Hitting peaks of scientific discovery
At 4800 metres, Mont Blanc is the tallest mountain in Europe. Nobody thought of climbing it until the Swiss aristocrat Horace Saussure, who was something of a scientist, offered a reward to anybody who could find a way to the top.
In 1786 two French climbers, Jacques Balmat and Dr Michel Paccard, reached the summit and claimed the reward. They also told Saussure how to reach the top.
As a well-bred aristocrat, Saussure made the climb in style. He was accompanied by 18 servants, a large tent, an entire bed, mattress, a green curtain, a ladder, two nightshirts, two frockcoats, a pair of slippers and a pile of scientific equipment.
Saussure tested the climbers’ pulse rates, sense of smell, taste, and hearing at high altitudes. He measured atmospheric humidity, and with two barometers confirmed the height of the mountain.
He measured the temperature of boiling water on the summit, and measured the precise colour of the sky – ‘‘the deepest blue I have ever seen. I could hardly believe my eyes’’.
In the 18th century it was generally believed that the highest mountain in the world was Mt Chimborazo in Peru. In 1799, after several gruelling years exploring Venezuela, Colombia and the Amazon basin, the German scientists Alexander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland climbed Mount Chimborazo.
Towards the summit, their hands were cut and their feet blistered as they negotiated steep, narrow and icy ridges. They lost their way in fog just below the summit.
Nevertheless, they measured the temperature of the soil, air and snow, and made trigonometric, barometric, and geomagnetic observations.
In the early 18th century, most Europeans were awed and frightened by mountains. They didn’t know how to survive in such hostile, remote places.
Both Saussure and Humboldt wrote glowingly about the splendour, challenge and excitement of their mountaineering adventures, which struck a note with a big readership.
Saussure introduced the sport of mountaineering and mountain tourism to Europe while he and Humboldt played a large part in transforming European attitudes to mountains and the natural world.
The pair saw wild nature not as a place to fear but as a place of grandeur and beauty to be enjoyed. They virtually invented a shifting new romantic attitude to nature, first reflected in the poetry of Humboldt’s friends Goethe and Schiller, then in Coleridge and Wordsworth. Our climbers also influenced Jefferson, Darwin, and Thoreau. Mountains moved from the background of paintings to the foreground.
Today’s mountains are overrun by tourists and scientists.
These days, some 20,000 mountaineer tourists climb Mt Blanc every year and Europe’s highest weather station perches on its summit. Since 1996, a research centre for alpine ecosystems has been working on the lower slopes of Mont Blanc.
Being so remote, Peru’s Mount Chimborazo gets few tourists but many members of the American Alpine Club climb the mountain to help a team of scientific researchers up there measuring glacial accession, toxins in water, changing vegetation, CO2 levels, and the effects of global warming.
We could say that Saussure and Humboldt were pioneer greenies.