Alexander von Humboldt

Born in Berlin on September 14, 1769, Alexander von Humboldt became one of the most influential naturalists and explorers of the 19th century. Before setting out on his famous travels, he worked in the Prussian mining service, where he also developed practical scientific interests that stayed with him throughout his life.

From 1799 to 1804, he traveled widely in Spanish America with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland, studying landscapes, plants, volcanoes, rivers, and climate across what are now Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Cuba, Mexico, and parts of the United States. Rather than treating nature as a set of separate facts, he looked for patterns linking everything together, an approach that laid important groundwork for biogeography and ecology.

Humboldt spent much of his later life writing and organizing the enormous results of his research, including the ambitious work Kosmos. By the time he died in Berlin on May 6, 1859, he was famous across Europe and beyond, admired not only for discovery and measurement but also for the energy and imagination he brought to science.