Measuring the World (3 page)

He too wanted to go on voyages, said Humboldt.

Forster nodded. Quite a few had that wish. And everyone of them regretted it later.

Why?

Because one could never come back.

Forster recommended him to the school of mining in Freiberg. It was where Abraham Werner worked. The earth's interior, he taught, was cold and hard. Mountain ranges were created by the chemical precipitations left as the primordial oceans shrank. The fire in volcanoes didn't come from deep in the earth, it was fed by burning coalfields. The core of the earth was solid rock. This theory was called Neptunism and was championed by both churches and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In the chapel at Freiberg Werner had masses said for the souls of his opponents who still denied the truth. Once he had broken the nose of a doubting student, and supposedly bitten off the ear of another years before. He was one of the last alchemists: member of secret lodges, expert in the signs that commanded the obedience of demons. He had the power to reassemble what had been destroyed, to re-create what had been burned from its smoke, and to make pulverized objects take shape again; he had also talked to the Devil and made gold. But he didn't give the impression of being an intelligent man. He leaned back, squeezed his eyes shut, and asked Humboldt if he was a Neptunist and believed in a cold earth's core.

Humboldt said yes.

Then he should get married.

Humboldt went red.

Werner puffed out his cheeks, looked conspiratorial, and asked if he had a sweetheart.

That was only an impediment, said Humboldt. One got married when one had nothing essential to do in life.

Werner stared at him.

Or so it was said, added Humboldt hurriedly. Of course that was wrong!

No unmarried man, said Werner, had ever made a good Neptunist.

Humboldt ran through the entire curriculum of the mining school in three months. In the mornings he spent six hours underground, in the afternoons he went to lectures, in the evenings and for half the night he learned what he needed for the next day. He had no friends, and when his brother invited him to his wedding—he had found a woman, he said, who suited him perfectly, there was no one like her in the world— he answered politely that he couldn't come, he had no time. He crawled through the lowest tunnels until he had accustomed himself to his claustrophobia as one would make peace with a relentless pain that slowly became bearable. He measured temperatures: the deeper one went, the warmer it got, which contradicted Abraham Werner's every teaching. He noticed that even in the deepest, darkest caves there was vegetation. Life seemed to have no boundary, some new form of moss or other growth occurred everywhere, or some kind of rudimentary plant. They struck him as sinister, which is why he dissected and examined them, classified them, and wrote an essay on each. Years later, when he saw similar plants in the Cavern of the Dead, he was prepared.

He took the final examinations and was given a uniform. He was supposed to wear it wherever he went. His official title was Assessor in the Department of Mines. He was embarrassed, he wrote to his brother, to be so pleased.

Not many months later he was already the most reliable inspector of mines in Prussia. He went on inspection tours of foundries, peat bogs, and the firing chimneys of the Royal Porcelain Factory; wherever he went, he scared the workers by the speed of his note-taking. He was always on the road, barely ate or slept, and had no idea himself what it was all supposed to be for. There was something in him, he wrote to his brother, that made him afraid he was losing his mind.

By chance he stumbled upon Galvani's book on electrical current and frogs. Galvani had removed the legs from frogs, then attached two different metals to them, and they had twitched as if alive. Was this something inherent in the legs themselves, which retained some life force, or was the movement of external origin, produced by the difference between the metals, and merely made manifest by the frog parts? Humboldt decided to find out.

He took off his shirt, lay down on the bed, and instructed a servant to attach two cupping glasses to his back. The servant obeyed, and Humboldt's skin produced two large blisters. And now please cut the blisters open! The servant hesitated, Humboldt had to raise his voice, the servant took up the scalpel. It was so sharp that the cut caused almost no pain. Blood dripped onto the floor. Humboldt ordered a piece of zinc to be laid on one of the wounds.

The servant asked if he could stop for a moment, he wasn't feeling well.

Humboldt told him not to be so stupid. As a piece of silver touched the second wound, a painful spasm shot through his back muscles and up into his head. With a shaking hand he made a note:
Musculus cucuUaris
, ongoing prickling sensation in dorsal vertebrae. No doubt about it, this was electricity! Repeat with the silver! He counted four shocks, regularly spaced, then the objects around him lost their color.

