The Invention of Nature (28 page)

Paris had been his home for more than twenty years and his closest friends lived there. It was a painful decision but in the end Humboldt agreed to move to Berlin – but only under the condition that he was allowed to travel to Paris regularly for several months at a time to continue his research. It was not easy, he wrote to the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß in February 1827, to give up his freedom and scientific life. Having only recently accused George Cuvier of betraying the revolutionary spirit, Humboldt now became a courtier himself, entering a world in which he would have to negotiate a fine balance between his liberal political beliefs and his royal duties. It would be almost impossible, he feared, to find ‘the middle ground between the oscillating opinions’.

On 14 April 1827 Humboldt left Paris for Berlin but not without one of his usual detours. He travelled via London, in what may have been a last desperate effort to convince the East India Company to grant him permission to explore India. Nine years had passed since his last visit in 1818, when he had stayed with his brother Wilhelm. Since then Wilhelm had been recalled from his diplomatic posting in Britain and now lived in Berlin,3 but Humboldt quickly reconnected with his old British acquaintances. He tried to make the most of his three-week visit.

Humboldt was passed on from one person to another – politicians, scientists and a ‘force of noblemen’. At the Royal Society, Humboldt met his old friends John Herschel and Charles Babbage, and attended a meeting during which one of the fellows presented ten maps that were part of a new atlas of India which had been commissioned by the East India Company – a painful reminder of what Humboldt was missing. He had dinner with Mary Somerville,4 one of the few female scientists in Europe, and visited the botanist Robert Brown at the botanic garden at Kew just to the west of London. Brown had explored Australia as one of Joseph Banks’s plant collectors, and Humboldt was keen to learn about Antipodean flora.

Humboldt was also invited to an elegant party at the Royal Academy and dined with his old acquaintance George Canning, who just two weeks previously had become the British Prime Minister. At Canning’s dinner, Humboldt was delighted to meet his old friend from Washington, DC, Albert Gallatin, who was now the American Minister in London. Only the attention of the British aristocracy annoyed Humboldt. Paris was a sleepy town compared to ‘my torments here’, he wrote to a friend, because everybody seemed to want a piece of him. In London ‘every sentence begins’, he complained, with ‘you will not leave without having seen my country-house: it is only 40 miles from London.’

Humboldt’s most exciting day, however, was spent not with scientists or politicians but with a young engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who had invited Humboldt to observe the construction of the first tunnel under the Thames. The idea of building a tunnel under a river was as daring as it was dangerous, and no one had ever succeeded in doing such a thing.

The conditions at the Thames could not have been worse because the riverbed and the ground beneath consisted of sand and soft clay. Brunel’s father, Marc, had invented an ingenious method of building the tunnel: a cast-iron shield in the height and width of the tunnel tube. Inspired by a shipworm that bored through the toughest timber planks by protecting its head with a shell, Marc Brunel had designed a huge contraption that allowed the excavation of the tunnel while at the same time propping up the ceiling and keeping the soft clay in place. As the workers moved the metal shield in front of them under the riverbed, they built up the tunnel’s brick shell behind them. Inch by inch, and foot by foot, the length of the tunnel slowly grew. Work had begun two years previously and by the time Humboldt came to London Brunel’s men had reached about the halfway point of the 1,200-foot-long tunnel.

The work was treacherous and Marc Brunel’s diary was filled with thoughts of worry and concern: ‘anxiety increasing daily’, ‘things are getting worse every day’, or ‘every morning I say, Another day of danger over.’ His son Isambard, who had been made ‘resident engineer’ in January 1827 at the age of twenty, brought his boundless energy and confidence to the project. But the work was challenging. In early April, shortly before Humboldt arrived, more and more water seeped into the tunnel and Isambard had forty men pumping to keep the influx of water under control. There was only ‘clayey silt above their heads’, Marc Brunel worried, fearing that the tunnel could collapse at any moment. Isambard wanted to inspect the construction from the outside and asked Humboldt to join him. It would be dangerous but Humboldt didn’t care – this was too exciting to miss. He also hoped to measure the air pressure at the bottom of the river to compare it to his observations in the Andes.

