Great Britain and Denmark both refused to let Humboldt travel to their tropical colonies, and more disappointingly, France would not give him its support. Support for such a venture proved hard to find, however, due to the political instability unleashed by the French Revolution.
But when his mother died in 1796, the obligation to remain a civil servant vanished, and he sought to make his dream of undertaking a great scientific expedition far from his homeland come true.
(As Wulf makes clear, Humboldt never lost his social conscience or love of travel.) Remarkably, he also found time to dabble in scientific experimentation unrelated to his work and became a close friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (the titular character of Faust, Wulf suggests, resembles Humboldt in his unquenchable thirst for knowledge). He also showed his social conscience in his sympathy for miners and travelled prodigiously throughout Prussia and other German states. Given his great intelligence and capacities for learning and hard work, he excelled. Upon reaching adulthood, Alexander put his love of geology to work as a mining engineer.
Both sons showed above-average intelligence, but their mother was determined they should find stable civil-service employment. His father died young, and Alexander and his brother, Wilhelm, were raised by a demanding, emotionally-distant mother. More subtly (but still apparent in the subtitle), Wulf also notes the tremendous influence Humboldt’s travels in South America had on his thinking and details his friendship with Simón Bolívar.Īlexander von Humboldt was born in Berlin in 1769 and spent a comfortable childhood in rural Prussia, where he loved to ramble about the family home, Schloss Tegel. In the Anglophonic world, at least, Humboldt has been largely forgotten despite being one of the most famous men in the world during the first half of the nineteenth century. With The Invention of Nature (subtitled The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science) Andrea Wulf makes a persuasive case that Alexander von Humboldt’s contributions are foundational to modern scientific and environmentalist thought and should be more widely recognized.
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