Athanasius Kircher (c. 1601–1680) wrote more than forty books on a stunning variety of topics during his lifetime—a record befitting an intrepid, frenzied scholar whose goal in life was nothing less than to know everything.
The epitome of the Renaissance man, Kircher spoke twelve languages, was history’s first Egyptologist, authored the first science fiction novel, and once studied volcanoes by lowering himself into the smoking crater of Mount Vesuvius. His love of learning is perhaps best reflected in the title of a book he wrote in 1669: The Great Art of Knowing.
Kircher was born in the Roman Catholic city of Geisa in central Germany, a country torn by religious strife during his lifetime. He was forced to flee his hometown to escape Protestant forces in 1622. He became a Jesuit priest in 1628 and moved through France, Austria, and Italy before settling in Rome.
The first book Kircher published, in 1631, was a treatise on magnetism. He also wrote on sundials, gravity, and mathematics. In 1656, he became one of the first to theorize that bubonic plague might be caused by microorganisms.
Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus, in which he attempted to decode the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet, was one of his best-known books. Although Kircher ultimately failed, he ignited widespread interest in ancient Egypt and left behind notebooks that were invaluable resources for Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), the French scholar who eventually succeeded in decoding the ancient writing.
Over the course of his lifetime, Kircher collected a vast array of books, artifacts, and inventions, which were housed in the Museum Kircherianum in Rome. The museum was one of the city’s largest until it was broken up in the nineteenth century.
Known during his lifetime as the “master of a hundred arts,” Kircher was one of Europe’s most famous scholars, largely self-taught and motivated by a zeal for knowledge for its own sake. After his death, however, Kircher’s reputation dimmed, as his amateur approach to scientific studies gave way to greater professionalization and specialization.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Kircher invented a perpetual motion machine, a talking dummy, and a music-writing machine—none of which worked. His inventions were satirized in The Island of the Day Before (1994), by the Italian novelist Umberto Eco (1932–).
- One of Kircher’s projects was attempting to translate the Voynich manuscript, a famous fifteenth-century book written in an unidentified language. Kircher was unable to decipher the manuscript, however, and all attempts by modern code breakers to do so—including one by a team from the National Security Agency—have also been stymied. Some scholars have theorized that the book may have been an elaborate medieval hoax.
- In his Physiologia (1680), Kircher was the first observer to accurately measure the airspeed velocity of a swallow—an impressive feat, given that stopwatches hadn’t been invented yet.
