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Article ID: CBB896137027

Mines, Mountains, and the Making of a Vertical Consciousness in Germany Ca. 1800 (2020)

Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Volume: 62
Issue: 4
Pages: 612-630

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12337

URI: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1600-0498.12337

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Travel; exploration Science and society Science and culture Oceanography Oceans and seas Geography Mountains Mines and mining 19th century Germany Humboldt, Alexander von

The insight that scientific theories are “practice-laden” has animated scholarship in the history of science for nearly three decades. This article examines a style of geographical thought that was, I argue, movement-laden. The thought-style in question has been described as a “vertical consciousness that engulfed science in the early nineteenth century,” and is closely associated with the geographical vision of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Humboldt’s science spanned nature’s horizontal and vertical axes, from Saxon mines to Andean summits, and from the currents of the ocean to those of the aerial ocean. In probing the origins of Humboldt’s vertical thinking, this article opens up a broader history about the industrial practices and travel cultures that originally animated it. Humboldt’s “global physics” first emerged within a context of vertical travel, up mountains and into mines and caverns. Rhythms of the body—lethal for some, “sublime” for others—became rhythms of the mind. A view of nature as set of vertically complementary spaces rippled through mining culture, Romantic art, and the geographical sciences. To trace the earliest routes of Humboldt’s science is to acknowledge the many actors—some celebrated, most unsung—who took part in the making of a vertical consciousness.

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Article Wilko Graf von Hardenberg; Martin Mahony (2020) Introduction—up, down, Round and Round: Verticalities in the History of Science. Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology (pp. 595-611). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB896137027/

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