Happy Birthday, Alexander von Humboldt. Tomorrow marks 250 years since the birth of the Prussian polymath, whose travels and observations laid the foundation for modern meteorological measuring.
It is impossible to pigeonhole Humboldt. A brilliant observer and recorder of the tiniest details, he was also able to zoom out and see the bigger picture, mapping the relationships between biology, meteorology and geology.
Immensely famous in his day, he travelled extensively in the Americas, and everywhere he went his sophisticated scientific instruments were taken out of their velvet-lined cases to record every detail.
Humboldt’s wider perspective inspired him to map the world using isotherms (lines connecting points with the same mean temperature) and identify climate zones from the equatorial Torrid Region, to the Frozen Regions. “Humboldt was one of the last people to hold essentially all scientific knowledge in one head,” write researchers in a special birthday issue of the Journal of Biogeography. By necessity today’s scientists are specialised, but Franziska Schrodt and her colleagues argue that some of the greatest challenges we face today would benefit from a Humboldtian approach, and that by working together scientists can make the kind of connections that Humboldt’s one single polymath brain was able to make.
