Humboldt, Alexander von

▪ German explorer and naturalist

Introduction

in full  Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander, Freiherr (baron) von Humboldt 

born Sept. 14, 1769, Berlin

died May 6, 1859, Berlin

 German naturalist and explorer who was a major figure in the classical period of physical geography and biogeography—areas of science now included in the earth sciences and ecology. With his book Kosmos he made a valuable contribution to the popularization of science. The Humboldt Current off the west coast of South America was named after him.

Early life

      Humboldt was the son of an officer in the army of Frederick the Great. His mother belonged to a family of Huguenots (French Protestants) who had left France after Louis XIV's revocation, in 1685, of religious liberty for Protestants. After his father's death in 1779, he and his brother Wilhelm were raised by their mother, an unemotional woman of strict Calvinist beliefs. They were privately educated; instruction in political history and economics was added to the usual courses in classics, languages, and mathematics, as their mother intended them to be qualified for high public positions. Alexander, a sickly child, at first was a poor student. He was restless, thought of joining the army, and followed his courses only under parental pressure. After futile studies in economics at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder he spent a year in Berlin, where he obtained some training in engineering and suddenly became passionately interested in botany. He began to collect plant specimens in the surroundings of Berlin and learned to classify them. But the poor flora of the province of Brandenburg did not provide much stimulus for an ardent botanist, and Humboldt soon dreamed of journeys to more exotic lands.

      A year spent at the University of Göttingen, from 1789 to 1790, finally opened the world of science to him; he became particularly interested in mineralogy and geology and decided to obtain a thorough training in these subjects by joining the School of Mines in Freiberg, Saxony, the first such establishment. Although founded only in 1766, the school had already acquired an international reputation. There, buttressed by a prodigious memory and driven by an unending thirst for knowledge, he began to develop his enormous capacity for work. After a morning spent underground in the mines, he attended classes for five or six hours in the afternoon and in the evening scoured the country for plants.

      He left Freiberg in 1792 after two years of intensive study but without taking a degree. A month later he obtained an appointment in the Mining Department of the Prussian government and departed for the remote Fichtel Mountains in the Margraviate of Ansbach-Bayreuth, which had only recently come into the possession of the Prussian kings. Here Humboldt came into his own; he travelled untiringly from one mine to the next, reorganizing the partly deserted and totally neglected pits, which produced mainly gold and copper. He supervised all mining activities, invented a safety lamp, and established, with his own funds, a technical school for young miners. Yet he did not intend to make mining his career.

Expedition to South America

      The conviction had grown in Humboldt that his real aim in life was scientific exploration, and in 1797 he resigned from his post to acquire with great single-mindedness a thorough knowledge of the systems of geodetic, meteorological, and geomagnetic measurements. The political upheavals caused by the Napoleonic Wars prevented the realization of several scientific expeditions in which Humboldt had been given an opportunity to participate. At last, dispirited by his disappointments but refusing to be deterred from his purpose, he obtained permission from the Spanish government to visit the Spanish colonies in Central and South America. These colonies were then accessible only to Spanish officials and the Roman Catholic mission. Completely shut off from the outside world, they offered enormous possibilities to a scientific explorer. Humboldt's social standing assured him of access to official circles, and in the Spanish prime minister Mariano de Urquijo he found an enlightened man who supported his application to the king for a royal permit. In the summer of 1799 he set sail from Marseille accompanied by the French botanist Aimé Bonpland, whom he had met in Paris, then the liveliest scientific centre in Europe. The estate he had inherited at the death of his mother enabled Humboldt to finance the expedition entirely out of his own pocket. Humboldt and Bonpland spent five years, from 1799 to 1804, in Central and South America, covering more than 6,000 miles (9,650 kilometres) on foot, on horseback, and in canoes. It was a life of great physical exertion and serious deprivation.

      Starting from Caracas, they travelled south through grasslands and scrublands until they reached the banks of the Apure, a tributary of the Orinoco River. They continued their journey on the river by canoe as far as the Orinoco. Following its course and that of the Casiquiare, they proved that the Casiquiare River formed a connection between the vast river systems of the Amazon (Amazon River) and the Orinoco (Orinoco River). For three months Humboldt and Bonpland moved through dense tropical forests, tormented by clouds of mosquitoes and stifled by the humid heat. Their provisions were soon destroyed by insects and rain; the lack of food finally drove them to subsist on ground-up wild cacao beans and river water. Yet both travellers, buoyed up by the excitement provided by the new and overwhelming impressions, remained healthy and in the best of spirits until their return to civilization, when they succumbed to a severe bout of fever.

