Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in the Americas, exploring and describing them for the first time from a modern scientific point of view.

He was the first person to describe the phenomenon and cause of human-induced climate change, in 1800 and again in 1831, based on observations generated during his travels.

Alexander von Humboldt was born in Berlin in Prussia on 14 September 1769.

In 1766, Alexander Georg married Maria Elisabeth Colomb, a well-educated woman and widow of Baron Hollwede, with whom she had a son.

Alexander Georg died in 1779, leaving the brothers Humboldt in the care of their emotionally distant mother.

Marked for a political career, Alexander studied finance for six months in 1787 at the University of Frankfurt (Oder), which his mother might have chosen less for its academic excellence than its closeness to their home in Berlin.

On 25 April 1789, he matriculated at the University of Göttingen, then known for the lectures of C. G. Heyne and anatomist J. F. Blumenbach.

The scientific friendship between Banks and Humboldt lasted until Banks's death in 1820, and the two shared botanical specimens for study.

Humboldt's scientific excursion up the Rhine resulted in his 1790 treatise Mineralogische Beobachtungen über einige Basalte am Rhein (Brunswick, 1790)

With this emphasis, he studied commerce and foreign languages at Hamburg, geology at Freiberg School of Mines in 1791 under A.G. Werner, leader of the Neptunist school of geology; from anatomy at Jena under J.C. Loder; and astronomy and the use of scientific instruments under F.X. von Zach and J.G. Köhler.

Travels and work in Europe Humboldt graduated from the Freiberg School of Mines in 1792 and was appointed to a Prussian government position in the Department of Mines as an inspector in Bayreuth and the Fichtel mountains.

Humboldt's researches into the vegetation of the mines of Freiberg led to the publication in Latin (1793) of his Florae Fribergensis, accedunt Aphorismi ex Doctrina, Physiologiae Chemicae Plantarum, which was a compendium of his botanical researches.

In 1797, Humboldt returned to Jena for three months.

In 1794, Humboldt was admitted to the famous group of intellectuals and cultural leaders of Weimar Classicism.

Humboldt contributed (7 June 1795) to Schiller's new periodical, Die Horen, a philosophical allegory entitled Die Lebenskraft, oder der rhodische Genius (The Life Force, or the Rhodian Genius).In 1792 and 1797, Humboldt was in Vienna; in 1795 he made a geological and botanical tour through Switzerland and Italy.

Neither brother attended the funeral of their mother on 19 November 1796.

These were lengthy, state-sponsored enterprises to gather information about plants and animals from the Spanish realms, assess economic possibilities, and provide plants and seeds for the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid (founded 1755).

Crown officials as early as 1779 issued and systematically distributed Instructions concerning the most secure and economic means to transport live plants by land and sea from the most distant countries, with illustrations, including one for the crates to transport seeds and plants.

Spanish Foreign Minister Don Mariano Luis de Urquijo received the formal proposal and Humboldt was presented to the monarch in March 1799.

Before leaving Madrid in 1799, Humboldt and Bonpland visited the Natural History Museum, which held results of Martín de Sessé y Lacasta and José Mariano Mociño's botanical expedition to New Spain.

Armed with authorization from the King of Spain, Humboldt and Bonpland made haste to sail, taking the ship Pizarro from A Coruña, on 5 June 1799.

Humboldt met the Venezuelan Bolívar himself in 1804 in Paris and spent time with him in Rome.

In February 1800, Humboldt and Bonpland left the coast with the purpose of exploring the course of the Orinoco River and its tributaries.

Around 19 March 1800, Humboldt and Bonpland discovered dangerous electric eels, whose shock could kill a man.

Humboldt returned to the incident in several of his later writings, including his travelogue Personal Narrative (1814–29), Views of Nature (1807), and Aspects of Nature (1849).Two months later, they explored the territory of the Maypures and that of the then-recently extinct Aturès Indians.

On 24 November 1800, the two friends set sail for Cuba, landing on 19 December, where they met fellow botanist and plant collector John Fraser.

Humboldt and Bonpland stayed in Cuba until 5 March 1801, when they left for the mainland of northern South America again, arriving there on 30 March.

On their way back to Europe from Mexico on their way to the United States, Humboldt and Bonpland stopped again in Cuba, leaving from the port of Veracruz and arriving in Cuba on 7 January 1804, staying until 29 April 1804.

Ascending the swollen stream of the Magdalena River to Honda, they arrived in Bogotá on 6 July 1801, where they met the Spanish botanist José Celestino Mutis, head of the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada, staying there until 8 September 1801.

Mutis was generous with his time and gave Humboldt access to the huge pictorial record he had compiled since 1783.

