Alexander von Humboldt

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was born in Berlin on September 14, 1769, into a family of the minor Prussian nobility ^[1]. His father, Alexander Georg von Humboldt, was an army officer who had served as a royal chamberlain; his mother, Marie Elisabeth Colomb, came from a prosperous Huguenot family and controlled the household finances after her husband died in 1779, when Alexander was nine ^[2].

The boy grew up largely at Schloss Tegel, the family estate outside Berlin, where private tutors schooled him and his older brother Wilhelm von Humboldt, the future linguist and education reformer. Alexander was the slower student of the two by his tutors' reckoning, but he collected plants, insects and rocks with such persistence that the family nicknamed him the little apothecary ^[2]. His mother intended both sons for careers in the Prussian civil service, and Alexander dutifully studied finance at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder before moving on to Göttingen in 1789 ^[1].

At Göttingen he met Georg Forster, the naturalist who had sailed on James Cook's second voyage. A journey the two men took down the Rhine to England in 1790 fixed Humboldt's ambition to travel and observe for himself ^[3]. Practical training followed at the Freiberg School of Mines in Saxony, where he compressed the usual course of study into eight months and absorbed the geology of Abraham Gottlob Werner ^[1].

In 1792 Humboldt entered the Prussian mining service and rose quickly to the rank of inspector. Posted to the Fichtel Mountains in Franconia, he reorganized derelict mines, founded a free school for miners at his own expense, and designed a breathing mask and a safety lamp for use underground ^[3]. In his spare hours he ran experiments on animal electricity, some of them on his own body, and published the results in a two-volume study in 1797 ^[2].

His mother's death in 1796 left him a substantial inheritance, and he resigned his post to pursue a scientific expedition. Plans to join voyages to Egypt and the South Pacific collapsed one after another amid the wars of the French Revolution. The breakthrough came in Madrid in 1799, when King Charles IV of Spain granted Humboldt an unusual passport allowing him free travel and free use of instruments throughout Spain's American colonies, territory normally closed to foreign scientists ^[1].

On June 5, 1799, Humboldt sailed from La Coruña aboard the corvette Pizarro with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland as his companion. He carried some of the finest portable instruments of the age: sextants, barometers, thermometers, a cyanometer for measuring the blueness of the sky, and chronometers for fixing longitude ^[4]. Anyone asking who was Alexander von Humboldt before that voyage would have heard of a promising mining official and experimenter. The journey that followed made him famous across two continents.

Humboldt and Bonpland landed at Cumaná, in present-day Venezuela, in July 1799. Over the next five years they traveled roughly 6,000 miles through what are now Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Mexico, with a final stop in the United States ^[4]. In 1800 they charted a long stretch of the Orinoco River and confirmed the existence of the Casiquiare canal, a natural waterway linking the Orinoco and Amazon river systems, a connection European geographers had doubted ^[1].

The most celebrated episode came in June 1802, when Humboldt, Bonpland and Carlos Montúfar climbed Chimborazo in Ecuador, then believed to be the highest mountain on Earth. A crevasse stopped them short of the summit, but they reached an altitude of about 19,286 feet by Humboldt's measurement, higher than any recorded climb to that date ^[4]. On the volcano's slopes Humboldt observed how vegetation changed in orderly bands with elevation, an insight he later drew as the Naturgemälde, a cross-section of Chimborazo annotated with plants, temperatures and pressures at each height. The image became a founding document of plant geography ^[5].

Throughout the journey the travelers gathered around 60,000 plant specimens, several thousand of them new to European science ^[3]. Humboldt measured the cold ocean current running along the Peruvian coast that now often carries his name, studied the fertilizer value of guano, recorded Earth's magnetic field at scores of stations, and witnessed a spectacular Leonid meteor shower in 1799. Before returning to Europe in 1804 he spent a year in New Spain compiling statistics on Mexico's population, mines and trade, then visited Washington, where he met President Thomas Jefferson and shared his geographic data ^[6].

Any account of Alexander von Humboldt achievements has to begin with the publications. Between 1805 and 1834 he issued the results of the American expedition in roughly thirty volumes, covering botany, zoology, astronomy, geology and political economy, illustrated with costly engravings that nearly exhausted his fortune ^[1]. The Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain gave Europe its first detailed statistical portrait of Mexico, and his Personal Narrative of the journey influenced a generation of readers, among them the young Charles Darwin, who carried it aboard the Beagle ^[5].

