Alexander von Humboldt on the loss of his meteorological instruments

The 19th century explorer sometimes felt that his efforts to record the natural world made his journeys more difficult and called unencumbered travellers ‘lucky’.The explorerAlexander von Humboldt is fed up, frustrated and far from home. He waits in a miserable village, by the Magdalena river in Colombia in 1801. “It was suffocatingly hot; at this time of year there is not a breath of wind. Feeling depressed, we lay on the ground in the main square,” he writes in hisPersonal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent.“My barometer had broken and it was the last one I had. I had anticipated measuring the slope of the river and fixing the speed of its current and the positions of different stages through astronomical observations. Only travellers know how painful it is to suffer such accidents, which continued t o dog me in the Andes and in Mexico; each time this happened I felt the same.Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Meteorology Science Colombia Americas World news Source Type: news