The Invention of Nature

He would give two years of his life for the memories of the time they had been together, he wrote to his friend in Freiberg, and confessed to have spent the ‘sweetest hours of his life’ with him. Written late at night, some of these letters were raw with emotion and shaped by a desperate loneliness. In page after page, Humboldt poured out his heart, and then excused his ‘foolish letters’. The next day, when work demanded his attention, all was forgotten and it would often be weeks or even months until he wrote again. Even to the few who knew him best, Humboldt often remained elusive.

Meanwhile his career soared and his interests widened. Humboldt now also became interested in the working conditions of the miners whom he saw crawling into the bowels of the earth every morning. To improve their safety, he invented a breathing mask, as well as a lamp that would work even in the deepest oxygen-poor shafts. Shocked by the miners’ lack of knowledge, Humboldt wrote textbooks for them and founded a mining school. When he realized that historical documents might prove useful for the exploitation of disused or inefficient mines because they sometimes mentioned rich veins of ores or recorded old findings, he spent weeks deciphering sixteenth-century manuscripts. He was working and travelling at such a manic pace that some of his colleagues thought he must have ‘8 legs and 4 arms’.

The intensity of it all made him ill, as he was still battling with recurring fevers and nervous disorders. The reasons, he thought, were probably a combination of being overworked and spending too much time in freezing conditions deep in the mines. But despite illness and his packed work schedule, Humboldt still managed to publish his first books, a specialized treatise on the basalts to be found along the River Rhine and another on the subterranean flora in Freiberg – strange mould and sponge-like plants that grew in intricate shapes on the damp beams in the mines. He focused on what he could measure and observe.

During the eighteenth century ‘natural philosophy’ – what we would call ‘natural sciences’ today – evolved from being a subject within philosophy along with metaphysics, logic and moral philosophy to becoming an independent discipline that required its own approach and methodology. In tandem new natural philosophy subjects developed and emerged into distinctly separate disciplines such as botany, zoology, geology and chemistry. And though Humboldt was working across different disciplines at the same time, he still kept them separate. This growing specialization provided a tunnel vision that focused in on ever greater detail, but ignored the global view that would later become Humboldt’s hallmark.

It was during this period that Humboldt became obsessed with so-called ‘animal electricity’, or Galvanism as it was known after Luigi Galvani, an Italian scientist. Galvani had managed to make animal muscles and nerves convulse when he attached different metals to them. Galvani suspected that animal nerves contained electricity. Fascinated by the idea, Humboldt began a long series of 4,000 experiments in which he cut, prodded, poked and electrocuted frogs, lizards and mice. Not content with experimenting on animals alone, he began to use his own body too, always taking his instruments on his work travels through Prussia. In the evenings, when his official work was done, he set up his electrical apparatus in the small bedrooms he rented. Metal rods, forceps, glass plates and vials filled with all kinds of chemicals were lined up on the table, as was paper and pen. With a scalpel he made incisions on his arms and torso. Then he carefully rubbed chemicals and acids into the open wounds or stuck metals, wires and electrodes on to his skin or under his tongue. Every twitch, every convulsion, burning sensation or pain was noted meticulously. Many of his wounds became infected and some days his skin was striped with blood-filled welts. His body looked as battered as a ‘street urchin’, he admitted, but he also proudly reported that despite the great pain, it all went ‘splendidly’.

One of the animal electricity experiments that Humboldt conducted with frog’s legs (Illustration Credit 1.3)

Through his experiments Humboldt was engaging with one of the most hotly debated ideas in the scientific world: the concept of organic and inorganic ‘matter’ and whether either contained any kind of ‘force’ or ‘active principle’. Newton had propounded the idea that matter was essentially inert but that other properties were added by God. Meanwhile, those scientists who had been busy classifying flora and fauna had been more concerned with bringing order to chaos than with ideas that plants or animals might be governed by a different set of laws than inanimate objects.