The Invention of Nature

The two old men corresponded about plants, politics and friends. Humboldt sent his latest books and informed Bonpland about political events in Europe. Life at the Prussian court had not broken his liberal ideals, he assured Bonpland, he still believed in freedom and equality. As both men grew older, their letters became increasingly tender, reminding each other of their long friendship and shared adventures. There was not a week, Humboldt wrote, when he didn’t think of Bonpland. They felt even more drawn to each other as time passed and their mutual friends died one after another. ‘We survive,’ Humboldt wrote after three of their scientific colleagues – including his close friend Arago – had died within three months, ‘but, alas, the immensity of the ocean separates us.’ Bonpland was also longing to see him. How much one needed a close friend to share the ‘secret feelings of one’s heart’, he wrote. In 1854, aged eighty-one, Bonpland was still talking about visiting Europe to embrace Humboldt. Then, in May 1858, Bonpland died in Paraguay, his name almost forgotten back home in France.

Aimé Bonpland (Illustration Credit 20.1)

Meanwhile Humboldt had become the most famous scientist of his age, not just in Europe but across the world. His portrait was placed in the Great Exhibition in London and also hung in palaces as remote as that of the King of Siam in Bangkok. His birthday was celebrated as far away as Hong Kong and one American journalist claimed: ‘Ask any schoolboy who Humboldt is, and the answer will be given.’

The US Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, sent Humboldt nine North American maps that showed all the different towns, counties, mountains and rivers that were named after him. His name, Floyd wrote, was a ‘household word’ throughout the country. In the past it had even been suggested that the Rocky Mountains should be renamed ‘Humboldt Andes’ – and by now several counties and towns, a river, bays, lakes and mountains in the United States carried his name, as did a hotel in San Francisco and the Humboldt Times newspaper in Eureka, California. Half flattered and half embarrassed, Humboldt quipped when he heard that yet another river had been named after him that he was 350 miles long and only had a few tributaries – but ‘I am full of fish,’ he said. There were so many ships that were named after him that he declared them his ‘naval power’.

Newspapers across the world monitored the health and activities of the ageing scientist. When rumours spread that he was ill and an anatomist from Dresden requested his skull, Humboldt jokingly replied that ‘I need my head for a little while longer, but later I would be only too happy to oblige.’ A female admirer asked if Humboldt could send her a telegraph when he was about to die so that she could rush to his deathbed to close his eyes. With such fame also came gossip, and Humboldt was not pleased when French newspapers reported that he had had an affair with the ‘ugly baroness Berzelius’, the widow of the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius. It was not entirely clear whether he was more offended by the idea of having had an affair or by the assumption that he could have chosen someone so unattractive.

In his mid-eighties, and feeling like a ‘half-petrified curiosity’, Humboldt remained interested in everything new. For all his love of nature, he was fascinated by the possibilities of technology. He questioned visitors about their journeys on steamboats and was amazed that it took only ten days to travel from Europe to Boston or Philadelphia. Railways, steamships and telegraphs ‘made space shrink’, he declared. For decades he had also been trying to convince his North and South American friends that a canal across the narrow isthmus of Panama would prove an important trade route and a viable engineering project. As early as 1804, during his visit to the United States, he had sent suggestions to James Madison, and later he had persuaded Bolívar to have the area surveyed by two engineers. He continued to write about the canal for the rest of his life.

Humboldt’s admiration for telegraphs, for example, was also so widely known that one acquaintance dispatched to him from America a small section of a cable – ‘a piece of Sub-Atlantic Telegraph’. For two decades Humboldt corresponded with inventor Samuel Morse, after seeing his telegraphic apparatus in Paris in the 1830s. In 1856 Morse, who also developed the Morse code, wrote to Humboldt to report on his experiments regarding a subterranean line between Ireland and Newfoundland. Humboldt’s interest was unsurprising since a communication line between Europe and America would have allowed him to get instant answers from scientists on the other side of the Atlantic about a missing fact for Cosmos.³