Seven years on the road
At 21 years of age, Jacob Bernoulli (1654–1705) completed his theology studies at the University of Basel and was ordained as a Reformed minister in March 1676. In August of the same year, he went traveling; all in all, his journeys would take up a large part of the following seven years before he finally embarked on an academic career in his hometown, Basel, where he would hold the chair of mathematics from 1687 to his death.
A document preserved in Bernoulli's manuscript estate at the Basel University Library bears witness to these "wandering years": a small autograph booklet titled Jacobi Bernoulli Reisbüchlein. In this travel diary, Bernoulli describes his journeys to France, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and England, where he attended a Royal Academy meeting in London and met prominent natural philosophers such as Robert Hooke and Johan Flamsteed.
In Reisbüchlein, Bernoulli presents an almost day-to-day account of the time he spent "on the road", traveling on horseback, by mail or merchant's coach, by boat, or on foot. At the places where he stayed for some time – from a few days up to more than a year –, he wrote down descriptions of the location, the sights, local manners, and expressions that caught his eye, also noting where he stayed and what he spent on transport, food or lodging. The funding for his travels came partly from his family in Basel, partly from the compensations he received for his work as a private teacher: At Geneva, he tutored a young lady who had early in her life lost her eyesight by an illness; at a small town in the Limousin he educated the children of a local nobleman and also served as a pastor; later he taught the son of a lawyer in Bordeaux and instructed a young man from Bern in mathematics at Leiden. Many of the people he traveled with, met, or visited are not only mentioned in the Reisbüchlein but also contributed entries in the friendship album or Stammbuch that he carried with him on his travels
A digital edition of Reisbüchlein, with transcriptions and dynamic visualizations of journeys, is available on the Bernoulli Euler Digital Platform, see here.
Sepideh Alassi