Private Life and Hobbies
Petzval was a good sportsman and rider. As a young child, he often traveled with his family to the High Tatras, and was also a dedicated athlete. In Vienna, he was for a long time the best fencer and ring fighter in the city. He also inherited an excellent talent for music from his father. Allegedly, while he was a lecturer in Vienna, he always rode to his lectures on a black Arabian horse.
Petzval never wanted to communicate anything about his private life, and was therefore relatively inscrutable to others during his lifetime. As Dr. Ermenyi described in his book, Dr. Josef Petzval's Life
- ". . . he went so far as to always insert a bare point, for example, use the appearing annual yearbook of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, in whatever apart from the names of the members the date and the place appear aforementioned to the birth for itself into this column."
At the end of his life he lived in increasingly greater isolation in his "castle" on Kahlenberg, with only his horse for company, although several academies and scholarly societies appointed him a member (member of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna (1846/1849), external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1873), honorary member of the Union of the Czech mathematicians and physicists (1881), carriers of the French Charles Chevalier Platinmedaille, and others).
Read more about this topic: Joseph Petzval
Famous quotes containing the words private, life and/or hobbies:
“Good government is the outcome of private virtue.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“Glorious bouquets and storms of applause ... are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys. But to move an audience in such a role, to hear in the applause that unmistakable note which breaks through good theatre manners and comes from the heart, is to feel that you have won through to life itself. Such pleasure does not vanish with the fall of the curtain, but becomes part of one’s own life.”
—Dame Alice Markova (b. 1910)
“I spend so many times for skating, and I gave up so many hobbies for this ... the Olympics are four years in time. And I am old.”
—Ye Qiaobo (b. 1965)