Humboldt's method mattered as much as his findings. He measured everything he could and then looked for patterns across regions. By plotting mean temperatures on maps he invented isotherms, the lines of equal temperature still used in climate science, and with them he could compare climates across continents for the first time ^[5]. He described how mountain vegetation zones mirror latitude zones, analyzed the relationship between geography and plant distribution, and wrote early, pointed observations about the environmental damage caused by colonial plantations, deforestation and monoculture, noting at Lake Valencia in Venezuela how clearing forests had altered the local water balance ^[5].

In 1829, at the age of fifty-nine, he undertook a second great journey, crossing the Russian Empire to the Altai Mountains on the Chinese frontier at the invitation of Tsar Nicholas I. He covered more than 9,000 miles in under six months, correctly predicted that diamonds would be found in the Urals, and used the trip to promote a worldwide network of geomagnetic observation stations ^[3]. The crowning work of his old age was Kosmos, an attempt to describe the entire physical universe in accessible prose. The first volume appeared in 1845 and became an international bestseller; four more volumes followed, the last published after his death ^[1].

Humboldt never married and left no children. His closest bonds were intense friendships with men, including the French physicist François Arago, whom he visited almost daily during his Paris years, and a series of younger scientific companions; historians continue to debate how to characterize his private affections, since he burned much of his personal correspondence ^[2].

He was famously generous and famously talkative. Contemporaries joked that conversation with Humboldt was a monologue delivered at high speed in several languages. He used his celebrity and his court connections to fund and promote younger researchers, supporting the chemist Justus von Liebig, the mathematician Gotthold Eisenstein and the zoologist Louis Agassiz at decisive moments in their careers ^[5].

His political convictions were firmly liberal for his era. Having seen slavery in Cuba and Venezuela at close range, he condemned it for the rest of his life, calling it the greatest of all evils, and he objected publicly when the 1856 American edition of his Cuba book cut his anti-slavery passages ^[6]. He also insisted, against the racial theorizing common in his century, that all human peoples belonged to a single species and that none was inherently superior to another, a position he restated in Kosmos ^[5].

Humboldt spent most of the period from 1808 to 1827 in Paris, then the center of European science, preparing his expedition volumes. Mounting debts and pressure from the Prussian crown finally drew him back to Berlin in 1827, where he served as royal chamberlain and unofficial science adviser to Frederick William III and later Frederick William IV ^[1]. The court duties bored him, but the salary kept him solvent, and he used his position to lobby for observatories, museums and expeditions.

In the winter of 1827 to 1828 he delivered a free public lecture series on the physical description of the universe at the University of Berlin and the Singakademie. The halls overflowed, women attended alongside men, and the lectures grew into the plan for Kosmos ^[5]. He kept a punishing schedule into extreme old age, sleeping little, answering thousands of letters a year, and complaining that his fame had turned him into a kind of public office.

He worked on the fifth volume of Kosmos almost to the end. Alexander von Humboldt died in Berlin on May 6, 1859, at the age of eighty-nine. Prussia gave him a state funeral, and he was buried beside his brother Wilhelm at Tegel ^[1]. Later that same year Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a book whose author called Humboldt the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived ^[5].

Few names are attached to more features of the planet. The Humboldt Current off South America, Humboldt penguins and squid, a lily, an orchid, an Antarctic mountain range, counties and towns across the United States, Humboldt University of Berlin and even Mare Humboldtianum on the Moon all commemorate him ^[3]. The centennial of his birth in 1869 brought celebrations from New York to Melbourne, with tens of thousands gathering in Central Park for the unveiling of his bust ^[5].

His intellectual legacy proved just as durable. Humboldt's insistence that nature is a web of interdependent forces, best understood by combining precise measurement with a feeling for the whole, anticipated modern ecology and Earth system science, and scholars often cite him as an early observer of human-caused climate change ^[5]. Ecologists, geographers and climate scientists still work within questions he framed. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, established in his name, has funded international research fellowships since the nineteenth century and remains one of Germany's leading scientific institutions ^[7].

For readers coming to an Alexander von Humboldt biography today, the striking thing is how contemporary his concerns feel: deforestation, climate, the unity of nature, science communicated to a broad public. The basic Alexander von Humboldt facts, a Prussian aristocrat who climbed volcanoes with barometers strapped to his mules and then spent fifty years writing up what the measurements meant, only begin to explain why his reputation has revived so strongly in the twenty-first century ^[5].