The Invention of Nature

Humboldt was searching for the ‘connections which linked all phenomena and all forces of nature’. Russia was the final chapter in his understanding of nature – he consolidated, confirmed and set into relation all the data he had collected over the past decades. Comparison not discovery was his guiding theme. Later, when he published the results of the Russian expedition in two books,² Humboldt wrote about the destruction of forests and of humankind’s long-term changes to the environment. When he listed the three ways in which the human species was affecting the climate, he named deforestation, ruthless irrigation and, perhaps most prophetically, the ‘great masses of steam and gas’ produced in the industrial centres. No one but Humboldt had looked at the relationship between humankind and nature like this before.³

Humboldt finally arrived back in St Petersburg on 13 November 1829. His endurance had been astonishing. Since their departure from St Petersburg on 20 May, his party had travelled 10,000 miles in less than six months, passing through 658 post stations and using 12,244 horses. Humboldt felt healthier than ever, strengthened by being outdoors for so long and by the excitement of their adventures. Everybody wanted to hear about his expedition. He had already suffered a similar spectacle in Moscow a few days earlier when half the city seemed to have turned up to meet him, dressed in gala uniforms and decorated in ribbons. In both cities parties were held in his honour and speeches were given, hailing him as the ‘Prometheus of our days’. No one seemed to mind that he had deviated from his original route.

These formal receptions irritated Humboldt. Rather than talking about his climate observations and geological investigations, he found himself forced to admire a plait made of Peter the Great’s hair. Whereas the royal family wanted to learn more about the spectacular discovery of diamonds, the Russian scientists were keen to see his collections. And so it continued with Humboldt being handed on from one person to another. No matter how much he disliked these moments, he remained charming and patient. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin was smitten by Humboldt. ‘Captivating speeches gushed from his mouth,’ Pushkin said, much like the water spouting from the marble lion in the fountain of the Grand Cascade in the royal palace in St Petersburg. In private Humboldt complained about the ceremonial pomp. ‘I’m almost collapsing under the burden of duties,’ he wrote to Wilhelm, but he also tried to exploit some of his fame and influence. Though he had refrained from publicly criticizing the conditions of the peasants and labourers, he now asked the tsar to pardon some of the deported people he had met during his travels.

The Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg (Illustration Credit 16.3)

Humboldt also delivered a speech at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg that would trigger a huge international scientific collaboration. For decades Humboldt had been interested in geomagnetism – just as he was in climate – because it was a global force. Determined to learn more about what he called the ‘mysterious march of the magnetic needle’, Humboldt now suggested the establishment of a chain of observation stations across the Russian Empire. The aim was to discover whether the magnetic variations were terrestrial in origin – generated, for example, by climatic changes – or caused by the sun. Geomagnetism was a key phenomenon in order to understand the correlation between the heavens and the earth because it could ‘reveal to us’, Humboldt said, ‘what passes at great depths in the interior of our planet or in the upper regions of our atmosphere’. Humboldt had long investigated the phenomenon. In the Andes he had discovered the magnetic equator, and during his enforced stay in Berlin in 1806, when the French army in Prussia had prevented his return to Paris, he and a colleague had made magnetic observations every hour on the hour – day and night – an experiment that he had then repeated on his return in 1827. After his expedition in Russia, Humboldt also recommended that his fellow Germans, along with the British, French and American authorities, should all work together to collect more global data. He appealed to them as the members of a ‘great confederation’.

Within a few years a web of magnetic stations laced the globe: at St Petersburg, Beijing and Alaska, Canada and Jamaica, Australia and New Zealand, Sri Lanka and even the remote island of St Helena in the South Atlantic where Napoleon had been incarcerated. Almost two million observations would be taken in three years. Like today’s climate change scientists, those who worked at these new stations were collecting global data, participating in what we would now call a Big Science Project. This was an international collaboration on a vast scale – the so-called ‘Magnetic Crusade’.