The diving bell in which Humboldt descended with Brunel to the bottom of the Thames to see the construction of the tunnel (Illustration Credit 14.2)

On 26 April a huge metal diving bell that weighed almost two tons was lowered by a crane from a ship. Boats filled with curious onlookers crowded the surface of the river as the diving bell with Brunel and Humboldt inside was dropped to a depth of thirty-six feet. Air was supplied through a leather hose that was inserted at the top of the bell, and two thick glass windows offered views into the murky river water. As they descended, Humboldt found the pressure in his ears almost unbearable but he got used to it after a few minutes. They wore thick coats and looked like ‘Eskimos’, Humboldt wrote to François Arago in Paris. Down on the riverbed with the tunnel below them and only water above, it was eerily dark except for their lanterns’ weak glimmer. They spent forty minutes underwater but as they ascended the changing water pressure ruptured blood vessels in Humboldt’s nose and throat. For the next twenty-four hours he spat and sneezed blood, just as he had when climbing Chimborazo. Brunel didn’t bleed, Humboldt noted, and joked that it was seemingly ‘a privilege of Prussians’.

Two days later parts of the tunnel fell in, and then in mid-May the riverbed above the tunnel collapsed completely, creating a huge hole through which water came gushing in. Amazingly no lives were lost and after repairs were made, the work continued. By then Humboldt had left London and had arrived in Berlin.

He was now the most famous scientist in Europe and admired by colleagues, poets and thinkers alike. One man, though, had yet to read his work. That man was eighteen-year-old Charles Darwin who, at the very moment that Humboldt was being fêted in London, had given up his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh. Robert Darwin, Charles’s father, was furious. ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching,’ he wrote to his son, ‘and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’

1 Or in the case of isobars, the lines represent air pressure.

2 During Napoleon’s reign Louis XVIII had lived in exile in Prussia, Russia and Britain.

3 Wilhelm had left London in 1818. He had then briefly held a ministerial position in Berlin but had grown frustrated with Prussia’s reactionary politics. At the end of 1819, Wilhelm had retired from his political career and moved to the family estate at Tegel, which he had inherited.

4 Forty-six-year-old Mary Somerville was a celebrated mathematician and polymath. In 1827 she was working on the translation of Laplace’s book The Mechanism of the Heavens into English. Her writing was so clear that the book became a bestseller in Britain. She was the only woman, Laplace said, ‘who could understand and correct his works’. Others called her the ‘queen of science’. She would later publish a book called Physical Geography which bore many similarities to Humboldt’s approach to science and the natural world.

15

Return to Berlin

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT arrived in Berlin on 12 May 1827. He was fifty-seven and disliked the city as much as he had two decades previously. He knew that his life would never be the same. From now on much of his day would belong to the ‘tedious, restless life at Court’. Friedrich Wilhelm III had 250 chamberlains for most of whom the title was only honorary. Humboldt, though, was expected to join the inner court circle but with no political role. He was expected to be the king’s intellectual entertainer and after-dinner reader. Humboldt survived behind a façade of smiles and chat. The man who had written thirty years previously that ‘court life robs even the most intellectual of their genius and freedom’, now found himself bound to royal routine. This was the beginning of what Humboldt called his ‘swinging of a pendulum’ – a life in which he chased the king’s movements from one castle to the next summer residence and back to Berlin, always on the road and always loaded with manuscripts and boxes full of books and notes. The only time he had for himself and to write his books was between midnight and three o’clock in the morning.

Humboldt returned to a country that had become a police state in which censorship was part of daily life. Public meetings – even scientific gatherings – were regarded with great suspicion and student bodies had been forcibly dissolved. Prussia had no constitution and no national parliament, only some provincial assemblies that had advisory functions but couldn’t make laws or impose taxes. Every decision was under close royal supervision. The whole city displayed a decidedly military character. Sentries were placed at almost all public buildings and visitors remarked on the perpetual drumming and parading of soldiers. It seemed as if there were more military men than civilians in town. One tourist noted the constant marching and ‘endless display of uniforms of all sorts, in all public places’.

