Berghaus, Heinrich Karl Wilhelm

Heinrich Karl Wilhelm Berghaus (May 3, 1797 - February 17, 1884) was a German (Prussian) geographer, linguist, and ethnologist who founded the Potsdam Geographische Kunstschule. He was born in Kleve, Germany, and, as a young man, trained as a surveyor. He put his training to work in 1811, working in the French Department of Lippe as a bridge and road engineer. When the Kingdom of Westphalia dissolved in 1813, he volunteered for the Prussian army administration, traveling with General Bogislav Friedrich Emanuel von Tauentzien (1760 - 1824) as far as Brittany. In 1816, he joined the staff of the Prussian trigonometrical survey, conducting surveys throughout the nation. Among his many accomplishments, Berghaus is credited with inventing the 'thematic atlas' in 1845. In addition to his own work, he trained some of the most important German geographers and cartographers of the late 19th century, including August Heinrich Petermann (1822 - 1878) and his nephew Hermann Berghaus (1828 - 1890). The elder Berghaus also was a friend and associate of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769 - 1859), producing some of the maps in his publications. In 1837, he inherited rights to Daniel Gottlob Reymann's (1759 - 1837) monumental Geographischer Specialatlas von Deutschland. Berghaus is best known for his own influential and wide-ranging atlases, namely Atlas von Asien, published between 1833 and 1837, and Berghaus' Physikalischer Atlas, published in multiple editions in the 1830s - 1840s. Although Atlas von Asien was a commercial failure, it was regarded as a work of supreme quality, boosting the reputation of the publisher Justus Perthes and setting up their next collaboration, Berghaus' Physikalischer Atlas, for success. In addition to his geographical work, Berghaus was also an accomplished linguist and ethnologist and published an important 1851 article on American Indian language and ethnology (Geographisches Jahrbuch, 1851).