They crossed the frozen ridges of the Cordillera Real, they reached Quito on 6 January 1802, after a tedious and difficult journey.

Humboldt and Bonpland landed in Acapulco on 15 February 1803, and from there they went to Taxco, a silver-mining town in modern Guerrero.

In April 1803, he visited Cuernavaca, Morelos.

When he left Mexico a year later in 1804, from the east coast port of Veracruz, he took a similar set of measures, which resulted in a chart in the Political Essay, the physical plan of Mexico with the dangers of the road from Acapulco to Mexico City, and from Mexico City to Veracruz.

He also recognized important creole savants in Mexico, including José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez, who died in 1799, just before Humboldt's visit; Miguel Velásquez de León; and Antonio de León y Gama.

When he published his Vues des cordillères, he included a color image of the Aztec calendar stone, which had been discovered buried in the main plaza of Mexico City in 1790, along with select drawings of the Dresden codex and others he sought out later in European collections.

One of his most widely read publications resulting from his travels and investigations in Spanish America was the Essai politique sur le royaum de la Nouvelle Espagne, quickly translated to English as Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811).

This information would later be the basis for his Essay on the Political Kingdom of New Spain (1810).

After six weeks, Humboldt set sail for Europe from the mouth of the Delaware and landed at Bordeaux on 3 August 1804.

His Essay on the Geography of Plants (published first in French and then German, both in 1807) was based on the then novel idea of studying the distribution of organic life as affected by varying physical conditions.

By his delineation (in 1817) of isothermal lines, he at once suggested the idea and devised the means of comparing the climatic conditions of various countries.

His discovery of the decrease in intensity of Earth's magnetic field from the poles to the equator was communicated to the Paris Institute in a memoir read by him on 7 December 1804.

After a short trip to Italy with Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac for the purpose of investigating the law of magnetic declination and a stay of two and a half years in Berlin, in the spring of 1808, he settled in Paris.

He was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1805.Over the years other learned societies in the U.S. elected him a member, including the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA) in 1816; the Linnean Society of London in 1818; the New York Historical Society in 1820; a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1822.; the American Ethnological Society (New York) in 1843; and the American Geographical and Statistical Society, (New York) in 1856.

He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1810.

After Mexican independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexican government recognized him with high honors for his services to the nation.

In 1827, the first President of Mexico, Guadalupe Victoria granted Humboldt Mexican citizenship and in 1859, the President of Mexico, Benito Juárez, named Humboldt a hero of the nation (benemérito de la nación).

Financial necessity forced his permanent relocation to Berlin in 1827 from Paris.

On 12 May 1827 he settled permanently in Berlin, where his first efforts were directed towards the furtherance of the science of terrestrial magnetism.

In 1827, he began giving public lectures in Berlin, which became the basis for his last major publication, Kosmos (1845–62).For many years, it had been one of his favorite schemes to secure, by means of simultaneous observations at distant points, a thorough investigation of the nature and law of "magnetic storms" (a term invented by him to designate abnormal disturbances of Earth's magnetism).

The meeting at Berlin, on 18 September 1828, of a newly formed scientific association, of which he was elected president, gave him the opportunity of setting on foot an extensive system of research in combination with his diligent personal observations.

His appeal to the Russian government, in 1829, led to the establishment of a line of magnetic and meteorological stations across northern Asia.

Meanwhile, his letter to the Duke of Sussex, then (April 1836) president of the Royal Society, secured for the undertaking, the wide basis of the British dominions.

In 1869, the 100th year of his birth, Humboldt's fame was so great that cities all over America celebrated his birth with large festivals.

Humboldt's works, which were considered essential to a library in 1869, had flowery prose that fell out of fashion.

Third, a rising anti-German sentiment in the late 1800s and the early 1900s due to heavy German immigration to the United States and later World War 1.

On the eve of the 1959 hundredth anniversary of the death of Humboldt, the government of West Germany planned significant celebrations in conjunction with nations that Humboldt visited.

Between May and November 1829 he and the growing expedition traversed the wide expanse of the Russian empire from the Neva to the Yenisei, accomplishing in twenty-five weeks a distance of 9,614 miles (15,472 km).

Humboldt published two works on the Russian expedition, first Fragments de géologie et de climatologie asiatiques in 1831, based on lectures he gave on the topic.

In 1843, he completed the three-volume Asie Centrale, which he dedicated to Czar Nicholas, which he called "an unavoidable step, as the expedition was accomplished at his expense".

As of 2016, these works have not been translated to English.

His 1829 expedition to Russia when he was an old man is much less known than his five-year travels in Spanish America, which had resulted in many published volumes over the decades since his 1804 return.

