The Invention of Nature, The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt, The Lost Hero of Science

I have a new hero, Alexander Von Humboldt, about whom the author, Andrea Wulf, writes that during the first half of the 19^th century, was the second most famous man in the world behind Napoleon. This book, The Invention of Nature, The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt, The Lost Hero of Science, is Wulf’s attempt to bring this remarkable man back to current day consciousness. She writes that in 1800, he was the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change. He was an intrepid traveler, having been the first scientist to record much of the northern parts of South America, making a journey, cataloguing everything, and writing about it in a way that inspired Charles Darwin to make his journeys. His name is attached to so many places including the Humboldt Current that runs along Chile and Peru, the Humboldt Glacier in Greenland, mountain ranges on three continents, parks in Chicago and Buffalo, and of course, the Humboldt Redwoods Park in California. Apparently the state of Nevada was nearly named Humboldt – the list goes on and on.

Humboldt, who was born to a wealthy Prussian family in 1769, was trained as a mining inspector, a trade he pursued only because his domineering mother insisted that he do so. It was his mother who kept his wanderlust in check, but when she died, he very quickly began his preparations for using his inheritance to see and record the world as a good scientist would do. Meanwhile, he worked to improve the working conditions of miners, invented a breathing mask, invented a lamp that would work in deep oxygen-poor mines, and founded a mining school. In his writing and thinking, he came to believe that “imagination was as necessary as rational thought in order to understand the natural world.”

In June 1799, Humboldt sailed from Spain to what is current day Venezuela, and it was five years before he returned to Europe. He traveled the length of the Orinoco River and climbed volcanoes in modern day Peru and Ecuador. The author’s description of his dangerous climb of the Chimborazo Volcano in Ecuador was incredible. He repeatedly found evidence of how the presence of humans unsettled the balance of nature. Wulf wrote, “Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads.’”

On his way back to Europe, he stopped in Washington, D.C., in order to have lengthy conversations with Thomas Jefferson who was then President of the United States and had just completed the Louisiana Purchase. Humboldt and Jefferson had much in common except for Humboldt’s intense disagreement with the institution of slavery. Back in Paris, Humboldt spent many hours with Simon Bolivar who later led revolutions against Spain in South America. As he continued writing and publishing his ideas, Wulf explained that instead of looking only at an organism, “Humboldt now presented relationships between plants, climate and geography.” In addition to Darwin, his works were critical to Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and others. He had lengthy conversations and relationships with all of the European leaders of his time. It was Humboldt who invented the term Cosmos from a Greek word which meant beauty and order. “Humboldt now used it, as he said, as a catchphrase to express and encapsulate ‘both heaven and earth.’” Cosmos was the title of his final and most famous works which ended up being written in five volumes.

The body of work that Humboldt left behind is staggering. As a history student who has read countless fiction and nonfiction works, I find it incredible that I knew so little about this man who has been so influential in terms of our understanding of the physical world in which we live. Thanks to my sister Pam for forwarding this book to me.