The Invention of Nature

1

Beginnings

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT was born, on 14 September 1769, into a wealthy aristocratic Prussian family who spent their winters in Berlin and their summers at the family estate of Tegel, a small castle about ten miles north-west of the city. His father, Alexander Georg von Humboldt, was an officer in the army, a chamberlain at the Prussian court and a confidant of the future king Friedrich Wilhelm II. Alexander’s mother, Marie Elisabeth, was the daughter of a rich manufacturer who had brought money and land into the family. The Humboldt name was held in high regard in Berlin and the future king was even Alexander’s godfather. But despite their privileged upbringing, Alexander and his older brother, Wilhelm, had an unhappy childhood. Their beloved father died suddenly when Alexander was nine and their mother never showed her sons much affection. Where their father had been charming and friendly, their mother was formal, cold and emotionally distant. Instead of maternal warmth, she provided the best education then available in Prussia, arranging for the two boys to be privately tutored by a string of Enlightenment thinkers who instilled in them a love of truth, liberty and knowledge.

These were strange relationships in which the boys sometimes searched for a father figure. One tutor in particular, Gottlob Johann Christian Kunth, who oversaw their education for many years, taught them with a peculiar combination of expressing displeasure and disappointment while at the same time encouraging a sense of dependency. Hovering behind them and watching over their shoulders as they calculated, translated Latin texts or learned French vocabulary, Kunth constantly corrected the brothers. He was never quite satisfied with their progress. Whenever they made a mistake, Kunth reacted as if they had done so to hurt or offend him. For the boys, this behaviour was more painful than if he had spanked them with a cane. Always desperate to please Kunth, as Wilhelm later recounted, they had felt a ‘perpetual anxiety’ to make him happy.

It was particularly difficult for Alexander who was taught the same lessons as his precocious brother, despite being two years younger. The result was that he believed himself to be less talented. When Wilhelm excelled in Latin and Greek, Alexander felt incompetent and slow. He struggled so much, Alexander later told a friend, that his tutors ‘were doubtful whether even ordinary powers of intelligence would ever be developed in him’.

Schloss Tegel and the surrounding estate (Illustration Credit 1.1)

Wilhelm lost himself in Greek mythology and histories of ancient Rome, but Alexander felt restless with books. Instead he escaped the classroom whenever he could to ramble through the countryside, collecting and sketching plants, animals and rocks. When he returned with his pockets full of insects and plants his family nicknamed him ‘the little apothecary’, but they didn’t take his interests seriously. According to family lore, one day the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, asked the boy if he planned to conquer the world like his namesake, Alexander the Great. Young Humboldt’s answer was: ‘Yes, Sir, but with my head.’

Much of his early life, Humboldt later told a close friend, was spent among people who loved him but who didn’t understand him. His teachers were demanding and his mother lived withdrawn from society and her sons. Marie Elisabeth von Humboldt’s greatest concern was, Kunth said, to foster the ‘intellectual and moral perfection’ of Wilhelm and Alexander – their emotional wellbeing was seemingly of no interest. ‘I was forced into a thousand constraints,’ Humboldt said, and into loneliness, hiding behind a wall of pretence because he never felt that he could be himself with his stern mother watching his every step. Expressions of excitement or of joy were unacceptable behaviour in the Humboldt household.

Alexander and Wilhelm were very different. Where Alexander was adventurous and enjoyed being outside, Wilhelm was serious and studious. Alexander was often torn between emotions, while Wilhelm’s overriding character trait was self-control. Both brothers withdrew into their own worlds – Wilhelm into his books and Alexander on lonely walks through Tegel’s forests, great woods that had been planted with imported North American trees. As he wandered among colourful sugar maples and stately white oaks, Alexander experienced nature as calming and soothing. But it was also among these trees from another world that he began to dream of distant countries.

Humboldt grew up a good-looking young man. He stood five feet eight, but carried himself straight and proud, so that he seemed taller. He was slight and agile – quick on his feet and nimble. His hands were small and delicate, almost like those of a woman, as one friend commented. His eyes were inquisitive and always alert. His looks very much conformed to the ideals of the age: tousled hair, full expressive lips and a dimpled chin. But he was often ill, suffering from fevers and neurasthenia which Wilhelm believed was a ‘kind of hypochondria’, for ‘the poor boy is unhappy’.

