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Galton - was interested in Eugenics and wanted to breed a superior man (and also a superior but still slightly inferior woman). He did this partly for patriotic reasons he felt it would help maintain English supremacy.
And he may have done it for compassionate reasons too. He may have believed people were poor and disadvantaged because they weren't bright enough to sort out a road to prosperity rather than the problem being uneven distribution of resources. He may have thought give a man a fish you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish you feed him for his life but make a man smart enough to figure out new ways of fishing and everyone wins.
But he thought intelligent people were better people.
So he started IQ testing. He reasoned that intelligence required a fine functioning brain, the brain can only function with the input it receives therefore the better the sensory input the better the output and the last one to need bifocals is the smartest.
These ideas never really reached acceptance not as science anyway, but I don't think they are so bad. Acquiring languages in adulthood correlates with certain auditory abilities. But in general Galton turned out to be wrong.
Ebbinghaus is best known - for his memory experiments.He was influenced by Fechner to believe mental processes could be measured. So he set out to measure the formation and retention of associations.
Like a psychologist of his age he used himself as a subject. Suspecting that common words and objects found in experience were to varying degrees already known and therefore had inherently different degrees of difficulty to remember he created his own memory objects, three letter combinations that went consonant vowel consonant.
Then he experimented on his ability to remember these nonsense syllables. He used serial learning to increase the number of associations made between the words (he only counted a word remembered if it came in sequence relative to the other words).
And he found a mathematical way - savings method - to measure how his memory had improved. He found that longer strings of nonsense words took more time to memorize and that lists of seven words could be memorized in one presentation foreshadowing George Miller's magic number seven.
He was also the first to document the distribution of practice, that memory performance improved if presentations were spread over a longer period of time.
Hope this is help
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