Alexander von Humboldt

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexander von Humboldt stood at the top of the volcano Chimborazo in Ecuador in 1802 at 19,286 feet above sea level, higher than any Westerner had ever climbed. He was gasping for air, bleeding from his gums, and still taking measurements. The questions he carried up that mountain were not small ones. How do living things change with altitude? What connects the climate near the ocean to the climate in the high Andes? Is the planet itself one single, breathing system? Those were not the questions of a geologist or a botanist or a geographer. They were the questions of all three at once, and Humboldt was all three. Born in Berlin on the 14th of September 1769, he would spend his life crossing entire continents, befriending presidents and poets, and quietly assembling a way of thinking about the natural world that is still with us today. He is called "the father of ecology" and "the father of environmentalism". He described human-induced climate change in writing as early as 1800. Yet today, most people outside Germany could not place his name. How a man once described by Thomas Jefferson as "the most scientific man of the age" came to be so widely forgotten is one of the stranger stories in the history of science.

• 2. A Mind Shaped Early

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  His father, Alexander Georg von Humboldt, died in 1779 when young Alexander was nine years old, leaving the boy and his older brother Wilhelm in the care of a mother described as emotionally distant. She pushed both sons hard toward careers as Prussian civil servants and hired tutors who were Enlightenment thinkers, including Kantian physician Marcus Herz and the botanist Carl Ludwig Willdenow, who would become one of the most important botanists in Germany. The young Humboldt earned a playful family nickname, "the little apothecary", for his habit of collecting and labeling plants, shells, and insects. He studied finance at the University of Frankfurt (Oder) in 1787, then matriculated at the University of Gottingen on the 25th of April 1789, where he met the naturalist Georg Forster, who had sailed with Captain James Cook. The friendship with Forster opened the world to Humboldt. Their joint journey through the Rhine in the fall of 1789 produced Humboldt's first scientific treatise, published in 1790, on basalt formations along that river. In England the same year, he met Sir Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society, who showed him specimens from the South Sea tropics and kept in scientific contact with him until Banks's death in 1820. At the Freiberg School of Mines in 1791, Humboldt studied under A.G. Werner and met the men who would shape his later career, including the Spaniard Manuel del Rio, who became director of the School of Mines in Mexico. The inheritance his mother left when she died in 1796 would later fund more than seventy percent of his American travels.

• 3. Inspector, Friend of Goethe

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  Graduating from Freiberg in 1792, Humboldt took a government post as a mine inspector in Bayreuth and the Fichtel Mountains, and in his first year alone the production of gold ore outstripped the previous eight years combined. He opened a free school for miners at his own expense, and sought to establish an emergency relief fund for those injured underground. His botanical research in those mines, published in Latin in 1793 as Florae Fribergensis, caught the attention of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had met Humboldt as a boy but now wanted to discuss the metamorphism of plants with the young scientist. An introduction was arranged through Wilhelm, who lived in the university town of Jena near Goethe's residence in Weimar. Goethe had been developing theories on comparative anatomy: working before Darwin, he believed animals possessed an internal force, an urform, giving them a basic shape which external forces then adapted to the environment. Humboldt urged him to publish. In 1797, they collaborated directly, attending anatomy lectures together and conducting experiments, including one in which the moisture from Humboldt's breath triggered a reaction in a frog leg hooked to metal, causing it to leap off the table. Humboldt later described that moment as like "breathing life into" the leg. Goethe told friends he had never met anyone so versatile. Humboldt contributed to Schiller's periodical Die Horen on the 7th of June 1795, writing the only literary story he ever authored, a philosophical allegory summarizing thousands of galvanic experiments he had conducted. When his mother's death freed him from official obligations in 1796, he turned his energy fully toward preparing for the expedition that had occupied his dreams for years.

• 4. Five Years in Spanish America

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  Humboldt and the French botanist Aime Bonpland sailed from La Coruna on the 5th of June 1799 aboard the ship Pizarro. Their destination was the Americas, but an outbreak of typhoid on board forced the captain to change course from Havana to Cumana, Venezuela, on the 16th of July. Humboldt later wrote that this accident made possible his entire exploration of the Orinoco River. In the valley of Aragua, investigating why Lake Valencia had fallen so dramatically in water level, Humboldt concluded that the clearing of tree cover was removing a "threefold" moderating influence on temperature: cooling shade, evaporation, and radiation. He was describing, in scientific terms, a form of human-induced climate change. In February 1800, Humboldt and Bonpland set out on a four-month journey of 1,725 miles along the Orinoco and its tributaries, in part to prove the existence of the Casiquiare canal connecting the river systems of the Orinoco and Amazon. Around the 19th of March 1800, they encountered electric eels and watched locals drive wild horses into the river to draw the eels out from the mud. Humboldt dissected captured eels and received potentially dangerous shocks himself. The experience led him to think more deeply about electricity and magnetism, and he returned to the incident in his later writings including the Personal Narrative and Views of Nature. From Venezuela they went to Cuba, then south through Colombia, arriving in Bogota on the 6th of July 1801 and meeting the botanist Jose Celestino Mutis, head of the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada, who had been compiling an illustrated botanical record since 1783. Humboldt was so astonished by Mutis's work that when he published his own first volume on botany, he dedicated it to Mutis "as a simple mark of our admiration and acknowledgement". They crossed the frozen ridges of the Cordillera Real to Quito, where Humboldt climbed the volcano Chimborazo with Bonpland, the Ecuadorian nobleman Carlos Montufar, and a number of Indians. The 1,000-foot shortfall from the true summit still left them at a record altitude for any Westerner. At Callao in Peru, on the 9th of November, Humboldt observed the transit of Mercury and studied the fertilizing properties of guano, whose subsequent introduction to European agriculture was due largely to his writings. Their final leg took them through Mexico, arriving by sea at Acapulco on the 15th of February 1803. Humboldt and Bonpland left the Americas in 1804 after six weeks in the United States. The entire expedition produced 4,000 pages of travel diaries, now held in Germany after a postwar detour to the Soviet Union and East Germany following World War II.

