Although Professor Popkiss was born in Hungary, he is actually Swiss. His parents moved to Appenzell near the Austro-Swiss border when he was only a year old; it was there that his sister Heidi was born. In his youth he helped out a clockmaker by the name of Curt Gestler who taught him about delicate machinery.

In 1931, he graduated from Geneva University with degrees in Electronics, Aviation and Rocketry and set up his own research complex. He was so dedicated to his work, he never married or seemed to have a life away from his lab. Unfortunately, due to lack of funding he had to shut down his laboratory, and in 1937 he went to the USA to build a new laboratory in the Nevada Desert at Black Rock. The US Government consulted him frequently and he was able to help them in the war effort, although he refused to help out with the Manhattan Project.

After the war he started to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and there, during a debate with some English academics, he met and befriended Dr. Beaker. They discovered that they had a common dream – to create a vehicle that would enable them to do some good after the carnage that had resulted from the two World Wars. In 1955, Dr Beaker joined Popkiss in Nevada to work together in building Supercar.

When he is not thinking up improvements for Supercar, the Professor collects butterflies and tinkers with clocks and 'likes nothing better than to sit in front of a roaring fire with a good book'. He is a great reader of classical literature.