Alexander von Humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), German naturalist and explorer, best known for his many valuable contributions to the study of geophysics, meteorology, and oceanography.

Humboldt was born in Berlin on September 14, 1769; he was educated privately, and at various universities and the mining academy at Freiberg. In 1792 he was appointed by the mining department of the Prussian government to supervise the mining activities in the Fichtelgebirge range in the margravates of Ansbach and Bayreuth. In 1797 he resigned, intending to become an explorer, but because of the political upheavals caused by the Napoleonic Wars he could only fulfil his ambition by gaining permission from the Spanish government to visit the Spanish colonies in Central and South America. In 1799 he sailed from Marseille with the French botanist Aimé Bonplant. They stopped briefly at the Canary Islands, and finally landed at Cumaná, Venezuela. They explored the entire length of the Orinoco River, and most of the Amazon, demonstrating that these two vast river systems were connected by the River Casaquiare. Humboldt wrote of his impressions in numerous letters to his brother, Wilhelm, many of which never reached their destination because of the continental blockade by warships of the British Royal Navy. One episode that intrigued the European scientists, however, was Humboldt’s description of how the local natives drove wild horses into the Orinoco, so that they could be subdued by powerful electric shocks from an electric fish, making them easy to tame. Humboldt’s study of “animal electricity” contributed to a better understanding of the nature of electricity.

After a short stay in Cuba, Humboldt and Bonplant explored the basin of the River Magdalena in Colombia, and the Andes of Ecuador. Humboldt broke the world mountain-climbing record when he ascended the volcano Chimborazo to an altitude of more than 5,800 m (19,000 ft). He was the first to ascribe mountain sickness to a lack of oxygen at high altitudes. He studied the ocean current off the west coast of South America (now known as the Peru Current, but originally named the Humboldt Current), relative temperature according to altitude, and magnetic intensity in relation to the equator, as well as minerals and plant and animal life. Humboldt and Bonplant spent the final period of their five-year exploration of Latin America in Mexico; they returned to Europe in 1804. Humboldt made one more journey of exploration, in 1829, when he travelled through the Ural and Altai mountains of Russia, as the guest of the tsar. Although his visit to Central Asia was restricted, it was still important, as this region was then largely unknown in the West.

From 1804 to 1827 Humboldt lived in Paris, writing up his South America voyage of exploration in 30 volumes, covering such aspects as climate, physical geography, and biogeography; Humboldt was a pioneer in relating local geography with flora and fauna. In 1827, his private fortune almost depleted, Humboldt returned to Berlin, where he gained a position at court. In the 1830s, through the agency of the Royal Society, he induced the British government to fund a worldwide network of magnetic observatories in order to determine whether magnetic storms in the Earth’s atmosphere were of terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin. Eventually, the British geophysicist Sir Edward Sabine correlated magnetic storms with increased sunspot activity. During the final years of his long life, Humboldt wrote a five-volume popular work on science, Kosmos (1845-1862; The Cosmos), in which he set forth not only his own vast scientific knowledge, but also most of the accumulated scientific knowledge of geography and geology of the time. Kosmos has been called the first textbook of geophysics. Humboldt died in Berlin on May 6, 1859.