The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  As Humboldt helped friends and fellow scientists to advance their careers and travels, his own chances of being allowed to enter India had dwindled to nothing. He fed his wanderlust with trips through Europe – Switzerland, France, Italy and Austria – but it wasn’t the same. He was unhappy. It was also becoming increasingly difficult to justify his decision to live in Paris to the Prussian king. Since Humboldt’s return from Latin America two decades earlier, Friedrich Wilhelm III had repeatedly pressed him to return to Berlin. For twenty years the king had paid him an annual stipend with no strings attached. Humboldt had always argued that he needed Paris’s scientific environment to write his books but the climate in the city and France had changed.

  After Napoleon’s removal and imprisonment on the remote island of St Helena in 1815, the Bourbon monarchy had been reinstated with the crowning of Louis XVIII2 – the brother of Louis XVI who had been guillotined during the French Revolution. Though absolutism had not returned to France, the country that had held the torch of liberty and equality had become a constitutional monarchy. Only one per cent of the French population was eligible to elect the lower house of parliament. Though Louis XVIII respected some liberal views, he had arrived in France from exile with a train of ultra-royalist émigrés who wanted to return to the old ways of the pre-revolutionary Ancien Régime. Humboldt had watched them coming back and had seen how they burned with hate and a desire for revenge. ‘Their tendency to absolute monarchy is irresistible,’ Charles Lyell had written to his father from Paris.

  Then in 1820 the king’s nephew, the Duc de Berry – third in line to the throne – was murdered by a Bonapartist. After that there was no holding back the royalist tide any more. Censorship became harsher, people could be held without trial and the wealthiest people received a double vote. In 1823 the ultra-royalists gained the majority in the lower house of parliament. Humboldt was deeply upset, telling one American visitor that all it took was one look at the Journal des Débâts – a newspaper founded in 1789, during the French Revolution – to see how the freedom of the press had become curtailed. Humboldt was also beginning to feel uncomfortable at the way that religion, with all its constraints on scientific thinking, was reasserting its grip on French society. With the return of the ultra-royalists, the power of the Catholic Church rose. By the mid-1820s new church spires were rising across the Paris skyscape.

  Paris was ‘less disposed than ever’ to be a centre for the sciences, Humboldt wrote to a friend in Geneva, as the funds for laboratories, research and teaching were slashed. The spirit of enquiry was stifled as scientists found themselves having to curry favours from the new king. The savants had become ‘pliant tools’ in the hands of politicians and princes, Humboldt told Charles Lyell in 1823, and even the great George Cuvier had sacrificed his genius as a naturalist for a new quest for ‘ribbons, crosses, titles and Court favours’. There was so much political wrangling in Paris that governmental positions seemed to change as quickly as in a game of musical chairs. Every man he met now, Humboldt said, was either a minister or an ex-minister. ‘They are scattered thick as the leaves in autumn,’ he told Lyell, ‘and before one set have time to rot away, they are covered by another and another.’

  French scientists feared that Paris was going to lose its status as a centre for innovative scientific thinking. At the Académie des Sciences, Humboldt said, the savants did little and what little they did often ended in quarrels. Even worse, the scholars had formed a secret committee to sanitize the library there – removing books that propounded liberal ideas like those written by Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. When the childless Louis XVIII died in September 1824 his brother Charles X, the leader of the ultra-royalists, became king. All those who believed in liberty and in the values of the revolution knew that the intellectual climate could only become more repressive.

  Humboldt himself had changed too. Now in his mid-fifties, his brown hair had turned silver-grey and his right arm was almost paralysed by rheumatism – the long-term effect, he explained to friends, of sleeping on wet ground in the rainforest at the Orinoco. His clothes were old-fashioned, tailored in the style of the years just after the French Revolution: fitted striped breeches, a yellow waistcoat, a blue tailcoat, a white cravat, tall boots and a shabby black hat. No one in Paris, a friend remarked, dressed like that any more. Humboldt’s reasons were as political as they were parsimonious. With his inheritance long gone, he lived in a small plain apartment overlooking the Seine, consisting only of a sparsely furnished bedroom and a study. Humboldt had neither the money nor the taste for luxuries, elegant clothes or opulent furniture.