When he regained consciousness, the servant was sitting white-faced on the floor, his hands bloody.

Onward, said Humboldt, and with a strange shiver of apprehension he realized that something in him was finding pleasure in this. Now for the frogs!

Oh no, said the servant.

Humboldt asked if he was intending to look for a new job.

The servant laid four dead, meticulously cleaned frogs on Humboldt's bloodied back. But this was quite enough, he said, after all they were both good Christians.

Humboldt ignored him and ordered silver again. The shocks began immediately. With each one, as he saw in the mirror, the frogs jumped as if alive. He bit down into the pillow, the cloth was wet from his tears. The servant giggled hysterically. Humboldt wanted to make notes, but his hands were too weak. Laboriously he got to his feet. The two wounds were running and the liquid coming out of them was so corrosive it was inflaming his skin. Humboldt tried to capture some of it in a glass tube, but his shoulder was swollen up and he couldn't turn round. He looked at the servant.

The servant shook his head.

Very well, said Humboldt, in that case in God's name would he please get the doctor! He wiped his face and waited until he regained the use of his hands so that he could jot down the essentials. There had been a flow of current, he had felt it, and it hadn't come from his body or the frogs, it had come from the chemical antagonism between the metals.

It wasn't easy to explain to the doctor what had been going on. The servant gave notice the same week, two scars remained, and the treatise on living muscle fiber as a conductor established Humboldt's reputation as a scientist.

He seemed to be showing some evidence of confusion, said his brother in a letter from Jena. He should really bear in mind that one also had moral obligations to one's own body, which wasn't just some random object among many; I'm begging you, do come, Schiller wants to meet you.

You misunderstand me, Humboldt replied, I have established that a human being is prepared to endure insult, but that a great deal of knowledge escapes him because he is afraid of pain. The man who deliberately undergoes pain nonetheless learns things he didn't … He laid down his pen, rubbed his shoulder, and crumpled the paper into a ball. Why, I wonder, he began again, does the fact that we are brothers strike me as the real riddle? That the two of us are alone, that we're doubles, that you are what I was never intended to be, and I am what you cannot be, that we must go through existence as a pair, together, whether we want it or not, closer all our lives than either of us will ever be to someone else. And why do I imagine that the greatness we each achieve will have no future, no matter what successes we have, and that it will vanish as if it were nothing until our names, which competed against each other in their fame, melt back into one and fade to a blank? He faltered, then tore the sheet into little pieces.

To examine the plants in the Freiberg mines, he developed the miner's lamp: a flame fed by a gas canister which worked in places even where there was no air. It almost killed him. He climbed down into a chamber in the rock that had never been explored before, set down the lamp, and within a matter of minutes lost consciousness. Dying, he saw tropical creepers which turned to women's bodies as he watched, and came back to his senses with a scream. A Spaniard named Andres del Rio, a former classmate at the Freiberg School of Mines, had found him and got him up to the surface again. Humboldt was almost too ashamed to thank him properly.

It took him a month of hard work to develop a breathing machine: two pipes led from an airbag to a breathing mask. He strapped the apparatus on and went down. Stony-faced he endured the onset of hallucinations. Then first his knees began to buckle and dizziness multiplied the single flame to a blaze; he opened the air valve and watched grimly as the women turned back into plants and the plants into mere nothings. He stayed down in the cool darkness for hours. When he emerged into the daylight, he was met with a letter from Kunth, summoning him to his mother's deathbed.

