Who is this Humboldt and why does his name adorn so many land features, towns, flora and fauna? In North America alone four counties, thirteen towns, mountains, bays, lakes and a river are named after him. The state of Nevada was almost called Humboldt when the Constitutional Convention debated its name in the 1860s. Almost 300 plants and more than 100 animals are named after him -- including the Californian Humboldt lily, the South American Humboldt penguin, and the fierce predatory six-foot Humboldt squid which can be found in the Humboldt Current. Several minerals carry his name -- from Humboldtit to Humboldtin -- and on the moon there is an area called ‘Mare Humboldtianum’. More places are named after Humboldt than anyone else.
Andrea Wulf’s book, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, is a readable biography of this person who was during the first half of the 19th Century, the most famous man in the world after Napoleon. Born in 1769 into a wealthy Prussian aristocratic family, Humboldt discarded a life of privilege to discover for himself how the world worked. “As a young man he set out on a five-year exploration to Latin America, risking his life many times and returning with a new sense of the world. It was a journey that shaped his life and thinking, and that made him legendary across the globe. He lived in cities such as Paris and Berlin, but was equally at home on the most remote branches of the Orinoco River or in the Kazakh Steppe at Russia’s Mongolian border. During much of his long life, he was the nexus of the scientific world, writing some 50,000 letter and receiving at least double that number. Knowledge, Humboldt believed, had to be shared, exchanged and made available to everybody.“
Wulf notes that he was “not content in his study or among books.” He was an explorer who threw himself into physical exertion, pushing his body to its limits. “He ventured deep into the mysterious world of the rainforest in Venezuela and crawled along narrow rock ledges at a precarious height in the Andes to see the flames inside an active volcano. Even as a sixty-year-old, he traveled more than 10,000 miles to the remotest corners of Russia, outpacing his younger companions.”