To hide his vulnerability, Alexander built a protective shield of wit and ambition. As a boy, he had been feared for his sharp comments, with one family friend calling him ‘un petit esprit malin’, a reputation he would live up to for the rest of his life. Even Alexander’s closest friends admitted that he had a malicious streak. But Wilhelm said that his brother was never really spiteful – maybe a little vain and driven by a deep urge to shine and excel. From his youth Alexander seemed to have been torn between this vanity and his loneliness, between a craving for praise and his yearning for independence. Insecure, yet believing in his intellectual prowess, he see-sawed between his need for approval and his sense of superiority.

Born the same year as Napoleon Bonaparte, Humboldt was raised in an increasingly global and accessible world. Fittingly, the months before his birth had seen the first international scientific collaboration when astronomers from dozens of nations had coordinated and shared their observations of the transit of Venus. The problem of calculating longitude had finally been solved, and the empty areas of eighteenth-century maps were filling up fast. The world was changing. Just before Humboldt turned seven, American revolutionaries declared their independence, and shortly before his twentieth birthday the French followed suit with their own revolution in 1789.

Germany was still under the umbrella of the Holy Roman Empire, which, as the French thinker Voltaire once said, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Not yet a nation, it was made up of many states – some tiny principalities, others ruled by large and powerful dynasties such as the Hohenzollern in Prussia and the Habsburgs in Austria, which continued to fight for dominance and territories. In the mid-eighteenth century, during the reign of Frederick the Great, Prussia had emerged as the greatest rival to Austria.

By the time of Humboldt’s birth, Prussia was known for its huge standing army and administrative efficiency. Frederick the Great had ruled as an absolute monarch but nevertheless introduced some reforms including a system of primary schooling and modest agrarian reform. First steps had also been taken towards religious tolerance in Prussia. Famed for his military prowess, Frederick the Great had been known for his love of music, philosophy and learning too. And though French and English contemporaries often dismissed the Germans as coarse and backward, there were more universities and libraries in the German states than anywhere else in Europe. As publishing and periodicals boomed, literacy rates soared.

Meanwhile Britain was marching ahead economically. Agricultural innovations such as crop rotation and new irrigation systems brought greater yields. The British were gripped by ‘canal fever’, lacing their island with a modern transport system. The Industrial Revolution had brought power looms and other machines, and manufacturing centres were mushrooming into cities. Husbandmen in Britain were turning from subsistence farming to feeding those living and working in the new urban centres.

Man began to control nature with new technologies such as James Watt’s steam engines and also with new medical advances as the first people were inoculated against smallpox in Europe and North America. When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod in the mid-eighteenth century, humankind began to tame what had been regarded as expressions of God’s fury. With such power, man lost his fear of nature.

For the previous two centuries western society had been dominated by the idea that nature functioned like a complex apparatus – a ‘great and complicated Machine of the Universe’, as one scientist had said. After all, if man could make intricate clocks and automata, what great things could God create? According to the French philosopher René Descartes and his followers, God had given this mechanical world its initial push, while Isaac Newton regarded the universe more like a divine clockwork, with God as the maker continuing to intervene.

Inventions such as telescopes and microscopes revealed new worlds and with them a belief that the laws of nature could be discovered. In Germany the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz had in the late seventeenth century propounded ideas of a universal science based on mathematics. Meanwhile in Cambridge, Newton had been uncovering the mechanics of the universe by applying mathematics to nature. As a result, the world began to be seen as reassuringly predictable, as long as humankind could comprehend those natural laws.

Maths, objective observation and controlled experiments paved this path of reason across the western world. Scientists became citizens of their self-proclaimed ‘republic of letters’, an intellectual community that transcended national boundaries, religion and language. As their letters zigzagged across Europe and the Atlantic, scientific discoveries and new ideas spread. This ‘republic of letters’ was a country without borders, ruled by reason and not by monarchs. It was in this new Age of Enlightenment that Alexander von Humboldt was raised, with western societies seemingly striding forward along a trajectory of confidence and improvement. With progress as the century’s watchword, every generation envied the next. No one worried that nature itself might be destroyed.

As young men, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt joined Berlin’s intellectual circles, where they discussed the importance of education, of tolerance and of independent reasoning. As the brothers dashed from reading groups to philosophical salons in Berlin, learning, previously such a solitary occupation in Tegel, now became social. During the summers their mother often stayed behind in Tegel, leaving the two young brothers with their tutors at the family’s house in Berlin. But this freedom was not to last: their mother made it clear that she expected them to become civil servants. Financially dependent on her, they had to accede to her wishes.

