Citation Needed - Alexander Von Humboldt

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt[a] (14 September 1769 – 6 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science.[5] He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835).[6][7][8] Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.[9][10] Humboldt and Carl Ritter are both regarded as the founders of modern geography as they established it as an independent scientific discipline.[11][12]

Oh, and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet. That's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnicki, and I'll be humboating myself before the king tonight. But the people who write good puns are here, too, I promise. Cecil, Noah, and he. That's like being the prettiest guy in a podcast, I guess. I don't know how you would know what that feels like, but yeah, I know it does feel like this.

I'm on another podcast and that guy's almost dead. So it works out. There you go. Yeah. For sure. It works out. Cumble. Nope. You like it?

Yeah. It's okay. I got my name wrong at the beginning. Before I begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons. Patrons, we're doing our absolute best to fire Tom and sue him for the money we've already paid him. But the lawsuit is expensive and he's making up all kinds of excuses. But I swear to you, every dollar you don't.

donate to us will be used for spite and spite alone against Tom Curry. No. If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around until the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us, Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event? We'll be talking about today. Today, we're going to be talking about Alexander von Humboldt. Ooh, so why are we talking about Alexander von Humboldt? Because given his contribution to science and his fame during his lifetime, I feel like it's

fucking nuts that more people don't know of. about this guy. He's the father of modern geography, the father of ecology, the father of environmentalism, the father of climatology, and the father of biogeography, the latter of which is admittedly less impressive than the other ones. Those are actually some of the names of Elon Musk's kids, too. Yeah. I feel like if you discover geography, all the pre-and-suffix versions just sort of come along with it. Now, you didn't discover geography, but yeah, yeah. So normally I'd say- He didn't do ancient geography, only modern. Right, whatever.

Obviously. So normally I would save something like this for the end of the essay, but just to give you an idea of the enormity of this dude's contribution to science, he has a penguin, a squid, and a squirrel monkey named after him. Also an orchid, a lily, and an oak tree. Also a bladder, warped crane spill on South American Willow. And a river dolphin and a hummingbird, a beetle, a butterfly, a marine snail, a different marine snail, a lichen and a fruit tree.

also a bay, a current, a glacier, multiple mountains, multiple mountains, multiple mountains, multiple parks, a single, a national park, a dry lake, bed, a mineral, and six universities. Also cities in Chihuahua, South Dakota, Nebraska, Illinois, Iowa, Tennessee, Kansas, Minnesota, Arizona, and Saskatchewan, counties in California, Nevada, and Iowa, a park in Chicago, a forest in Peru, and a parkway in Buffalo. And... Humboldt is him? Huh? A lunar mare.

Yes, and an asteroid and another asteroid. Okay. like the duplications are just wasteful though, right? Like someone was like, oh, well, I also loved Alexander von Humboldt, and I think he would like my sea snail more than yours. So, thank you. I was furious that there were two marine snails there. That one seems excessive, yeah.

But the asteroids, I think one of them is named Alexander, and the other one is named Von Humboldt. So, like, they're, I don't know if they're in a pair. Oh, you completed my thing. Thanks. That's cool, Craig. That's cool. Oh, and believe it or not, by the way,

that list is not remotely exhaustive. If it was, it would be the whole fucking episode. There are over 1,100 species and geographical features named after Alexander von Humboldt, more than any other human being, and by a lot, the next closest is Darwin with fewer than a third as many. So the excessive... Okay, let's see which name the sea snail comes to when we say it. Wait, that doesn't work.

We're saying nothing. Fuck. So the excessively named Friedrich Wilhelm... Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was born on September 14th of 1769 in Berlin. And that's not Berlin, Germany, because Germany didn't exist as a country yet. So he was actually born Prussian. His father was a minor noble whose reward for his service in the seven years war included a contract to lease state lotteries and tobacco sales.

