Frequently described as “the last man who knew everything,” 17th-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher was a true polymath. Born May 2, 1601, in Germany, Kircher relocated to Italy and the Roman College by the 1630s, fleeing the Thirty Years’ War. There he began a lifetime of research and publication in an impressively wide array of fields: from medicine to Egyptology, from music to theology, from linguistics to cartography and more.
Kircher contributed to astronomy through his studies of Earth as a planet – he famously lowered himself into the crater of Mount Vesuvius to take measurements not long after its 1631-32 eruption, and studied the magnetism of Earth’s poles. But he also studied optics, observed sunspots and planets, and published Iter extaticum coeleste (The Ecstatic Heavenly Journey). Though he also believed in dragons, rejected the organic origin of fossils, and believed in spontaneous generation, Kircher remains respected today for his efforts to disseminate knowledge: He compiled data and observations from around the world and published it to the wider European scientific community, essentially serving as a one-man scientific journal. Today, a crater on the Moon named for him celebrates his contributions.
