1769 Berlin
1859 Berlin

Alexander von Humboldt (specifically Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt) was born on September 14, 1769, in the Tegel Castle in Berlin. From 1787 until 1792, Humboldt studied at the universities in Frankfurt an der Oder and Göttingen as well as at the Commerce Academy Hamburg. He also studied economics and commerce at the mining academy in Freiberg and attended lectures in archeology, medicine, physics, and mathematics. From 1792 until 1796, after finishing his studies, Humboldt worked in the Prussian mining service, where the later Prussian reformers Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein und Karl August von Hardenberg also worked. During his studies and his time in the Prussian civil service, Humboldt traveled constantly, making use of this time for his geographical and botanical observations. In 1799, Humboldt traveled with the botanist Aimé Bonpland on a research trip to South America, including the countries Venezuela, Cuba, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico. During this momumental journey, he catalogued over 60,000 plants and undertook political-sociological analyses of the countries in the region as well as demographic, geological, zoological, meteorological, and linguistic studies. After his return to Berlin, he was named extraordinary member of the Academy of the Sciences as well as Royal Chamberlain. In 1806, Humboldt moved to Paris, where he lived for the next two decades. There he wrote his travel report "Voyage aux Régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent" (German: Reise in die Äquinoktial-Gegenden des Neuen Kontinents; English: Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent). Living again in Berlin in 1827, Humboldt went two years later on another research trip with the doctor, zoologist, botanist Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg and the chemist and minerologist Gustav Rose to Russia, where he made primarliy geomagnetic and astronomical observations as well as describing the physical geography of the regions he visited. After returning once again to Berlin, he lived and worked there, with small interruptions for short trips and diplomatic missions, until his death on May 6, 1859. Alexander von Humboldt is still today considered one of the most important German natural scientists of international repute as well as one of the founders of geography as an empirical science.

Humboldt

Humboldt

Humboldt

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