  Then, in autumn 1826, after more than two decades, Friedrich Wilhelm III finally ran out of patience. He wrote to Humboldt that ‘you must already have completed the publication of the works, which you believed could only be accomplished satisfactorily in Paris.’ The king could no longer extend permission for him to stay in France – a country that, in any event, ‘ought to be an object of hatred to every true Prussian’. As Humboldt read that the king was now awaiting his ‘speedy return’, there could be no doubt that this was an order.

  Humboldt desperately needed the money from his annual stipend because the cost of his publications had left him, he admitted, ‘poor as a church mouse’. He had to live on what he earned but he was useless when it came to his finances. ‘The only thing in heaven or earth that M. Humboldt does not understand,’ his English translator had remarked, ‘is business.’

  Paris had been his home for more than twenty years and his closest friends lived there. It was a painful decision but in the end Humboldt agreed to move to Berlin – but only under the condition that he was allowed to travel to Paris regularly for several months at a time to continue his research. It was not easy, he wrote to the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß in February 1827, to give up his freedom and scientific life. Having only recently accused George Cuvier of betraying the revolutionary spirit, Humboldt now became a courtier himself, entering a world in which he would have to negotiate a fine balance between his liberal political beliefs and his royal duties. It would be almost impossible, he feared, to find ‘the middle ground between the oscillating opinions’.

  On 14 April 1827 Humboldt left Paris for Berlin but not without one of his usual detours. He travelled via London, in what may have been a last desperate effort to convince the East India Company to grant him permission to explore India. Nine years had passed since his last visit in 1818, when he had stayed with his brother Wilhelm. Since then Wilhelm had been recalled from his diplomatic posting in Britain and now lived in Berlin,3 but Humboldt quickly reconnected with his old British acquaintances. He tried to make the most of his three-week visit.

  Humboldt was passed on from one person to another – politicians, scientists and a ‘force of noblemen’. At the Royal Society, Humboldt met his old friends John Herschel and Charles Babbage, and attended a meeting during which one of the fellows presented ten maps that were part of a new atlas of India which had been commissioned by the East India Company – a painful reminder of what Humboldt was missing. He had dinner with Mary Somerville,4 one of the few female scientists in Europe, and visited the botanist Robert Brown at the botanic garden at Kew just to the west of London. Brown had explored Australia as one of Joseph Banks’s plant collectors, and Humboldt was keen to learn about Antipodean flora.

  Humboldt was also invited to an elegant party at the Royal Academy and dined with his old acquaintance George Canning, who just two weeks previously had become the British Prime Minister. At Canning’s dinner, Humboldt was delighted to meet his old friend from Washington, DC, Albert Gallatin, who was now the American Minister in London. Only the attention of the British aristocracy annoyed Humboldt. Paris was a sleepy town compared to ‘my torments here’, he wrote to a friend, because everybody seemed to want a piece of him. In London ‘every sentence begins’, he complained, with ‘you will not leave without having seen my country-house: it is only 40
miles from London.’

  Humboldt’s most exciting day, however, was spent not with scientists or politicians but with a young engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who had invited Humboldt to observe the construction of the first tunnel under the Thames. The idea of building a tunnel under a river was as daring as it was dangerous, and no one had ever succeeded in doing such a thing.

  The conditions at the Thames could not have been worse because the riverbed and the ground beneath consisted of sand and soft clay. Brunel’s father, Marc, had invented an ingenious method of building the tunnel: a cast-iron shield in the height and width of the tunnel tube. Inspired by a shipworm that bored through the toughest timber planks by protecting its head with a shell, Marc Brunel had designed a huge contraption that allowed the excavation of the tunnel while at the same time propping up the ceiling and keeping the soft clay in place. As the workers moved the metal shield in front of them under the riverbed, they built up the tunnel’s brick shell behind them. Inch by inch, and foot by foot, the length of the tunnel slowly grew. Work had begun two years previously and by the time Humboldt came to London Brunel’s men had reached about the halfway point of the 1,200-foot-long tunnel.