So he was basically the Duke of gas station vices, I guess. The crown prince of Krotome. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. But what that meant was his kids basically never had to do shit and they would be fine. Well, I guess his firstborn son had to like go on to be the Duke of Gas Station vices after he died or whatever. But Alexander was not the firstborn. So he was dropped into the lap of luxury where he could have very well spent the rest of his life.

Instead, he decided to become ye oldy David Attenborough. Who, by the way, is the guy with the third most shit named after him. Oh, this ends with one of them pinned to the specimen tray in the other's collection, right? Is that how it sounds? So Alexander's dad died when he was very young, and the Wiki said that his mom was emotionally distant. Seems weird to criticize her parenting style from a quarter of millennium's distance, but whatever.

She did set her kids up for success, though. She got him the best possible tutors. Two of his childhood tutors are famous enough to have earned their own Wikipedia articles, actually, though one of them mentions also a mentor of Alexander von Humboldt in the first paragraph. So you might just be holding them aloft historically. Sorry, how emotionally distant do you have to be for it to be worthy of mention in 1769?

Yeah, right. Could she not remember his name? Yeah, that's weird. It feels kind of resentful. You know what I mean? Like, I'm my own person. Like the guy, the guy who played chunk in the goonies, he's a lawyer now. And you know, every judge is like, come on, do the truffle shuffle.

I'm a lawyer now. So he goes on to university where he studies under a bunch more guys who have their own Wikipedia entries. And he studies pretty much everything. What Marks Humboldt out more than anything else is how eclectic his learning was. Instead of drilling into one specific field of study, like we kind of expect scientists to do now. And how they more or less expected scientists to do back then, he studied geology, botany, mineralogy, anatomy, biology, astronomy, anthropology, like pretty much everything that they had a name for in the late 18th. century. So after graduation, he got a job working as an inspector for the Prussian Department of Mines. And apparently he was super good at his job. His job was to go to mines and tell him how to mine

better. And under his leadership, gold ore production hit a new record everywhere he went. This is also where we get the first hint of the humanitarian street that was going to mark so much of what he did. During his time as a mine inspector, he grew concerned enough about the well-being of the miners that he started a school for them with his own money and established, an emergency relief fund for minors injured in job site accidents. Wow. Back then, the government used to help miners instead of just covering up the trafficking, huh? Yeah, the good old days of 1700s, Prussia. Jesus is where we are as a nation. So from his graduation in 1792 through 1799, he bounced all over Europe,

meeting influential scientists and thinkers who have their own Wikipedia articles. He befriended Gerta and he dissected people struck by lightning. Okay, that's a weird list. Right. Like, there's a weird, and very specific, that last one. He's always getting corpses from fucking liars being like, this was not lightning. Was it? Was it? This was an eel, I could tell. His emotionally distant mother died in this period, but that didn't seem to slow him down at all. Neither he nor his brother, who is his only surviving a sibling, bothered with her funeral.

Okay, so, yeah, that's sad. She said, was it lightning that killed him? Well, I'm not coming. I think to do. Die better. And according to one correspondent that wrote to him shortly after, quote, her death must be particularly welcomed by you, unquote.

Yeah, don't really. I told the servants to put her out into right color trash bag. I'm really into ecology. It's a horsing. Now, we're not entirely sure

why he hated his mom so much, but he gave a traditional, stuffy aristocratic lady from Prussia plenty to be angry about. First and foremost, Humboldt was gay, or bisexual, probably, but he carried out several love affairs with men, and he didn't keep it all that secret. But it also, it might have been because of his rejection of his family's Lutheran faith. He pushed back against the label of atheism, but his writings left God out to a degree that made a lot of his contemporaries nervous.

He was also highly critical of a lot of the church's abuses, though that was kind of a proud German tradition. Perhaps more controversial was the fact that he was very tolerant of Judaism, which was not very much not a German tradition. Not really anybody's tradition. No, not even in Judaism, really. Yeah. Anyway, so by 1799, he had enough clout connections and inherited enough fortune to do some real travel. But just back then, just being able to charter your own expedition wasn't enough. You also needed permission from the various factions that were busy carving the world up into spheres of influence, most of whom were at war with one another.

