Burrhus Frederic Skinner, born 1904 in Pennsylvania, was the discoverer of Operant Conditioning. He was a man with multifarious interests and skills; inventing, teaching, and experimenting.
He grew up in a comfortable home with his mother, his father, and his vivid imagination. At an early age, he developed an interest for building and constructing various devices. Some of these included a perpetual motion machine and a cart with steering that worked backwards.
After college, Skinner decided he wanted to pursue a career as a writer. He took a job at a book store for a couple of months - a choice which changed his plan for the future. In the store, he came upon books on the theories and discoveries of Pavlov and Watson; Skinner was impressed.
Skinner got enrolled in the Psychology Department of Harvard University, where he met a mentor holding similar views as him on behavior. Inspired, he ran experiments on rats and their reaction, finding that the stimuli following an action affected it as much as the ones before. This was later to become Operant Conditioning.
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