With no political muscle at court, Humboldt was determined to infuse Berlin at least with a spirit of intellectual curiosity. It was badly needed. Already as a young man, when he had worked as a mining inspector, Humboldt had founded and privately financed a school for miners. Like his brother Wilhelm, who had almost single-handedly established a new Prussian education system two decades previously, Alexander believed that education was the foundation of a free and happy society. For many this was a dangerous thought. In Britain, for example, pamphlets were published, warning that knowledge exalted the poor ‘above their humble and laborious duties’.

Stadtschloss in Berlin (Illustration Credit 15.1)

Humboldt believed in the power of learning, and books such as his Views of Nature were written for a general audience rather than for scientists in their ivory towers. As soon as he arrived in Berlin, Humboldt tried to establish a school of chemistry and mathematics at the university. He corresponded with colleagues about the possibilities of laboratories and the advantages of a polytechnic. He also convinced the king that Berlin needed a new observatory equipped with the latest instruments. Though some believed that Humboldt had become a ‘sycophantic courtier’, it was in fact his court position that enabled him to support scientists, explorers and artists. One has to get the king ‘during an idle moment’, Humboldt explained to a friend, and not let go of him. Within weeks of his arrival he was busy implementing his ideas. He had, as one colleague said, the ‘enviable talent for constituting himself the centre of intellectual and scientific converse’.

For decades Humboldt had criticized governments, openly voicing his dissent and opinions, but by the time he moved to Berlin, he had grown disillusioned with politics. As a young man he had been electrified by the French Revolution, but in recent years he had watched how the ultra-royalists of the Ancien Régime were turning back the clock in France. Elsewhere in Europe the mood was also reactionary. Wherever Humboldt looked, he saw how hope of change had been quashed.

In England, on his recent visit, he had met his old acquaintance George Canning, the new British Prime Minister. Humboldt had seen how Canning had struggled to form a government because his own Tory Party was split over social and economic reforms. At the end of May 1827, ten days after Humboldt arrived in Berlin, Canning had found himself turning to the opposition party, the Whigs, for support. From what Humboldt could gather from the Berlin newspapers, the situation in Britain became worse at every turn. Within a week the House of Lords had shelved an amendment to the divisive Corn Laws which had been a key issue in the reform debates. The Corn Laws were so controversial because they enabled the government to impose high import duties on foreign grains. Cheap corn from the United States, for example, was so heavily taxed that it became prohibitively expensive, allowing wealthy British landowners effectively to eliminate any competition while at the same time keeping a monopoly to control prices. Those who suffered the most were the poor because the price of bread remained exorbitant. The rich stayed rich and the poor remained poor. ‘We are on the brink of a great struggle between property and population,’ Canning predicted.

The situation was similarly reactionary on the continent. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the German states had entered a phase of relative peace but of few reforms. Under the leadership of the Austrian Foreign Minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich, the German states had established the Deutscher Bund during the Congress of Vienna – the German Confederation. It was a loose federation of forty states that replaced what had once been the Holy Roman Empire and then under Napoleon the Confederation of the Rhine. Metternich had envisaged this form of federation in order to rebalance the power in Europe and to counter the emergence of one individual powerful state. There was no head of state and the Federal Assembly in Frankfurt was less a governing parliament than a congress of ambassadors who all continued to represent their own states’ interests. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia had regained some economic power when its territory expanded again, now comprising Napoleon’s vassal state, the short-lived Kingdom of Westphalia, as well as the Rhineland and parts of Saxony. Prussia now stretched from its border with the Netherlands in the west to Russia in the east.

In the German states reform was regarded with suspicion and as the first step on the road to revolution. Democracy, Metternich said, was ‘the volcano which must be extinguished’. Humboldt, who had met Metternich several times in Paris and in Vienna, was disappointed by these developments. Though the two men had corresponded about the advancement of the sciences, they knew each other well enough to avoid political discussions. In private the Austrian Chancellor described Humboldt as ‘a head that’s gone politically awry’ while Humboldt called Metternich a ‘mummy’s sarcophagus’ because his policies were so antiquated.