Alexander von Humbolt

EFIL4STOWS

September 14, 1769 – May 6, 1859

Over-achievers. There was always one in your class at school. There's often one at work. Some of us have them as friends (not me, of course). They can be admirable, inspiring, annoying - depends on the personality type, of both the over-achiever and the achiever-perceiver.

Alexander von Humbolt (AvH, A-Hum or 'ver Uber Boffin' if he was getting a write-up in the red-tops) was the over-achiever's over-achiever. The thinking man's crumpet. Intellectually, he'd get it.

Let's take, for example, his summer holiday of 1789. Humbolt went on an excursion up the Rhine and by way of a memoir of this trip he wrote the treatise Mineralogische Beobachtungen über einige Basalte am Rhein or Mineralogic observations on some basalts at the river Rhine. Treatise. Mineralgic observations. He was 20 years old. Hmm.

That was nothing though, Humbolt as a mere callow youth. He would look back at his inexperienced fumbling with the Rhine basalts with a mixture of wistful nostalgia and a nagging frustration that he hadn't both discovered and thoroughly researched the K-hole while he was still in his teens. Everyone makes mistakes and has regrets, but most of us don't then spend the rest of our lives standing astride the globe in polymathic splendour; going everywhere, measuring and recording everything, making significant findings in the natural sciences, geography, meteorology and the rest to boot. Most of us don't have squids, willows, towns, mountains, universities and hog-nosed skunks named after us. He does. Are you an honorary Mexican citizen? Guess what.

It was easier in those days, of course, but even still it's clear the boy was different gravy. Where I consider it an achievement to make it out of the house at the weekend, Humbolt wrote Kosmos - an attempt to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge, in five volumes. Five volumes! It sometimes takes me more than a week to come up with this dreck and most of that is copy-pasting from Wikipedia with a few silly words thrown in for good measure. I blame my generation, if I was born into a prominent mid-19th Century Pomeranian family it would be a different story altogether. I still probably wouldn't have been worshipped by Darwin though but that's all right - the whole Creation thing left me a bit cold apart from Swervedriver.

Status: Dead

Lookalike: Inspector George Gently

In Three Words: Work-Life Balance