Before crossing the Americas, Humboldt was a mine inspector who paid for a miners' school
Long before he climbed higher than any Westerner had gone, Alexander von Humboldt inspected Prussian mines. In his first year, gold ore output beat the previous eight years combined, and he opened a free school for miners out of his own pocket. The man later called the father of ecology began with grimy, practical work underground.
Humboldt was born in Berlin on 14 September 1769 into a Pomeranian noble family. His father died when he was nine, leaving him and his older brother Wilhelm with a cool, ambitious mother who hired Enlightenment tutors and expected both boys to become civil servants. Alexander, nicknamed the little apothecary for his habit of labelling plants, shells and insects, dutifully studied finance before drifting toward science at Göttingen. His aversion to his mother was no secret; neither son attended her funeral in 1796, yet her inheritance later supplied most of the money for his travels.
Meeting Georg Forster, who had sailed with Captain Cook, set his course. The two journeyed to England, where Joseph Banks showed him a vast herbarium from the South Seas and began a friendship that lasted until 1820. Humboldt then trained himself deliberately for exploration, studying geology at the Freiberg School of Mines, anatomy at Jena and the handling of scientific instruments.
At Jena he befriended Goethe, who said he had never met anyone so versatile. Together they ran galvanic experiments; one frog leg stayed still against various metals until Humboldt breathed on it, when it leapt off the table. He loved that result because it felt like breathing life into the limb. He even tested muscle stimulation on his own body and wrote his only piece of fiction, an allegory about the life force, for Schiller's journal.
Freed by his inheritance, he spent 1799 to 1804 crossing the Americas with the botanist Aimé Bonpland. They located the source of the Orinoco, and in 1802 he climbed Ecuador's highest mountain to 19,286 feet, a record for a Westerner then. His account filled volumes published over 21 years. In Kosmos he revived an ancient Greek word to describe nature as one interacting whole, and in 1800 and 1831 he described local climate effects caused by human development. With Carl Ritter, he is counted a founder of modern geography.
Source: Alexander von Humboldt