It took a while, but eventually he secured permission to travel to South America for himself and Ambenpland, a French physician and botanist who was almost certainly Humboldt's lover at the time. Okay, baby, I know Carnival isn't the thing yet, but trust me, this is going to be so crazy and fun. But despite being a Prussian citizen and ostensibly an employee of that government, he was able to obtain permission from the Spanish crown for his expedition, and that was mostly because there was a shortage of competent naturalists willing to make the journey to an unexplored malarial part of the globe for the purposes of see what's there on their own dime, right? So governments were grabbing up colonies faster than they could explore them,

and Spain was hoping to offset the costs by finding out, you know, what was actually in those colonies. And who better to send than a mine inspector with a pension for increasing gold ore production. So they set out for Havana, but an outbreak of typhoid fever forces the ship to port in Venezuela. And that's where Alexander von Homba will make his first major contribution to science, and it was probably his most important. So one of the things the Spanish crown really wanted him to do is take a look at their agricultural operations and give them ideas about how to increase production and efficiency.

So he's visiting this cacao plantation near Caracas, and he sees that the water level of the nearby lake has gone down quite a bit. And while he's studying the causes of that, he would be the first. first person to develop the concept of human-caused climate change. Okay. That's cool. He starts explaining it immediately gets hit with a water balloon. James Inhock. Come on.

What do you grow up? What does that even mean? There's water? I'm not saying there's not water. So stupid. Hit me with another one. You hit me with another balloon. What even is that?

Is that like rubber? That's going to be bad for the environment. Yeah. Is that a petroleum product? Yeah. So he did a bunch of other shit in Venezuela. He spent a ton of time traveling the Orinoco River documented the flora, the fauna, the native cultures he found along the way. He was also able to partially document the culture of a recently extinct Amazonian tribe called the Atouris.

And I only mention them because it gives rise to the most fascinating sentence in his Wikipedia article, quote, several words of the tribe were transferred to Humboldt by one parrot, end quote. This bird? It's like a Flintstone's court reporter. That's what it does. So then he went to... So then he went to Cuba where he spent so much time and effort

documenting the botany geology and culture that he's often called the second discoverer of Cuba, which is like super fucking racist, but no doubt quite an honor at the time. The discoverer of Cuba that mattered. Cuba, but you know, for real this time... Come back to me. I'm trying to... Guys, do we count as white?

Like, I feel like we should. Are we with? This feels white. The thing that we're doing. To be clear, the first discoverer was also some European, too. So, yeah. So, okay, so, but then he went to the Andes where he bonplunded a bunch of natives and a few Ecuadorian nobleman climb the snow-capped volcano Chimborazo to a height of 19,286 feet. That's 5,878 meters.

And while they missed the summit by a good thousand feet or so, they did achieve what Europeans thought. at the time was a new altitude record. Hell, no Westerner had even reached that elevation in a fucking hot air balloon. Incas, however, had been routinely doing it for centuries. Ah, I hate to see it.

All right, well, I've got a parrot to ask about what happened near the top of that mountain, so while I get the straight tea, we'll take a little break for some apropos of nothing. There it is, Cheo, the top of Harappa Mountain, and here I am, the first man to gaze.

upon it. Indeed you are. What an incredible discovery, sir. Hey, Chale, have you seen my goats? I feel like they were... Dude! Dude! Oh, uh... I mean, uh, whoa! How'd you guys get up here? Nobody's ever been up this high before.

It's crazy. Really? Then where did you come from? Oh, me? I was... I was, um... Down. Down? Down? Yep. Down. I was down.

Just, uh, I was just waiting for a white guy to discover this mountain. Probably. Hey, Craig, I checked up here and there aren't it. Oh, fuck, it's a white guy. Oh, come on. How did you get all the way up there?

