The medium of visual representation played a crucial role in the Enlightenment project of taking intellectual possession of nature, and of dominating it. Pictures helped to categorize the various natural phenomena, to disseminate knowledge about their appearance and, so to speak, to capture them on paper or canvas. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, natural historians treating extreme and threatening natural phenomena, such as volcanoes, earthquakes, waterspouts or geysers, increasingly supplemented their written accounts with engraved illustrations. In this (...) paper, I concentrate on the visual treatment of earthquakes in learned publications. I discuss two different types of graphic representation of this natural phenomenon, which had always been considered as virtually ‘undepictable’.After the great earthquake of Lisbon in 1755, research into the subject was greatly stimulated. Two scholars, the British natural philosopher John Michell and the Dutchman Johan Drijfhout, published earthquake treatises in learned journals, and each complemented his text with a diagrammatic illustration. By translating their theoretical considerations into the abstract form of geological sections, these natural philosophers moulded a new visual language for seismology and earth history. An entirely different example of visual representation as a tool in research into earthquakes can be seen in the approach to the earthquake in Calabria in 1783. The Neapolitan Academy of Science and Letters sent some of its members to investigate the devastating effects of this earthquake on the landscape and the nature of the country. The topographical changes were recorded on the spot by trained draughtsmen, with the aim of providing accurate and comprehensive visual documentation. The pictures are remarkable in the way they reveal a conflict between the new demands of modern empirical science and the established ‘picturesque’ conventions of landscape painting. (shrink)

Summary From summer 1792 until spring 1797, Alexander von Humboldt was a mining official in the Franconian parts of Prussia. He visited mines, inspected smelting works, calculated budgets, wrote official reports, founded a mining school, performed technological experiments, and invented a miners’ lamp and respirator. At the same time he also participated in the Republic of Letters, corresponded with savants in all Europe, and was a member of the Leopoldine Carolinian Academy and the Berlin Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde. He collected minerals, (...) made geognostic observations, performed chemical and physiological experiments, read the newest scientific journals, and prepared and published texts on mineralogy, geognosy, chemistry, botany and physiology. Humboldt did his scientific investigations alongside his administrative and technical work. This raises the question of whether there were fruitful interactions between Humboldt's technical-administrative work and (parts of) his natural inquiry. I argue that the mining official Humboldt was a late eighteenth-century figure of hybrid savant-technician. Mines and smelting works provided numerous opportunities for studies of nature. Humboldt systematically used inspection tours for mineralogical and geognostic observations. He transformed mines into chemical laboratories, and he transferred knowledge and material items from his natural inquiries in mines to academic institutions. The main objective of this paper is to illuminate the persona of savant-technician (or scientific-technological expert) along with Humboldt's mixed technological and scientific work during his term as mining official. (shrink)