Alexander von Humboldt "The Founder of Modern Geography"

Charles Darwin described him as "the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived." He is widely respected as one of the founders of modern geography. 

Alexander von Humboldt's travels, experiments, and knowledge transformed western science in the nineteenth century.

Alexander von Humboldt was born in Berlin, Germany in 1769. His father, who was an army officer, died when he was nine years old so he and his older brother Wilhelm were raised by their cold and distant mother. Tutors provided their early education which was grounded in languages and mathematics. 

Once he was old enough, Alexander began to study at the Freiberg Academy of Mines under the famous geologist A.G. Werner. Von Humboldt met George Forester, Captain James Cook's scientific illustrator from his second voyage, and they hiked around Europe. In 1792, at the age of 22, von Humboldt began a job as a government mines inspector in Franconia, Prussia. 

When he was 27, Alexander's mother died, leaving him as substantial income from the estate. The following year, he left government service and began to plan travels with Aime Bonpland, a botanist. The pair went to Madrid and obtained special permission and passports from King Charles II to explore South America. 

Once they arrived in South America, Alexander von Humboldt and Bonpland studied the flora, fauna, and topography of the continent. In 1800 von Humboldt mapped over 1700 miles of the Orinco River. This was followed by a trip to the Andes and a climb of Mt. Chimborazo (in modern Ecuador), then believed to be the tallest mountain in the world. They didn't make it to the top due to a wall-like cliff but they did climb to over 18,000 feet in elevation. While on the west coast of South America, von Humboldt measured and discovered the Peruvian Current, which, over the objections of von Humboldt himself, is also known as the Humboldt Current. In 1803 they explored Mexico. Alexander von Humboldt was offered a position in the Mexican cabinet but he refused. 

The pair were persuaded to visit Washington, D.C. by an American counselor and they did so. They stayed in Washington for three weeks and von Humboldt had many meetings with Thomas Jefferson and the two became good friends. 

Von Humboldt sailed to Paris in 1804 and wrote thirty volumes about his field studies. During his expeditions in the Americas and Europe, he recorded and reported on magnetic declination. He stayed in France for 23 years and met with many other intellectuals on a regular basis. 

Von Humboldt's fortunes were ultimately exhausted because of his travels and self-publishing of his reports. In 1827, he returned to Berlin where he obtained a steady income by becoming the King of Prussia's advisor. Von Humboldt was later invited to Russia by the tsar and after exploring the nation and describing discoveries such as permafrost, he recommended that Russia establish weather observatories across the country. The stations were established in 1835 and von Humboldt was able to use the data to develop the principle of continentality, that the interiors of continents have more extreme climates due to a lack of moderating influence from the ocean. He also developed the first isotherm map, containing lines of equal average temperatures. 

From 1827 to 1828, Alexander von Humboldt gave public lectures in Berlin. The lectures were so popular that new assembly halls had to be found due to the demand. As von Humboldt got older, he decided to write everything known about the earth. He called his work Kosmos and the first volume was published in 1845, when he was 76 years old. Kosmos was well written and well received. The first volume, a general overview of the universe, sold out in two months and was promptly translated into many languages. Other volumes focused on such topics as human's effort to describe the earth, astronomy, and earth and human interaction. Humboldt died in 1859 and the fifth and final volume was published in 1862, based on his notes for the work. 

Once von Humboldt died, "no individual scholar could hope any longer to master the world's knowledge about the earth." (Geoffrey J. Martin, and Preston E. James. All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas., page 131). Von Humboldt was the last true master but one of the first to bring geography to the world.

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Ten of the greatest: Maps that changed the world

"From the USSR's Be On Guard! map in 1921 to Google Earth, a new exhibition at the British Library charts the extraordinary documents that transformed the way we view the globe forever"

1- BE ON GUARD! 1921

The infant USSR was threatened with invasion, famine and social unrest. To counter this, brilliant designers such as Dimitri Moor were employed to create pro-Bolshevik propaganda. 

Using a map of European Russia and its neighbours, Moor's image of a heroic Bolshevik guard defeating the invading 'Whites' helped define the Soviet Union in the Russian popular imagination.

2- HENRICUS MARTELLUS WORLD MAP, 1490

It's said that Columbus used this map or one like it to persuade Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile to support him in the early 1490s. 

The map was made by a German cartographer living in Florence and reflects the latest theories about the form of the world and the most accurate ways of portraying it on a flat surface. 