Marie Elisabeth von Humboldt sent eighteen-year-old Alexander to university in Frankfurt an der Oder. Some seventy miles west of Berlin, this provincial institution had only 200 students, and she had probably chosen it for its closeness to Tegel rather than its academic merit. After Alexander had completed a semester of government administration studies and political economy there, it was decided that he was ready to join Wilhelm in Göttingen, one of the best universities in the German states. Wilhelm studied law and Alexander focused on science, mathematics and languages. Though the brothers were in the same town, they spent little time together. ‘Our characters are too different,’ Wilhelm said. While Wilhelm studied hard, Alexander dreamed of the tropics and adventures. He longed to leave Germany. As a boy Alexander had read the journals of Captain James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville, both of whom had circumnavigated the globe, and imagined himself far away. When he saw the tropical palms at the botanical garden in Berlin, all he wanted to do was see them in their natural environments.

This youthful wanderlust became more serious when Humboldt joined an older friend, Georg Forster, on a four-month trip across Europe. Forster was a German naturalist who had accompanied Cook on his second voyage around the world. Humboldt and Forster had met in Göttingen. They often talked about the expedition, and Forster’s lively descriptions of the South Pacific islands made Humboldt’s longing to travel even stronger.

In the spring of 1790, Forster and Humboldt went to England, the Netherlands and France but the highlight of their journey was London, where everything made Humboldt think of distant countries. He saw the Thames choked with vessels bringing goods from all corners of the globe. Some 15,000 ships entered the port every year loaded with spices from the East Indies, sugar from the West Indies, tea from China, wine from France and timber from Russia. The whole river was a ‘black forest’ of masts. In between the large trading ships were hundreds of barges, wherries and smaller boats. Undoubtedly crowded and congested, it was also a magnificent portrait of Britain’s imperial might.

A view of London and the Thames (Illustration Credit 1.2)

In London, Humboldt was introduced to botanists, explorers, artists and thinkers. He met Captain William Bligh (of the infamous mutiny on the Bounty), and Joseph Banks, Cook’s botanist on his first voyage around the world, and by now the president of the Royal Society, the most important scientific forum in Britain. Humboldt admired the beguiling paintings and sketches that William Hodges, the artist who had joined Cook’s second voyage, had brought back. Wherever Humboldt turned, new worlds were conjured up. Even in the early mornings, the first things he saw when he opened his eyes were the framed engravings of the East India Company ships that decorated the bedroom walls in his lodgings. Humboldt often wept when he saw these painful reminders of his unfulfilled dreams. ‘There is a drive in me,’ he wrote, ‘that often makes me feel as if I’m losing my mind.’

When the sadness became unbearable, he went on long solitary walks. On one such excursion through the countryside in Hampstead just north of London, he saw a recruiting notice nailed to a tree, calling for young sailors. For a brief moment he thought he had found an answer to his wishes but then he remembered his strict mother. Humboldt felt an inexplicable pull towards the unknown, what the Germans call Fernweh – a longing for distant places – but he was ‘too good a son’, he conceded, to turn against her.

He was slowly going crazy, he believed, and began to write ‘mad letters’ to his friends back home. ‘My unhappy circumstances,’ Humboldt wrote to one friend on the eve of his departure from England, ‘force me to want what I can’t have, and to do what I don’t like.’ But he still didn’t dare to challenge his mother’s expectations of what an upbringing in the Prussian elite entailed.

Back home Humboldt’s misery became a frantic energy. He was impelled by a ‘perpetual drive’, he wrote, as if chased by ’10,000 pigs’. He darted back and forth, jumping from one subject to another. No longer did he feel insecure about his intellectual abilities or think himself lagging behind his older brother. He was proving to himself, his friends and family just how clever he was. Forster was convinced that Humboldt’s ‘brain has been sadly overworked’ – and he was not the only one. Even Wilhelm von Humboldt’s fiancée, Caroline von Dachröden, who had only met Alexander recently, was concerned. She liked Alexander, but she feared that he was going to ‘snap’. Many who knew him often remarked on this restless activity and how fast he spoke – at ‘race-horse speed’.