      After a short stay in Cuba, Humboldt and Bonpland returned to South America for an extensive exploration of the Andes. From Bogotá to Trujillo, Peru, they wandered over the Andean Highlands—following a route now traversed by the Pan-American Highway, in their time a series of steep, rocky, and often very narrow paths. They climbed a number of peaks, including all the volcanoes in the surroundings of Quito, Ecuador; Humboldt's ascent of Chimborazo (20,702 feet [6,310 metres]) to a height of 19,286 feet (5,878 metres), but short of the summit, remained a world mountain-climbing (mountaineering) record for nearly 30 years. All these achievements were carried out without the help of modern mountaineering equipment, without ropes, crampons, or oxygen supplies; hence, Humboldt and Bonpland suffered badly from mountain sickness (altitude sickness). But Humboldt turned his discomfort to advantage: he became the first person to ascribe mountain sickness to lack of oxygen in the rarefied air of great heights. He also studied the oceanic current off the west coast of South America that was originally named after him but is now known as the Peru Current. When the pair arrived, worn and footsore, in Quito, Humboldt, the experienced mountaineer and indefatigable collector of scientific data, had no difficulty in assuming the role of courtier and man of the world when he was received by the Viceroy and the leaders of Spanish society.

      In the spring of 1803, the two travellers sailed from Guayaquil to Acapulco, Mex., where they spent the last year of their expedition in a close study of this most developed and highly civilized part of the Spanish colonies. After a short stay in the United States, where Humboldt was received by President Jefferson, they sailed for France.

      Humboldt and Bonpland returned with an immense amount of information. In addition to a vast collection of new plants, there were determinations of longitudes and latitudes, measurements of the components of the Earth's geomagnetic field, and daily observations of temperatures and barometric pressure, as well as statistical data on the social and economic conditions of Mexico. Whenever Humboldt had found himself in a centre of commerce in America, he had sent off reports and duplicates of his collections to his brother, Wilhelm, who had become a noted philologist, and to French scientists; unfortunately, the continental blockade then enforced by British ships prevented the greater part of his mail from reaching its destination.

Professional life in Paris

      The years from 1804 to 1827 Humboldt devoted to publication of the data accumulated on the South American expedition. With the exception of brief visits to Berlin, he lived in Paris during this important period of his life. There he found not only collaborators among the French scientists—the greatest of his time—but engravers for his maps and illustrations and publishers for printing the 30 volumes into which the scientific results of the expedition were distilled. Of great importance were the meteorological data, with an emphasis on mean daily and nightly temperatures, and Humboldt's representation on weather maps of isotherms (lines connecting points with the same mean temperature) and isobars (lines connecting points with the same barometric pressure for a given time or period)—all of which helped lay the foundation for the science of comparative climatology. Even more important were his pioneering studies on the relationship between a region's geography and its flora and fauna, and, above all, the conclusions he drew from his study of the Andean volcanoes (volcanism) concerning the role played by eruptive forces and metamorphosis in the history and ongoing development of the Earth's crust. These conclusions disproved once and for all the hypothesis of the so-called Neptunists, who held that the surface of the Earth had been totally formed by sedimentation from a liquid state. Lastly, his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain contained a wealth of material on the geography and geology of Mexico, including descriptions of its political, social, and economic conditions, and also extensive population statistics. Humboldt's impassioned outcry in this work against the inhumanities of slavery remained unheard, but his descriptions of the Mexican silver mines led to widespread investment of English capital and mining expertise in the mines.

      During his years in Paris, Humboldt enjoyed an extraordinarily full life. He had the ability to cultivate deep and long-lasting friendships with well-known scientists, such as the renowned physicist and astronomer François Arago (Arago, François), and to evoke respect and admiration from the common man, an ability that reflected his generosity, humanity, and vision of what science could do. A gregarious person, Humboldt appeared regularly in the salons of Parisian society, where he usually dominated the conversation. He lived simply, in a modest apartment at the top of an old house in the Latin Quarter. His fortune had been seriously depleted by the cost of his expedition and the publication of his books, and for the rest of his life he was often in financial straits. He was, moreover, always willing and anxious to assist young scientists at the beginning of their careers. Due to his magnanimity, generosity, and wise judgment, promising students who lacked funds were given the necessary encouragement, financial assistance, and introductions to the scientific community to insure a successful start in life. Such men as the German chemist Justus von Liebig and the Swiss-born zoologist Louis Agassiz (Agassiz, Louis) owed to Humboldt the means to continue their studies and embark on an academic career. The best proof of his wide interests and affectionate nature lies in his voluminous correspondence: about 8,000 letters remain.