It seemed to prove that, as Columbus argued, there wasn't a great distance between Europe and China by sea. The map is also the first to record the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa by the Portuguese in 1488. 

This proved that there wasn't a land link to Asia in the south - and that Europeans could reach the riches of the East Indies by sea without having to go through Muslim-held lands.

3- CHINESE GLOBE, 1623

Made for the Chinese Emperor, this is the earliest known Chinese terrestrial globe, and a fusion of East and Western cultures. 

Its creators are thought to be the Jesuit missionaries Manuel Dias (1574-1659), who introduced the telescope to China, and Nicolo Longobardi (1565-1655), superior general of the China mission. 

Both were respected scholars, and the globe's depiction of the coasts of Africa and Europe would have contrasted with traditional Chinese maps. 

These exaggerated the size of China and placed it in the middle of a world that otherwise consisted mainly of small off­shore islands.  In its treatment of eclipses and meridians and its information about magnetic inclination, however, the globe draws on ideas that were developed in China far earlier than in the West. 

4- WALDSEEMULLER WORLD MAP, 1507

'America' is named and envisaged as a separate continent for the first time on this map, put together by a think tank in Saint-Dié in the Duchy of Lorraine. 

The map itself was created by a skilled cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, and was accompanied by an explanatory booklet by one Matthias Ringmann. Impressed by the writings of Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci, Ringmann suggested that the Americas weren't part of Asia, as Columbus thought, but a continent in their own right. 

So they should, like the other continents, have a female name - hence America, after Vespucci's first name. Perhaps to emphasise the independent existence of the Americas, the map shows what we now know is the Pacific lapping the western coast of South America, though its existence was only confirmed years later. 

5- GOOGLE EARTH, c2005

Google Earth presents a world in which the area of most concern to you (in this instance, Avebury in Wiltshire) can be at the centre, and which - with mapped content overlaid - can contain whatever you think is important.

Almost for the first time, the ability to create an accurate map has been placed in the hands of everyone, and it has transformed the way we view the world. But it comes at a price. 

There are few, if any, agreed standards about what should be included, and the less populated and 'less important' regions get ignored. 

6- DESCRIPTIVE MAP OF LONDON POVERTY, 1889

Businessman Charles Booth was sceptical about a claim in 1885 that a quarter of Londoners lived in extreme poverty, so he employed people to investigate. 

They found the true figure was 30 per cent. The findings were entered onto a 'Master Map' using seven colour categories, from black for 'Lowest class, semi-criminal' to gold for wealthy. The authorities were terrified into action, and the first council houses were built soon afterwards. 

7- 'RED LINE' MAP OF NORTH AMERICA, 1782-3

This map was used by British diplomats negotiating an end to the American War of Independence in Paris. Richard Oswald, secretary to the delegation, annotated it with coloured lines to show where it was thought past treaties established the U.S./Canada border. 

In the event, when drawing the northern border the Americans asked for less than expected, and in the century afterwards they tried to renegotiate. 

To prevent them from seeing this embarrassing map, it was removed from the British Museum, where it had been since the 1820s, and placed in the Foreign Office. 

8- LONDON TUBE MAP, 1933

Dismissed as too 'revolutionary' when it was first submitted in 1931, Harry Beck's Underground map solved the problem of how to represent clearly and elegantly a dense, complex interweaving of train lines. 

Placing the stations at similar intervals regardless of their true locations amplifies the area of central London, increasing its clarity, while the straight lines and interchange symbols confer a simplicity and order on the network. A cartographic icon. 

9- PETERS PROJECTION WORLD MAP, 1974

It's impossible to portray the reality of the spherical world on a flat map. The familiar 'Mercator' projection gives the right shapes of land masses (up to a point), but at the cost of distorting their sizes in favour of the wealthy lands to the north. 

The German Arno Peters sought to correct this. His projection gets the proportions (roughly) right, and has the e‑ffect of emphasising the Third World. That said, it's no more 'true' than the 'colonialist' projection it seeks to replace.

10- EVESHAM WORLD MAP, c1400

Created for the prior of Evesham Abbey, this map marks the birth of modern English patriotism. 

The top is a world map in the traditional medieval sense, with the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel below and a large multi-towered Jerusalem. 

But at the bottom an enormous England stretches from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. The very large tower above the French coast is Calais, captured in 1347. We are in the age of Henry V and Agincourt.  

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