  The work was treacherous and Marc Brunel’s diary was filled with thoughts of worry and concern: ‘anxiety increasing daily’, ‘things are getting worse every day’, or ‘every morning I say, Another day of danger over.’ His son Isambard, who had been made ‘resident engineer’ in January 1827 at the age of twenty, brought his boundless energy and confidence to the project. But the work was challenging. In early April, shortly before Humboldt arrived, more and more water seeped into the tunnel and Isambard had forty men pumping to keep the influx of water under control. There was only ‘clayey silt above their heads’, Marc Brunel worried, fearing that the tunnel could collapse at any moment. Isambard wanted to inspect the construction from the outside and asked Humboldt to join him. It would be dangerous but Humboldt didn’t care – this was too exciting to miss. He also hoped to measure the air pressure at the bottom of the river to compare it to his observations in the Andes.

  The diving bell in which Humboldt descended with Brunel to the bottom of the Thames to see the construction of the tunnel (Illustration Credit 14.2)

  On 26 April a huge metal diving bell that weighed almost two tons was lowered by a crane from a ship. Boats filled with curious onlookers crowded the surface of the river as the diving bell with Brunel and Humboldt inside was dropped to a depth of thirty-six feet. Air was supplied through a leather hose that was inserted at the top of the bell, and two thick glass windows offered views into the murky river water. As they descended, Humboldt found the pressure in his ears almost unbearable but he got used to it after a few minutes. They wore thick coats and looked like ‘Eskimos’, Humboldt wrote to François Arago in Paris. Down on the riverbed with the tunnel below them and only water above, it was eerily dark except for their lanterns’ weak glimmer. They spent forty minutes underwater but as they ascended the changing water pressure ruptured blood vessels in Humboldt’s nose and throat. For the next twenty-four hours he spat and sneezed blood, just as he had when climbing Chimborazo. Brunel didn’t bleed, Humboldt noted, and joked that it was seemingly ‘a privilege of Prussians’.

  Two days later parts of the tunnel fell in, and then in mid-May the riverbed above the tunnel collapsed completely, creating a huge hole through which water came gushing in. Amazingly no lives were lost and after repairs were made, the work continued. By then Humboldt had left London and had arrived in Berlin.

  He was now the most famous scientist in Europe and admired by colleagues, poets and thinkers alike. One man, though, had yet to read his work. That man was eighteen-year-old Charles Darwin who, at the very moment that Humboldt was being fêted in London, had given up his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh. Robert Darwin, Charles’s father, was furious. ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching,’ he wrote to his son, ‘and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’

  1 Or in the case of isobars, the lines represent air pressure.

  2 During Napoleon’s reign Louis XVIII had lived in exile in Prussia, Russia and Britain.

  3 Wilhelm had left London in 1818. He had then briefly held a ministerial position in Berlin but had grown frustrated with Prussia’s reactionary politics. At the end of 1819, Wilhelm had retired from his political career and moved to the family estate at Tegel, which he had inherited.

  4 Forty-six-year-old Mary Somerville was a celebrated mathematician and polymath. In 1827 she was working on the translation of Laplace’s book The Mechanism of the Heavens into English. Her writing was so clear that the book became a bestseller in Britain. She was the only woman, Laplace said, ‘who could understand and correct his works’. Others called her the ‘queen of science’. She would later publish a book called Physical Geography which bore many similarities to Humboldt’s approach to science and the natural world.

