Wolfgang Köhler was born January 21, 1887, in Reval, Estonia. He received his PhD in 1908 from the University of Berlin. He then became an assistant at the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt, where he met and worked with Max Wertheimer.

In 1913, he took advantage of an assignment to study at the Anthropoid Station at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and stayed there till 1920. In 1917, he wrote his most famous book, Mentality of Apes.

In 1922, he became the chair and director of the psychology lab at the University of Berlin, where he stayed until 1935. During that time, in 1929, he wrote Gestalt Psychology. In 1935, he moved to the U.S., where he taught at Swarthmore until he retired. He died June 11, 1967 in New Hampshire.