Uh, I followed you? Okay. Look, it's very obvious to me that you natives discover this mountain first and you're just letting white guys who come here think they discover it. What? We would never do that.

No, no, no, no. It's too late and you've ruined it for me. Oh, come on, man. Hey, there's a river on the other side. that nobody's ever seen before you want to, you want to discover that? Yeah, I would. Go tell everybody to get out of the river for like 15 minutes.

I'm on it. What did you say? I said I'm honored to meet you. And we're back. When we left off, this man was doing some sea snail worthy shit, if ever I've heard about it. Maybe even two sea sails. Can I say that?

You never know, yeah. Tell us what happened next. All right, so it's worth noting as I'm talking about all these places that, you know that he's going to like none of them have roads right again many of them don't even have paths or i mean not paths going the way he wants to go if there are maps at all their rudimentary is all shit i mean think fucking place map map right so when humbled and bum plan decide to cross over the andes to the pacific they're just winging it which is how basically all their exploration is done they come across lewis and clark like the other team in sean of the dead they're like pointing at each other

So from the Andes, they catch a ship off the Pacific coast to modern-day Ecuador, and they head to what was then called New Spain and is now called Mexico. While he was there, he produced an incredibly extensive report on the nation's mining that tickled the shit out of the Spanish. He also detailed Aztec ruins, measured elevations, helped establish a safer route from Mexico City to Veracruz, identified local plants, and otherwise did the kind of shit that gets shit named after you later. Okay, hold on.

Heath definitely has a drink name. after him somewhere and I guarantee there is not a lot of dignity and whatever did get that honor. That's all I'm saying. It was not dignified. That is correct. But to be fair, Humboldt did that too while he was in Mexico, probably. So from there... It's called Heath Bar Punch.

So from there, he decided he wanted to see the United States. His permission slip from the Spanish monarchy wouldn't get him in, obviously. But by now he's a pretty well-known European scientist. then President Thomas Jefferson was desperate for European scientists to take America seriously. So when Humboldt wrote to ask permission to come do some scientistsing, Jefferson sent back an offer to basically suck his dick if that would hurry him along. It would. It helped matters a lot that he told Jefferson that he found mammoth teeth near the equator. And Jefferson was kind of obsessed with the idea that they were still living mammoths somewhere on the American continent.

I feel like someone would have noticed before they found teeth. but I appreciate the optimism. Teeth first is weird, right? So after a few weeks in the U.S., he goes back to Europe, but he sets about publishing an abridged form of the 4,000 pages of diary notes he kept

while he was on his American sojourn. And he publishes them extravagantly. He was rich, he wasn't frugal, so his books were filled with these full-color illustrations and visually engaging charts and shit. He also had his shit translated into as many languages as he could before he exhausted pretty much his entire.

personal fortune. Sounds like this guy studied biology, geography, and publicity. Am I right? Yeah, just not fucking accounting. But he wasn't just... Sounds like this guy's wife be shopping. Am I right? I am fucking a stool.

You can't see it because it's an audio meeting. But he wasn't just an engaging writer with really pretty books. He was also a fantastic scientist. His measurements and records during the expedition made major contributions to geography, meteorology, and botany. He was also among the first naturalists to realize that part of describing a new biological specimen was describing its environment. And that might not seem like much today, but it was revolutionary at the time.

His focus on environmental factors would spin off whole new sciences, like multiple sciences. And he was so good at taking the most precise possible measurements that today we call the type of science that goes out and takes really precise measurements in non-laboratory environments, Humboldian science. Guys, look, I love guesstimating as much as the next scientist, but what have we really put our full humbussy into this one?

You know what I'm saying? Well, humbussy is another thing named after Middoll. You can have your name on Measure Twice Cut Once, or you can have your name on butthole. You got to pick one or it's going to be confusing. It could be a tragic confusion. How many sea snails can I have?

