Alexander von Humboldt
If you asked people to describe one of the world’s greatest explorers, they probably wouldn’t say Alexander von Humboldt. If you asked them to name a great scientist they’d be unlikely to include Alexander von Humboldt. If you suggested they list the great geographers, Alexander von Humboldt probably wouldn’t make it to the list. And yet ...
Von Humboldt was born in Germany in 1769 and he is considered to be one of the founders of modern geography - his travels, experiments, and writings transformed western science in the nineteenth century. He led the first true scientific exploration of the Amazon region in which he aimed to contribute to his ambition to discover ‘the laws which wind a uniting bond round a multitude of isolated fact’.
As a young man, von Humboldt met George Forester, Captain James Cook's scientific illustrator from his second voyage, and together they travelled around Europe. When he was 27, Alexander's mother died, leaving him as substantial income. The following year, he left government service and began to plan travels with Aime Bonpland, a botanist, to explore South America, a continent almost unknown and to visit which the Spanish king had issued exactly four passports to Europeans in the previous decade!
Once they arrived in South America, von Humboldt and Bonpland studied the flora, fauna, and geography of the continent. In 1800 Von Humboldt mapped over 1700 miles of the Orinoco River. This was followed by a trip to the Andes and a climb of Mt. Chimborazo, then believed to be the tallest mountain in the world. They didn't make it to the top due to a wall-like cliff but they did climb to over 18,000 feet in elevation. This was to prompt a fascinating debate between von Humboldt and Simon Bolivar. von Humboldt had turned back from the summit because he began to feel weak and not in his right senses – this matched his philosophy that experience was only valid if it was measurable and quantifiable, a man who was feeling so ill he couldn’t see clearly, in von Humboldt’s view, wouldn’t ever know if he’d really made the summit or not. Bolivar, on the other hand, made an ‘imaginative’ ascent of the mountain, which he recorded in a poem, leading many people to suggest he had actually climbed it when he hadn’t. His view was that interpreting the reality of experience in such a way as to make it interesting was as valid as science.
Von Humboldt and Bonpland’s great accomplishment - other than massive collections of specimens and extensive notes on landscapes and natural history - was to prove the existence of a water connection, the famous Canal or Rio Cassiquiare, between the two river systems. Unfortunately, after passing though the Cassiquiare and reaching the Rio Negro in Portuguese Brazil, Von Humboldt was deported to Venezuela on suspicion of being a Spanish spy.
The pair was persuaded to visit Washington, D.C. and Von Humboldt had many meetings with Thomas Jefferson with whom he became good friends.
Von Humboldt sailed to Paris in 1804 and wrote thirty volumes about his field studies, creating a synthesis of his measurements, observations and experiments that became the basis for empirical geography. von Humboldt's fortunes were ultimately exhausted because of his travels and self-publishing of his reports. In 1827, he returned to Berlin where he became the King of Prussia's advisor. He was later invited to Russia by the Tsar and after exploring the country and describing discoveries such as permafrost, he recommended that Russia establish weather observatories across the country. The stations were established in 1835 and Von Humboldt was able to use the data to develop the principle of continentality, which states that the interiors of continents have more extreme climates due to a lack of moderating influence from the ocean. He also developed the first isotherm map, containing lines of equal average temperatures – something we see every day on weather maps on TV.
As Von Humboldt aged, he decided to write everything known about the earth. He called his work Kosmos and the first volume was published in 1845, when he was 76 years old. Kosmos was well written and well received sold out in seven weeks. Subsequent volumes focused on such topics as human's effort to describe the earth, astronomy, and earth and human interaction. von Humboldt died in 1859 and the fifth and final volume was published in 1862, based on his notes for the work.
He will go down in history as the last person who could have hoped to encompass a whole field of knowledge in a single personality and lifetime. His legacy is enshrined in the von Humboldt Foundation.
Other Great Explorers
tenzing, Vancouver, Almagro, Alvarado, Balboa, burton, clark, drake, eriksson, grant, heyerdahl, hillary, humboldt, ingstad, james cook, livingstone, magellan, Piccard, Raleigh, Scott, Shackleton