The first two volumes of the Kosmos were published between the years 1845 and 1847 were intended to comprise the entire work, but Humboldt published three more volumes, one of which was posthumous.

The third and fourth volumes were published in 1850–58; a fragment of a fifth appeared posthumously in 1862.

In 1849 a German newspaper commented that in England two of the three different translations were made by women, "while in Germany most of the men do not understand it".

The first translation by Augustin Pritchard—published anonymously by Mr. Baillière (volume I in 1845 and volume II in 1848)—suffered from being hurriedly made.

Volume 3 of the German edition corresponds to the volumes 3 and 4 of the English translation, as the German volume appeared in 2 parts in 1850 and 1851.

Volume 5 of the German edition was not translated until 1981, again by a woman.

There have been new editions of print works, including his Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas (2014), which includes reproductions of all the color and black and white plates.

Despite international pressure, including the British government and Simón Bolívar's, along with European scientists including Humboldt, Francia kept Bonpland prisoner until 1831.

Humboldt and Bonpland maintained a warm correspondence about science and politics until Bonpland's death in 1858.During Humboldt's time in Paris, he met in 1818 the young and brilliant Peruvian student of the Royal Mining School of Paris, Mariano Eduardo de Rivero y Ustariz.

Agassiz delivered an address to the Boston Society of Natural History in 1869, on the centenary of his patron's birth.

Humboldt would later reveal to Darwin in the 1840s that he had been a fan of Darwin's grandfather's poetry.

Church painted Cotopaxi three times, twice in 1855 and then in 1859 in eruption.

He wrote to Humboldt in 1855, sending him his proposal for South American travels.

Ida Laura Pfeiffer, one of the first female travelers who completed two trips around the world from 1846 to 1855, followed in Humboldt's footsteps.

The two explorers met in Berlin in 1851 before Pfeiffer's second tour and again in 1855 when she returned to Europe.

In 1814 Humboldt accompanied the allied sovereigns to London.

Again in the autumn of 1822 he accompanied the same monarch to the Congress of Verona, proceeded thence with the royal party to Rome and Naples and returned to Paris in the spring of 1823.

Between 1830 and 1848 Humboldt was frequently employed in diplomatic missions to the court of King Louis Philippe of France, with whom he always maintained the most cordial personal relations.

He spent three years in France, from 1830 to 1833.

Humboldt's brother, Wilhelm, died on 8 April 1835.

Upon the accession of the crown prince Frederick William IV in June 1840, Humboldt's favor at court increased.

At 25 he met Reinhardt von Haeften (19 May 1772 – 20 October 1803), a 21-year-old lieutenant, with whom he lived and travelled for two years, and to whom he wrote in 1794: "I only live through you, my good precious Reinhardt".

A traveling companion in the Americas for five years was Aimé Bonpland, and in Quito in 1802 he met the Ecuadorian aristocrat Don Carlos Montúfar, who traveled with Humboldt to Europe and lived with him.

Although he preferred living in Paris, by 1836 the King had insisted he return to Germany.

He lived with the Court at Sanssouci, and latterly in Berlin, with his valet Seifert, who had accompanied him to Russia in 1829.

In 1908, the sexual researcher Paul Näcke gathered reminiscences from homosexuals including Humboldt's friend the botanist Carl Bolle, then nearly 90 years old: some of the material was incorporated by Magnus Hirschfeld into his 1914 study Homosexuality in Men and Women.

On 24 February 1857, Humboldt suffered a minor stroke, which passed without perceptible symptoms.

It was not until the winter of 1858–1859 that his strength began to decline; on 6 May 1859, he died peacefully in Berlin, aged 89.

The first centenary of Humboldt's birth was celebrated on 14 September 1869, with great enthusiasm in both the New and Old Worlds.

Although the original endowment was lost in the German hyperinflation of the 1920s, and again as a result of World War II, the Foundation has been re-endowed by the German government to award young academics and distinguished senior academics from abroad.

Alexander von Humboldt is also a German ship named after the scientist, originally built in 1906 by the German shipyard AG Weser at Bremen as Reserve Sonderburg.

She was operated throughout the North and Baltic Seas until being retired in 1986.

Subsequently, she was converted into a three-masted barque by the German shipyard Motorwerke Bremerhaven, and was re-launched in 1988 as Alexander von Humboldt.

The Jan De Nul Group operates a hopper dredger built in 1998 also named Alexander von Humboldt.

Letters of Alexander von Humboldt written between the years 1827 and 1858 to Varnhagen von Ense together with extracts from Varnhagen's diaries, and letters of Varnhagen and others to Humboldt/ authorized translation from the German (with explanatory notes and a full index of names), biodiversitylibrary.org Nova genera et species plantarum (7 vols.