So his other big contribution was to sort of suss out the holistic nature of nature. Again, it sounds pretty fucking obvious today, but that's only because we've been building off Alexander von Humboldt's model for centuries now. Before him, the common European worldview when it came to nature was biblical, right? Nature was there for humans to subdue. God put the animals and the plants there for us, and we could do whatever the fuck we wanted with him. And even outside of the religious world, that view still held sway. You don't need to look any further than the abject cruelty of scientific experiments of the late San Francisco.

1700s to verify that. And yes, I'm comparing that to pouring caustic chemicals on bunnies to see if they make good eye shadow and shit. You have to light him on fire to get a proper smoky eye out of them. It's a whole thing. It sounds like you're insulting Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I'm not sure why. Always. Hey, fuck you. So let me give you a quick example of how Elizabeth Holmes, is that you? No. So let me give you a quick example of how baked in the perceptions. that I'm talking about is here. When we talk about the Department of Conservation today, we assume that the thing that's being conserved is nature itself, right? We're conserving the streams and the forests and the fields in a natural state. Or more realistically, we're sort of making a

vague stab at doing that while making way for the fucking pipe dream of infant growth that fuels capitalism. But we think at least that the point is to conserve nature, right? But when the term Department of Conservation was coined, what they were trying to conserve. was enough fish and game for outdoorsmen. In other words, they wanted to make sure that there was always enough deer and fish around for them to kill. Yeah, you know, the way AI feels about humans. Here's the thing, they're going to want a few of us around so they can taunt us like,

you know, after they win. Otherwise, it ruins it. I feel like they're going to pick me. They're going to want somebody who gets really mad when you pick them. You are tauntable. That's for sure. I'm very tauntable. Very tauntable.

Right. I'm backing into just eagerly the taunting. But of course, Humboldt's observations and measurements in an area that was only just being subdued by capitalism really challenged that whole view, right? He showed without even meaning to that our rush to cut down all the trees and drain the swamps and build canals actually was making irreconcilable changes to the environment around us. And that's a really hard observation to reconcile with the don't worry, God will fix it view that sort of undergirded the dominant worldview of that. the time. Yeah, thank goodness people don't feel that way anymore. That would be awful. Yeah, right? Yeah. So anyway, so following his big expedition, he sets out to publish this massive work. He thinks this is going to take about two years. It takes 21. And even then,

it was more abandoned than finished. But in 1829, he decided he wanted to get out there and do some more exploring, which is fucking nuts, because in 1829, he was 60 years old. And that's 60 in 1829 years, right? That's 143 in 2026 years. But in 1829, a Russian finance minister reached out to him, hoping that he would come to the Euro Mountains and assess the feasibility of Russia starting a platinum-based currency. Now, the idea of a platinum-based currency was stupid, and he knew that without having to go up to any fucking mountain to tell anybody,

but he didn't want to pass up on a chance for a cool trip. So he took the dude up on the offer, and he pretended that he was going to assess it. And once he was heading that way anyway, Russia asked if maybe he'd like to take a tour of their many minds and see if he had any ideas on how to increase production. in them. Little did they know, all they really needed to do to entice him, though, was just pay for the fucking trip. He long since squandered his inheritance on groovy illustrations for his book,

so just the ability to take on another big expedition was more than enough to convince him. So between May and November of 1829, Humboldt and his expedition traveled almost 10,000 miles, over 15,000 kilometers from St. Petersburg to central Siberia, which are only about 2,500 miles apart. so they certainly didn't take the direct route. All along the way, they measured everything they could think to quantify except anything to do with the lives and conditions of Russian serfs. Unlike his American expedition, this one was constantly accompanied by government representatives going, don't look in that direction.

