in the tradition of the German High Guardians, who appeared in Pforzheim in 1832, but was under Otto to a communist periodical for the German exiles of the emigrant ` '48 '. Karl Marx used the contact to him to recommend with Conrad Schramm an important official of the League of Communists as employees. In the dispute of the disintegrating German -Marx then lightly of the ` liberal ' has become Otto.

In his later years Otto lived in Kempten.

Works

• Textbook of mnemonics for a quite new applicable on the positives of all Disciplinen systems. Cotta, Stuttgart and Tübingen 1843.
• Dictionary of mnemonics according to his own systems. Cotta, Stuttgart and Tübingen 1844.
• Guide of mnemonics for schools. Approximately 3000 mnemonic processed data from the history and geography containing. Cotta, Stuttgart and Tübingen 1846.
• Practical Textbook of mnemonics or memory art. About 9000 applications to the various Schuldisciplinen containing. Second completely transformed work ed. Cotta, Stuttgart 1847.