Alexander von Humboldt
1769 – 1859 · Germany
Known for: Naturalist who saw the Earth as one living whole
“He measured the world in order to show that it is a single living whole.”
Biography
Alexander von Humboldt was born in Berlin on 14 September 1769, the younger son of a Prussian officer and court chamberlain, and grew up alongside an elder brother, Wilhelm, the future statesman and scholar of languages. His father died when he was nine, and his mother, who intended both boys for the civil service, engaged tutors from the circle of the Enlightenment, among them the physician Marcus Herz and the botanist Carl Ludwig Willdenow. A boy who collected and labelled plants, shells and insects earned the family nickname of the little apothecary. He studied finance at Frankfurt an der Oder and then at Göttingen, but filled those years with geology at Freiberg, anatomy at Jena, astronomy and the handling of instruments. A journey along the Rhine with Georg Forster, who had sailed with James Cook, settled the direction of his life.
Between 1799 and 1804 Humboldt travelled through the Spanish colonies of the Americas with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland, covering thousands of miles of country European science had barely touched. He identified the source of the Orinoco, and in 1802 he climbed the highest mountain in Ecuador to a height of 19,286 feet, at the time a record altitude for a European. What made the journey matter was not its length but its method: he measured constantly, recording temperature, air pressure, magnetic intensity and the altitudes at which one community of plants gave way to the next. Out of those measurements grew a quantitative botanical geography and with it the science of biogeography, together with his conviction that the Earth can be understood only through long series of observations taken in many places at once. The account of the expedition ran to several volumes and occupied him for twenty one years.
Humboldt lived afterwards in Paris and later again in Berlin, gathering the observations of a lifetime into a single book. He took the ancient Greek word cosmos for the title of Kosmos, a treatise in several volumes that drew the sciences and human culture into one description of the physical world and made the idea of nature as an interacting whole available to ordinary readers. Twice, in 1800 and again in 1831, he described how settlement and cultivation were altering local climates. He died in Berlin on 6 May 1859, in his ninetieth year. With Carl Ritter he is counted a founder of modern geography, and the ecological thinking he set in motion earned him the name of the father of environmentalism.