Oton Kučera

His son Vlaho later claimed that Oton was born on December 31, 1856, but that pragmatic reasons (such as the army service) prompted his parents to move the date by one day.

Through his paternal grandfather Václav Kučera, who moved from Staré Hamry to Glina, Oton was of Czech descent.

He went to Vienna, where he studied physics, mathematics and astronomy, attending the lectures of the famous scientists Jožef Stefan, Ludwig Boltzmann and Johann Josef Loschmidt.

He was offered the post of the assistant, but patriotic and family reasons brought him back to Vinkovci, where he started lecturing at the local Gymnasium at the age of 19.

Together with Spiridon Brusina and Gjuro Pilar, he founded the Croatian Society of Natural Sciences in Zagreb in the late 1885.

The Society published its Glasnik (Herald), where Kučera's first article, Man and Natural Science, can be found in 1886.

Kučera believed that man has the same relationship towards the stars as towards his homeland, and that astronomy makes people think about the fundamental questions of life and forget the low passions, which endows it with great educational value.

In 1895, he wrote Our Sky, a book of popular astronomy published by Matica hrvatska in a printing run of 12,000 copies.

In 1902, Kučera published Experimental Physics for Secondary Schools and initiated the astronomy section at the Croatian Society of Natural Sciences.

Still lecturing at the academy, he accepted the position of the head of the Zagreb Observatory, created in 1903, which he had helped found.

In 1907 he translated two textbooks, Scheiner's Structure of Space and Walentin's Advanced Physics for Secondary School.

When his first wife Vilma Stenzl died, he remarried with Jelka Sakač and had three more children: daughters Mara and Nevenka and son Vlaho.