  PART IV

  Influence: Spreading Ideas

  15

  Return to Berlin

  ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT arrived in Berlin on 12 May 1827. He was fifty-seven and disliked the city as much as he had two decades previously. He knew that his life would never be the same. From now on much of his day would belong to the ‘tedious, restless life at Court’. Friedrich Wilhelm III had 250 chamberlains for most of whom the title was only honorary. Humboldt, though, was expected to join the inner court circle but with no political role. He was expected to be the king’s intellectual entertainer and after-dinner reader. Humboldt survived behind a façade of smiles and chat. The man who had written thirty years previously that ‘court life robs even the most intellectual of their genius and freedom’, now found himself bound to royal routine. This was the beginning of what Humboldt called his ‘swinging of a pendulum’ – a life in which he chased the king’s movements from one castle to the next summer residence and back to Berlin, always on the road and always loaded with manuscripts and boxes full of books and notes. The only time he had for himself and to write his books was between midnight and three o’clock in the morning.

  Humboldt returned to a country that had become a police state in which censorship was part of daily life. Public meetings – even scientific gatherings – were regarded with great suspicion and student bodies had been forcibly dissolved. Prussia had no constitution and no national parliament, only some provincial assemblies that had advisory functions but couldn’t make laws or impose taxes. Every decision was under close royal supervision. The whole city displayed a decidedly military character. Sentries were placed at almost all public buildings and visitors remarked on the perpetual drumming and parading of soldiers. It seemed as if there were more military men than civilians in town. One tourist noted the constant marching and ‘endless display of uniforms of all sorts, in all public places’.

  With no political muscle at court, Humboldt was determined to infuse Berlin at least with a spirit of intellectual curiosity. It was badly needed. Already as a young man, when he had worked as a mining inspector, Humboldt had founded and privately financed a school for miners. Like his brother Wilhelm, who had almost single-handedly established a new Prussian education system two decades previously, Alexander believed that education was the foundation of a free and happy society. For many this was a dangerous thought. In Britain, for example, pamphlets were published, warning that knowledge exalted the poor ‘above their humble and laborious duties’.

  Stadtschloss in Berlin (Illustration Credit 15.1)

  Humboldt believed in the power of learning, and books such as his Views of Nature were written for a general audience rather than for scientists in their ivory towers. As soon as he arrived in Berlin, Humboldt tried to establish a school of chemistry and mathematics at the university. He corresponded with colleagues about the possibilities of laboratories and the advantages of a polytechnic. He also convinced the king that Berlin needed a new observatory equipped with the latest instruments. Thou
gh some believed that Humboldt had become a ‘sycophantic courtier’, it was in fact his court position that enabled him to support scientists, explorers and artists. One has to get the king ‘during an idle moment’, Humboldt explained to a friend, and not let go of him. Within weeks of his arrival he was busy implementing his ideas. He had, as one colleague said, the ‘enviable talent for constituting himself the centre of intellectual and scientific converse’.

  For decades Humboldt had criticized governments, openly voicing his dissent and opinions, but by the time he moved to Berlin, he had grown disillusioned with politics. As a young man he had been electrified by the French Revolution, but in recent years he had watched how the ultra-royalists of the Ancien Régime were turning back the clock in France. Elsewhere in Europe the mood was also reactionary. Wherever Humboldt looked, he saw how hope of change had been quashed.

  In England, on his recent visit, he had met his old acquaintance George Canning, the new British Prime Minister. Humboldt had seen how Canning had struggled to form a government because his own Tory Party was split over social and economic reforms. At the end of May 1827, ten days after Humboldt arrived in Berlin, Canning had found himself turning to the opposition party, the Whigs, for support. From what Humboldt could gather from the Berlin newspapers, the situation in Britain became worse at every turn. Within a week the House of Lords had shelved an amendment to the divisive Corn Laws which had been a key issue in the reform debates. The Corn Laws were so controversial because they enabled the government to impose high import duties on foreign grains. Cheap corn from the United States, for example, was so heavily taxed that it became prohibitively expensive, allowing wealthy British landowners effectively to eliminate any competition while at the same time keeping a monopoly to control prices. Those who suffered the most were the poor because the price of bread remained exorbitant. The rich stayed rich and the poor remained poor. ‘We are on the brink of a great struggle between property and population,’ Canning predicted.