Then, in the late summer of 1790, Humboldt began to study finance and economics at the academy of trade in Hamburg. He hated it for it was all numbers and account books. In his spare time, Humboldt delved into scientific treatises and travel books, he learned Danish and Swedish – anything was better than his business studies. Whenever he could, he walked down to the River Elbe in Hamburg where he watched the large merchant vessels that brought tobacco, rice and indigo from the United States. The ‘sight of the ships in the harbour’, he told a friend, was what held him together – a symbol of his hopes and dreams. He couldn’t wait to be finally the ‘master of his own luck’.

By the time he finished his studies in Hamburg, Humboldt was twenty-one. Once again accommodating his mother’s wishes, he enrolled in June 1791 at the prestigious mining academy in Freiberg, a small town near Dresden. It was a compromise that would prepare him for a career in the Prussian Ministry of Mines – to appease his mother – but at least allowed him to indulge his interest in science and geology. The academy was the first of its kind, teaching the latest geological theories in the context of their practical application for mining. It was also home to a thriving scientific community, having attracted some of the best students and professors from across Europe.

Within eight months Humboldt had completed a study programme that took others three years. Every morning he rose before sunrise and drove to one of the mines around Freiberg. He spent the next five hours deep in the shafts, investigating the construction of the mines, the working methods and the rocks. It helped that he was so lithe and wiry, moving easily through the narrow tunnels and low caves as he drilled and chiselled to take samples back home. He worked so ferociously that he often didn’t notice the cold or damp. By noon he crawled out of the darkness, dusted himself clean and rushed back to the academy for seminars and lectures on minerals and geology. In the evenings, and often until deep into the night, Humboldt sat at his desk, hunched over his books by candlelight, reading and studying. During his free time, he investigated the influence of light (or its lack) on plants and collected thousands of botanical specimens. He measured, noted and classified. He was a child of the Enlightenment.

Only a few weeks after he had arrived in Freiberg, he had to ride to Erfurt, some 100 miles to the west, to attend his brother’s wedding to Caroline. But as so often, Humboldt combined social events or family celebrations with work. Instead of simply joining the festivities in Erfurt, he turned it into a 600-mile geological expedition through the region of Thuringia. Caroline was half amused and half concerned about her frenzied new brother-in-law. She enjoyed his energy but also sometimes made fun of him – as a sister might tease a younger brother. Alexander had his quirks and those should be respected, she told Wilhelm, but she was also worried about his state of mind and loneliness.

In Freiberg, Humboldt’s only real friend was a fellow student, the son of the family from whom he had rented a room. The two young men spent day and night together, studying and talking. ‘I have never loved someone so deeply,’ Humboldt admitted, but also berated himself for forming such an intense bond because he knew that he would have to leave Freiberg after his studies and then feel even more lonely.

The hard work at the academy, though, paid off when Humboldt finished his studies and was made a mining inspector at the astonishingly young age of twenty-two, overtaking many more senior men. Half embarrassed by his stratospheric ascent, he was also vain enough to show off to friends and family in long letters. Most importantly, the position allowed him to travel thousands of miles in order to evaluate soils, shafts and ore – from coal in Brandenburg and iron in Silesia to gold in the Fichtel Mountains and salt mines in Poland.

During these travels, Humboldt met many people but rarely opened his heart. He was content enough, he wrote to friends, but certainly not happy. Late at night, after a full day in the mines or rattling along bad roads in his carriage, he thought of the few friends he had made over the past years. He felt ‘damned, always lonely’. As he ate another meal on his own in a squalid tavern or inn somewhere along his route, he was often too tired to write or talk. Some nights, though, he was so lonely that the need to communicate conquered his fatigue. Then he picked up his pen and composed long letters that looped and jumped, from detailed treatises about his work and scientific observations to emotional outbursts and declarations of love and friendship.

He would give two years of his life for the memories of the time they had been together, he wrote to his friend in Freiberg, and confessed to have spent the ‘sweetest hours of his life’ with him. Written late at night, some of these letters were raw with emotion and shaped by a desperate loneliness. In page after page, Humboldt poured out his heart, and then excused his ‘foolish letters’. The next day, when work demanded his attention, all was forgotten and it would often be weeks or even months until he wrote again. Even to the few who knew him best, Humboldt often remained elusive.

