He developed and improved a number of physics related devices, among them the Psychrometer, which was named after him In his childhood, August was initially taken on by a poor foster family.

After the war he studied philosophy and theology and became a senior teacher in the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster.

In 1823 he married the daughter of his former teacher and later colleague Ernst Gottfried Fischer, the same year he also received his doctorate with a dissertation on conic sections In 1827 he became headmaster[2] of the newly built Cologne Gymnasium and remained in this position until his death in 1870.

[3][4][5] With the inventions of the hygrometer and thermometer, the theories of combining the two began to emerge during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In 1818 Ernst patented the term “psychrometer”, from the Greek language meaning “cold measure”.