The Invention of Nature

As soon as he came, he was ready to leave. How was he to work here and find enough like-minded scientists? There wasn’t even a university in the city, and the ground, he said, was ‘burning under my feet’. By contrast, King Friedrich Wilhelm III was delighted to have the most famous Prussian back. Celebrated across Europe for his daring explorations, Humboldt would be a great ornament at court, and the king granted him a generous yearly pension of 2,500 thalers with absolutely no obligations attached. This was a large sum at a time when skilled craftsmen such as carpenters and joiners earned less than 200 thalers annually, but perhaps not when compared to the 13,400 thalers that his brother Wilhelm earned as a Prussian ambassador. The king also made Humboldt his chamberlain, again with no apparent conditions. Having spent much of his inheritance, Humboldt needed the money but at the same time found the king’s attentions ‘almost oppressive’.

A dour and frugal man, Friedrich Wilhelm III was no inspiring ruler. He was neither a pleasure-seeker nor an art lover like his father, Friedrich Wilhelm II, and lacked any of the military and scientific brilliance of his great-uncle, Frederick the Great. Instead he was fascinated by clocks and uniforms – so much so that Napoleon reputedly once said that Friedrich Wilhelm III should have been a tailor because ‘he always knows how many yards of cloth are needed for a soldier’s uniform’.

Embarrassed by the ties that would now bind him to the court, Humboldt asked his friends to keep the royal appointment quiet. And perhaps with good reason, because some were shocked to see the apparently fiercely independent and pro-revolutionary Humboldt making himself subservient to the king. His friend Leopold von Buch complained that Humboldt now spent more time at the king’s palaces than the courtiers themselves. Instead of concentrating on his scientific studies, Buch said, Humboldt was immersed in court gossip. The accusation was slightly unfair because Humboldt was far more absorbed in scientific matters than in royal affairs. Though he had to be at court regularly, he also found time to lecture at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, to write and to continue the comparative magnetic observations that he had begun in South America.

An old family acquaintance and wealthy distillery owner offered Humboldt his garden house to live in. His estate bordered the River Spree and was just a few hundred yards north of the famous boulevard Unter den Linden. The little garden house was simple but perfect – it saved Humboldt money and allowed him to concentrate on his magnetic observations. He built a small hut in the garden for that purpose, and in order not to influence the measurements had it constructed without a single piece or nail made of iron. At one stage he and a colleague spent several days taking data from the instruments every half-hour – day and night – getting only snatches of sleep in between. The experiment resulted in 6,000 measurements but also left them somewhat exhausted.

Then, in early April 1806, after a full year in Humboldt’s company, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac returned to Paris. Humboldt was unhappy and lonely in Berlin and wrote to a friend a few days later that he was living ‘isolated and as a stranger’. Prussia felt like a foreign country. Humboldt was also worried about his botanical publications for which Bonpland had taken responsibility. These were specialized books for scientists and based on the plant collections they had acquired in Latin America. As a trained botanist, Bonpland was more suited for the task than Humboldt. Bonpland, however, did his best to ignore the work. He had never enjoyed the laborious chore of describing plant specimens and writing, infinitely preferring the richness of the rainforest to the tedium of his desk. Frustrated with the slow progress, Humboldt repeatedly urged Bonpland to work faster. When Bonpland finally sent some proof pages to Berlin, the meticulous Humboldt was irritated by the many mistakes. Bonpland was a little too relaxed about accuracy, Humboldt thought, ‘in particular concerning the Latin descriptions and numbers’.

Bonpland refused to be rushed, and when he then announced his intention of leaving Paris on another exploration, Humboldt despaired. Having given away his own plant specimens to collectors across Europe and being busy with his many other book projects, he needed Bonpland to concentrate on the botanical work. Humboldt was slowly losing his patience. But there was not much he could do, other than continue to bombard his old friend with letters – a mixture of cajoling, grumbling and pleading.