Victor Conrad was born and educated in Vienna. Upon graduation be became a staff member of the department of Meteorology and Magnetism at the University of Vienna. There he founded a section for the observation of electricity in the air, which was important to the discovery of cosmic rays some years later. Victor Conrad served as head of the department of cosmic physics at the University of Czernowitz (1910), Bukovina, until the World War I. In 1918 he returned to the University of Vienna, to the Institute of Meteorology, where he started a seismographic station for the observation of geophysical problems (earthquakes). Victor Conrad was later (1920-1938) involved with the research of bioclimatic issues. He was editor of the geophysical quarterly Gerlands Beitraege zur Geophysik (1926-1938), and edited 39 volumes. He wrote the chapter of climatic elements and their dependence on terrestrial influences, in the 500 pages Handbuch der Klimatologie published by Wladimir Koppen, a famous meteorologist. After the takeover by the Nazis, Conrad escaped to the USA. He was invited to lecture and do research in the Penn State Meteorology program, where he remained for a little over a year in 1939-40. He then joined Harvard University at Boston where he continued lecturing and conducting research on climatology. In Boston he published Fundamentals of Physical Climatology (1942), and Methods in Climatology (1944) together with Professor L.W. Pollak of Dublin. Conrad died in Boston in 1962.