Konrad F. Springer — Publisher and Scientist

Abstract

Konrad Springer and I first met on a sunny spring day in March 1969 in Zürich where he had come for a visit to the ETH. Martin Zimmermann was a Guggenheim Fellow that year, working at H.H. Bosshard’s wood research institute where he was developing his new methods for studying the distribution and length of vessels in wood. He was at this time also writing on a book for Springer-Verlag together with Claud Brown. I myself was spending a year at Kurt Mühlethaler’s electron microscopy laboratories, examining the phloem and xylem in normal and compression woods of spruce. Bosshard and Mühlethaler were both former students of Professor Frey-Wyssling who at this time was still active in research and teaching. He and Konrad Springer had known each other for many years, and it was through Frey-Wyssling that Konrad Springer had got to know Martin Zimmermann, another of FreyWyssling’s former students.