Meanwhile his career soared and his interests widened. Humboldt now also became interested in the working conditions of the miners whom he saw crawling into the bowels of the earth every morning. To improve their safety, he invented a breathing mask, as well as a lamp that would work even in the deepest oxygen-poor shafts. Shocked by the miners’ lack of knowledge, Humboldt wrote textbooks for them and founded a mining school. When he realized that historical documents might prove useful for the exploitation of disused or inefficient mines because they sometimes mentioned rich veins of ores or recorded old findings, he spent weeks deciphering sixteenth-century manuscripts. He was working and travelling at such a manic pace that some of his colleagues thought he must have ‘8 legs and 4 arms’.

The intensity of it all made him ill, as he was still battling with recurring fevers and nervous disorders. The reasons, he thought, were probably a combination of being overworked and spending too much time in freezing conditions deep in the mines. But despite illness and his packed work schedule, Humboldt still managed to publish his first books, a specialized treatise on the basalts to be found along the River Rhine and another on the subterranean flora in Freiberg – strange mould and sponge-like plants that grew in intricate shapes on the damp beams in the mines. He focused on what he could measure and observe.

During the eighteenth century ‘natural philosophy’ – what we would call ‘natural sciences’ today – evolved from being a subject within philosophy along with metaphysics, logic and moral philosophy to becoming an independent discipline that required its own approach and methodology. In tandem new natural philosophy subjects developed and emerged into distinctly separate disciplines such as botany, zoology, geology and chemistry. And though Humboldt was working across different disciplines at the same time, he still kept them separate. This growing specialization provided a tunnel vision that focused in on ever greater detail, but ignored the global view that would later become Humboldt’s hallmark.

It was during this period that Humboldt became obsessed with so-called ‘animal electricity’, or Galvanism as it was known after Luigi Galvani, an Italian scientist. Galvani had managed to make animal muscles and nerves convulse when he attached different metals to them. Galvani suspected that animal nerves contained electricity. Fascinated by the idea, Humboldt began a long series of 4,000 experiments in which he cut, prodded, poked and electrocuted frogs, lizards and mice. Not content with experimenting on animals alone, he began to use his own body too, always taking his instruments on his work travels through Prussia. In the evenings, when his official work was done, he set up his electrical apparatus in the small bedrooms he rented. Metal rods, forceps, glass plates and vials filled with all kinds of chemicals were lined up on the table, as was paper and pen. With a scalpel he made incisions on his arms and torso. Then he carefully rubbed chemicals and acids into the open wounds or stuck metals, wires and electrodes on to his skin or under his tongue. Every twitch, every convulsion, burning sensation or pain was noted meticulously. Many of his wounds became infected and some days his skin was striped with blood-filled welts. His body looked as battered as a ‘street urchin’, he admitted, but he also proudly reported that despite the great pain, it all went ‘splendidly’.

One of the animal electricity experiments that Humboldt conducted with frog’s legs (Illustration Credit 1.3)

Through his experiments Humboldt was engaging with one of the most hotly debated ideas in the scientific world: the concept of organic and inorganic ‘matter’ and whether either contained any kind of ‘force’ or ‘active principle’. Newton had propounded the idea that matter was essentially inert but that other properties were added by God. Meanwhile, those scientists who had been busy classifying flora and fauna had been more concerned with bringing order to chaos than with ideas that plants or animals might be governed by a different set of laws than inanimate objects.

In the late eighteenth century, some scientists began to question this mechanical model of nature, noting its failure to explain the existence of living matter. And by the time Humboldt began to experiment with ‘animal electricity’, more and more scientists believed that matter was not lifeless but that there had to be a force that triggered this activity. All over Europe scientists began to discard Descartes’s ideas that animals were essentially machines. Physicians in France, as well as the Scottish surgeon John Hunter and in particular Humboldt’s former professor in Göttingen, the scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, all began to formulate new theories of life. When Humboldt was studying in Göttingen, Blumenbach had published a revised edition of his book Über den Bildungstrieb. In it Blumenbach presented a concept that explained that several forces existed within living organisms such as plants and animals. The most important was what he called the Bildungstrieb – the ‘formative drive’ – a force that shaped the formation of bodies. Every living organism, from humans to mould, had this formative drive, Blumenbach wrote, and it was essential for the creation of life.

For Humboldt nothing less was at stake in his experiments than the undoing of what he called the ‘Gordian knot of the processes of life’.