As was appropriate, he found the fastest horse and rode out. Rain lashed his face, his coat flapped behind him, twice he slipped from the saddle and landed in the dirt. He arrived filthy and unshaven, and because he knew what was correct behavior, he pretended to be out of breath. Kunth nodded his approval; they sat together at her bedside and watched as the pain transformed her face into something unknown. Consumption had burned her up inside, her cheeks had fallen in, her chin was long, and her nose was suddenly hooked; so much blood had been let that she had almost died of it. While Humboldt held her hand, afternoon passed over into evening and a messenger brought a letter from his brother, excusing himself on the grounds of urgent business in Weimar. As night set in, his mother struggled erect in bed and began to emit sharp screams. The sleeping draught was having no effect, even another bleeding brought no relief, and Humboldt could not believe the fact that she was capable of such improper behavior. Around midnight her screams became so unbridled and loud and seemed to be coming from so deep in her body as it arched upward that she seemed to be in ecstasy. He waited with closed eyes. It took two hours for her to fall quiet. At first light, she murmured something incomprehensible; as the sun rose in the morning sky she looked at her son and said he must control himself, that was no way to be lolling about. Then she turned her head away, her eyes seemed to turn to glass, and he was looking at the first corpse he had ever seen in his life.

Kunth put a hand on his shoulder. No one could begin to measure what this family had meant to him.

No, said Humboldt, as if someone were whispering to him, he could measure it and he would never forget.

Kunth was moved, and sighed. Now he knew he would continue to receive his keep.

In the afternoon the servants watched Humboldt walking up and down in front of the castle, over the hills, round the pond, mouth wide open, face turned up to the sky looking like an idiot. They had never seen him this way. He must surely, they said to one another, be awfully shaken. And he was: he had never been so happy.

A week later he resigned his post. The minister couldn't understand it. Such high office at such a young age, and no limit to how high he might climb! So why?

Because none of it was enough, answered Humboldt. He stood there, a slight figure but ramrod straight, his eyes glistening and his shoulders relaxed, in front of his superior's desk. Because at last he was free to go.

First came Weimar, where his brother introduced him to Wieland, Herder, and Goethe. The latter greeted him as an ally. Any pupil of the great Werner would find a friend in him.

He was going to travel to the New World, said Humboldt. He had never confessed this to anyone before. No one would prevent him, and he didn't expect to come back alive.

Goethe took him aside and led him through a suite of rooms all painted different colors to a high window. A great undertaking, he said. His priority would be to investigate volcanoes, to support the theory of Neptunism. There was no fire under the earth's crust. Nature's heart was not made of boiling lava. Only spoiled minds could seize upon such repellent ideas.

Humboldt promised to take a look at volcanoes.

Goethe crossed his arms behind his back. And he was never to forget where he came from.

Humboldt didn't understand him.

He should think about who had sent him, Goethe gestured toward the brightly colored rooms, the plaster casts of Roman statues, the men who were conversing in lowered voices in the salon. Humboldt's elder brother was discussing the merits of blank verse, Wieland was nodding alertly, Schiller was sitting on the sofa stealing a yawn. You come from us, said Goethe, you come from here. You will still be our ambassador across the seas.

Humboldt journeyed on to Salzburg, where he acquired himself the most expensive arsenal of measuring instruments ever to be possessed by one person. Two barometers for air pressure, a hypsometer to measure the boiling point of water, a theodolite for measuring land, a sextant with an artificial horizon, a foldable pocket sextant, a dipping magnetic needle to establish the force of earth's magnetism, a hydrometer for the relative dampness in the air, a eudiometer for measuring the oxygen levels in the air, a Leyden jar to capture electrical charges, and a cyanometer to measure the blue of the sky. Plus two of these pricelessly costly clocks which recently had started to be produced in Paris. They no longer needed a pendulum, but marked the seconds invisibly with regularly moving springs inside. When handled properly, they kept to Paris time, and if one determined the height of the sun above the horizon and then consulted tables, they made it possible to fix the degree of longitude.

He stayed for a year and practiced. He measured every hill around Salzburg, he took daily measurements of the air pressure, he mapped the magnetic field, he tested the air, the water, the earth, and the color of the sky. He practiced dismantling and reassembling every instrument until he could do it blind, standing on one leg, in rain, or surrounded by a herd of fly-tormented cows. The locals decided he was mad. But that too, he realized, was something he must get used to. Once he tied one arm behind his back for a week, so as to become accustomed to physical insult and pain. Because he was bothered by his uniform, he had another one tailored for him and wore it even to bed. The whole trick was never to let anything get to one, he said to Frau Schobel, his landlady, and asked for another glass of the greenish whey that made him feel sick.