Later years

      The happy years in Paris came to an end in 1827. Humboldt's means by then were almost completely exhausted; unable to maintain his financial independence, he had to return to Berlin, where the King impatiently demanded his presence at court. Until a few years before his death, Humboldt served as a tutor to the Crown Prince, as a member of the privy council, and as a court chamberlain. He made use of his position to acquaint the young prince and the royal family with scientific methods and the scientific ideas of his time. His enthusiasm for the popularization of science prompted him to give a course on physical geography to the professors and students of all faculties of the University of Berlin, part of which he repeated in a public lecture to an audience of more than 1,000. In the autumn of the same year, 1828, he also organized in Berlin one of the first international scientific conferences. Such large gatherings of possibly liberal-minded people were frowned upon by governments in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and the attendant rise of democratic expectations, and it is a tribute to Humboldt's adroitness that he was able to overcome the misgivings of official Prussian circles.

      In 1829 Humboldt was given the opportunity to visit Russia and Siberia. On the initiative of the Russian minister of finance, Count Yegor Kankrin (Kankrin, Egor Frantsevich, Count), he was invited to visit the gold and platinum mines in the Urals, as an adviser to the government on the techniques and organization of mining. But Humboldt had to pledge himself to refrain from commenting on the political situation of the country whose despotism he abhorred. This expedition, lasting only one summer, was very different from the South American journey; the members, Humboldt and two young scientists, were accompanied throughout by an official guard, since they were guests of the Tsar. Humboldt and his companions had to endure tiresome receptions at the imperial court and in the homes of provincial governors. They travelled in carriages as far as the Altai Mountains and the Chinese frontier. The resulting geographical, geological, and meteorological observations, especially those regarding the Central Asian regions, were of great importance to the Western world, for Central Asia was then to a large degree unknown territory.

      Humboldt passed the last 30 years of his life in Berlin. Once a year he travelled to Paris, where he renewed his contacts with the French scientists, enjoyed daily discussions with his friend Arago, and breathed the cosmopolitan air he so sadly missed in Berlin.

      Even before his visit to Russia, he had returned to an investigation of a phenomenon that had aroused his interest in South America: the sudden fluctuations of the Earth's geomagnetic field (magnetic field)—the so-called magnetic storms (magnetic storm). With the help of assistants, he carried out observations of the movement of a magnetometer in a quiet garden pavilion in Berlin; but it had been clear to him for a number of years that, to discover whether these magnetic storms were of terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin, it would be necessary to set up a worldwide net of magnetic observatories. The German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (Gauss, Carl Friedrich) had already begun to organize simultaneous measurements of the magnetic field by several observatories in Germany, England, and Sweden. In 1836 Humboldt, still interested in the problem, approached the Royal Society in London with the request that it establish an additional series of stations in the British possessions overseas. As a result, the British government provided the means for permanent observatories in Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand and equipped an Antarctic expedition. With the help of the mass of data produced by this international scientific collaboration, one of the first of its kind, the English geophysicist Sir Edward Sabine (Sabine, Sir Edward) later succeeded in correlating the appearance of magnetic storms in the Earth's atmosphere with the periodically changing activity of sunspots, thus proving the extraterrestrial origin of the storms.

      During the last 25 years of his life, Humboldt was chiefly occupied with writing Kosmos, one of the most ambitious scientific works ever published. Four volumes appeared during his lifetime. Written in a pleasant, literary style, Kosmos gives a generally comprehensible account of the structure of the universe as then known, at the same time communicating the scientist's excitement and aesthetic enjoyment at his discoveries. Humboldt had taken immense pains to discipline his inclination to discursiveness, which often gave his writing a certain lack of logical coherence. He was rewarded for his effort by the success of his book, which, within a few years, had been translated into nearly all European languages.

      While still working on the fifth volume of Kosmos with hardly diminished vitality and enthusiasm and with an unimpaired memory, Humboldt died in his 90th year.

Charlotte L. Kellner

Additional Reading

Biographies

Helmut De Terra, Humboldt: The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt, 1769–1859 (1955, reprinted 1979); L. Kellner, Alexander von Humboldt (1963); Douglas Botting, Humboldt and the Cosmos (1973).

Works

Ansichten der Natur, mit wissenschaftlichen Erläuterungen (1808; Aspects of Nature, in Different Lands and Different Climates, 1849), descriptions of scenic aspects and a sketch of the geography of plants for the general reader; Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent, fait en 1799–1804, 23 vol. (1805–34; Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804, 7 vol., 1814–29), a well-known account of the journey through the grasslands of Venezuela and the Orinoco River basin that had a great influence on Charles Darwin; Asie Centrale, 3 vol. (1843), significant for its report on relatively unknown regions and for its ideas on comparative climatology.

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