• 5. Mexico and the Science of Seeing Data

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  Humboldt had not planned to visit New Spain at all, but when they could not join a voyage to the Pacific, he and Bonpland landed at Acapulco on the 15th of February 1803. One of his first acts was to survey the deep-water bay and correct the erroneous longitude that the ship's captain had recorded. Precise mapping of Acapulco mattered because the port was the terminus of the Asian trade from the Spanish Philippines. He visited the silver mine at Valenciana in Guanajuato, then the most important mine in the Spanish empire, and produced an analysis considered the strongest section of his later Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. Viceroy Jose de Iturrigaray had greeted them officially and given Humboldt special access to crown records, mines, landed estates, canals, and prehispanic antiquities. Humboldt was impressed by Mexico City as the largest city in the Americas and said of it that no city in the new continent, including those of the United States, displayed such great scientific establishments as the capital of Mexico. He pointed specifically to the Royal College of Mines, the Royal Botanical Garden, and the Royal Academy of San Carlos. Humboldt also pioneered a new way of presenting data to a general audience, insisting that quantitative information be shown visually rather than as columns of numbers. He put it plainly: "anything that has to do with extent or quantity can be represented geometrically". His Chimborazo cross-section, roughly two feet by three feet, depicted altitude, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, and the species found at every elevation in a single illustration. One scholar later said of it that it marked the beginning of a new era of environmental science. He also conducted a census of New Spain's population, estimating six million individuals and noting that indigenous people made up roughly forty percent of the total, distributed unevenly with the highest concentrations in the center and south of Mexico.

• 6. Jefferson, Bolívar, and Scientific Fame

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  Leaving Cuba in 1804, Humboldt made an unplanned stop in the United States. He wrote to President Thomas Jefferson, who was himself a scientist, and mentioned that he had discovered mammoth teeth near the Equator. Jefferson had believed mammoths had never lived so far south. The letter was an immediate success. Jefferson invited him to the White House, and the two held intense discussions about New Spain's population, trade, agriculture, and military capacity. This mattered politically because Jefferson had only recently concluded the Louisiana Purchase, which now placed New Spain on the southwest border of the United States, and the Spanish minister in Washington had refused to provide information about Spanish territories. Humboldt also wrote Jefferson a two-page report on where he believed the border of the new purchase actually lay. Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin said he had absorbed more information of various kinds in less than two hours with Humboldt than he had in two years of reading. After six weeks, Humboldt sailed from the mouth of the Delaware and landed at Bordeaux on the 3rd of August 1804. Back in the Americas, Humboldt had climbed the Avila mount in Caracas with the young poet Andres Bello, former tutor of Simon Bolivar. Humboldt met Bolivar himself in 1804 in Paris and again in Rome. The surviving record does not support the idea that Humboldt directly inspired Bolivar to join the struggle for independence, but it does record Bolivar's expressed admiration for Humboldt's new knowledge about Spanish America. Mexico, after independence from Spain in 1821, recognized Humboldt formally. In 1827, the first president of Mexico, Guadalupe Victoria, granted him Mexican citizenship. In 1859, President Benito Juarez named him a hero of the nation. By the centenary of his birth in 1869, his fame was so great that cities across America held large festivals and a bust was unveiled in Central Park in New York City.

• 7. Kosmos and a Fading Name

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  In the winter of 1827-1828, Humboldt delivered public lectures at the University of Berlin that became, years later, the foundation for Kosmos, his multi-volume attempt to unify all branches of scientific knowledge into a single coherent account of the universe. He had dreamed of this work for decades. The first two volumes appeared between 1845 and 1847. Three more followed, the last posthumously in 1862, and even then the project remained incomplete. In Britain and America, Kosmos was extraordinarily popular. A German newspaper noted in 1849 that in England, two of the three competing translations had been made by women. The three English-language translators were Augustin Pritchard, Elizabeth Juliana Leeves Sabine under the supervision of her husband Colonel Edward Sabine, and Elise Otte, whose five-volume translation was the only complete one to cover all four German volumes. Humboldt himself complained of Pritchard's version that it would damage his reputation and that "all the charm of my description is destroyed by an English sounding like Sanskrit". Scholars differ sharply on the work's lasting importance. One calls it "little more than an academic curiosity"; another describes it as his "most influential book". Financial necessity had forced Humboldt back to Berlin permanently in 1827, after exhausting his personal fortune on his many publications. His royal chamberlain appointment from King Frederick William III of Prussia, with its pension of 2,500 thalers, later doubled, became his main source of income in old age. Why did so famous a man fade from public memory? Scholars point to three factors. Specialization in academia made Humboldt, a proud generalist, seem outdated. His literary style, praised in his day, came to be called "laborious picturesqueness" by critics. And a rise in anti-German sentiment in the late 1800s and early 1900s, tied to German immigration to the United States and then to World War One, eroded his standing in the countries where he had been celebrated most. His travel diaries, digitized between 2014 and 2017 by the University of Potsdam and the German State Library, may yet reverse that drift.