Look over that way. A tradition that Russia maintains to this very day. Yeah, I bet some of their soldiers wish that up was an option. No, his Russian expedition lasted for eight months. The Wiki helpfully adds that it used, 12,244 horses along the way, in case anybody was curious about that number. Ultimately, he was disappointed in the endeavor. Government interference kept him from doing any particularly useful science,

and he was barely in any one place long enough to even get anything named after him, but it does technically have him doing science on four continents before the end of his life. 12,244 horses, did they just put him end-to-end and walk there on their backs? Yeah, right? Yeah. What the fuck happened? So he died at Berlin at the age of 89, and he had some pretty solid last words, quote, how glorious these sunbeams are.

They seem to call earth to the heavens, end quote. No idea what he's talking about, but that sounds good, right? Okay, I mean, clearly planned that out. I want to believe that he didn't die right away, though, after he did that. And then he was like, fuck, I have to stay silent for a while. Yes, right. Or maybe that's like all he said. He was like Groot.

He would just answer no matter what you said with that for a while. So by the time of his death, he'd been elected to pretty much every learned society that existed in the world at the time. He was as decorated as a war hero. And he was a major influence on such eminent thinkers as Darwin Thoreau and nine other guys I'd never heard of, but were important enough to have their own wikis. All right. Weird for Wikipedia to have a thought you were neat section. That's cool. It's good for him.

Yeah. But of course, of all his honors, perhaps the greatest is that he is the namesake of Humboldt County, California, which is basically the Bordeaux of Weed, which, as will probably surprise none of you, is why I end up learning so much about the dude in the first place. All right. And are you ready for the... All right. And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be? My essay on the dude they named Mendocino County after is not going to be as fun as this. And are you ready for the quiz? Always. All right, Noah. Obviously, Humboldt's association with the dank is the most important thing about him.

And tragically, he appears not to have a strain of weed named after him yet. So what should we call it? A. Prussian Blue Dream. B. Observational geology Cush. What? C.

they get worse. Maui, wowi, that's a lot of publications. I like that one. I actually like that one. That's pretty good.

That one's good. Or D. Alexander von Humboldt's personal narrative of travels to the equitinificatogal regions of the new cannabis.

Weed. Oh. Eli, you have never sounded older than you do during this fucking question, man. You said the dank.

That was like the oldest you've ever sounded. That's what we call it. When Eli does the drugs Which I have done in the last three years Yeah Yeah I've smoked several drugs recently Maybe you've heard of them

They're in Canada, yeah They're called the drugs Yeah, so... I'm on YouTube I think it's C Maui-Wawi, that's a lot of publications Sure, whatever frees me from the prison of my own words All right, no, when the time comes

I'll be doing my last words as you know on a podcast. Oh yeah. What should they be? A. Smash that like and subscribe button. What's better help? Eli, last word.

Yeah. C. You should have voted for Hillary Clinton or D. Oh, this is the best ones. I'll see you in Valhalla. Smash that like and subscribe button. All right. So D is good, but you risk

summoning Cash Patel. So I think it's going to be C, the Hillary Clinton one. I tried to trick you, but you got it. Nicely done. Noah, his very expensive illustrated books did break into the best-selling charts. Which of his books was the most popular? A, his book on how amazing small flies are, the great Natsby.

B. Mating Habits of Underage, Bovines, Buffalo, Lita. C. Large primates fighting on the African plain. Apes of Wrath, or D. His book on racist lions. Pride and prejudice. Fantastic.

No Lion King. I'm going to go with E, all of the above, because those are all fucking gold. They all broke the best cell. Yes. Yes. There it is.

All right. Well, Cecil, you called Lions Racist. So you win. All right. I'll choose Heath for next week. All right. Cheers. Cheers.

Cheers. For Noah, Cecil and Heath. I'm Eli Bosniz. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week. And by then, Heath will be an expert on something else. Dream now and then, you can listen to all the podcasts that Tom is on, just in case, you know, but they bum you out later to listen to.

Oh, Jesus Christ, dude. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per-upisode donation at patreon.com forward slash citation pod, or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.com. And thanks to this brave explorer, this will from henceforth be known as the Humboldt River Delta.

Hey, can we come swim now? Really, Craig? What? What? It's been like 20 minutes.