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Friedrich Simony was born on November 30, 1813, in Hrochowteinitz in Bohemia. He died on July 20, 1896 in St. Gallen in Styria. He dropped out of high school in Nikolsburg (Mikulov) in 1828 to begin an apprenticeship as a pharmacist. Simony later went to Vienna, where he began studying pharmacy, which he completed in 1835. The following years were devoted to natural sciences, botany, geology, etc. In an obituary in 1898, Albrecht Penck tried to characterize him in one sentence: "Simony was primarily a geographer of the Alps, and no area in the Alps captivated him more than the Salzkammergut."
There are two vertical cornerstones in Simony's work: the Dachstein, whose summit at 2,995 meters is close to a 3,000-meter peak, and Lake Hallstatt, whose bottom is 125 meters deep. While the Dachstein was first climbed by Peter Karl Thurwieser, an Austrian meteorologist and alpinist, on July 18, 1834, it was left to Simony to climb the mountain for the first time in winter on January 14, 1847. You can read it in the "Wiener Zeitung" of February 8, 1847 under the title "A winter week on the Hallstatt Snow Mountains and the ascent of the 9,492-foot-high Dachsteinspitze in Vienna on January 14, 1847."
Here we not only experience Simony as a scientist who continuously measures, notes and documents, here we also get to know his literary side: "January 11th saw us in our fourth hour of hiking. The finely cut crescent of the moon and a small blinding lantern were our lights. The sky, which during the night had locked its most beautiful stars in envious courts like a sultan, now seemed more favorably disposed to us again - its immeasurable face looked unclouded on them Earth and its early pilgrims." The fact that Simony and the writer Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868) were close friends was highlighted in numerous essays. Just as Stifter is primarily perceived as a man of letters whose artistic work is less well-known, it is worth reading Simony's writings from a literary perspective.
When observations are documented, which is essential in the natural sciences, Simony not only found the right words, he also knew how to provide the right images. Whether watercolors, drawings and photographs, Simony's image documents continue to meet scientific requirements in the 21st century and provide valuable historical snapshots. The historian Rudolf Lehr from Hallstatt said: "He introduced the descriptive method in geography and became the inventor of scientific drawing in geography." Botanist Franz Grims from Taufkirchen/Pram finds suitable words for Simony's style: "When depicting landscapes, he was primarily concerned with the precise reproduction of their shapes. Natural moods caused by different weather conditions, times of day or seasons are missing. The sky is cloudless, the landscape without light or shadow and the lakes are uniformly white surfaces. Simony's drawings clearly have scientific tasks to fulfill, decorative accessories are usually missing." Finally, the geographer Albrecht Penck (1858–1945), full professor and successor of Simony at the University of Vienna, is quoted: "Capturing their [= the mountains'] external shape in pictures became his life's work. His pen was tireless; when drawing was given significant support through photography, he went out with the camera to be one of the first to cultivate high mountain photography from a scientific point of view."
Simony, who first came to the Salzkammergut in 1840, began plumbing the depths of Lake Hallstatt here in the spring of 1844 - in the truest sense of the word, he completed his work in 1845 and provided drawings of the lake's subsurface, just as if one were letting out the water. At the same time he collected fossils in the region. In Prince Metternich, whom Simony had met in 1843, he found a buyer for his collection, which the young Franz von Hauer (1822–1899) worked on in 1846. In the same year, Wilhelm von Haidinger (1795–1871) founded the Society of Friends of Natural Sciences in Vienna. The fact that Simony was present at the association does not need to be emphasized separately; evidence of this can be found in the reports of communications from friends of natural sciences in Vienna from 1847 onwards. All of them focus on the Salzkammergut. The range of topics corresponds to Simony's holistic approach, he explored depths, measured temperatures in the water as well as on the Dachstein, he sketched and published about glaciers, limestone cave formation, up to "depth, average and perspective maps of Lake Hallstatt" and wrote about traces of the "prehistoric ice age in the Salzkammergut" and lectured on the importance of "landscape contour drawing".
In 1848 he measured the temperatures of all the lakes in the Salzkammergut. In 1849 he was appointed to the state museum in Klagenfurt. It is obvious that Simony plumbed the depths of the ice-covered Lake Wörthersee in winter. But it wouldn't be long before Wilhelm von Haidinger, who took over the k. in November 1849, found him. k. Geological Reichsanstalt founded, was called back to Vienna. When it came to systematically exploring the geology of the monarchy in the summer of 1850, Haidinger knew who was suitable for the Salzkammergut. Simony never tired, collected rock samples and sent them to Vienna. The next step in his career came in 1851. Emperor Franz Joseph appointed him full professor of geography at the University of Vienna on April 19, 1851. It would be more than ten years before Eduard Suess was appointed the first full professor of geology in 1862.
Simony himself had requested "the award of a professorship of physical geography at the Vienna University" in a letter to the high ministry dated February 18, 1851 at Villa Metternich. He had clear ideas about how he would proceed. We read, among other things: "The tasks associated with the professorship would therefore be divided into two halves: that of travel and that of lectures." He also had fixed ideas about lectures: "Three weekly lectures throughout the six winter months, i.e. a total of 70-80 lectures, would be sufficient to explain the subject in terms of its most essential content."
When he died, there were countless voices that paid tribute to him on July 21, 1896, the day after his death, and painted a picture of an extraordinary man. Fortunately, his magnum opus, the "Dachstein Area", a large-format atlas with 90 illustrations, had previously been published in 1895.
"As the son of poor parents, he worked his way up through his own strength, through iron-clad hard work; he was the model of a man who pursued his path with earnestness and perseverance and as an autodidact" ("Neue Freie Presse"). The newspaper "Das Vaterland" wrote about him: "He made exploring the Austrian Alpine world his life's work and not only presented the magic and peculiarities of the mountain world scientifically, but also created artistically valuable landscape pictures that made his name known throughout the world." "Die Presse" was able to report on the fruits of hard work: "Just as the exercise of his research activities - the countless Alpine climbs, sometimes undertaken with great difficulty - placed the highest demands on energy, so Simony's life was an uninterrupted chain of persistent work and energy." He was, as we read in the magazine "Carinthia": "a self-made man in the best sense of the word." These Anglicisms were surprising at the end of the 19th century.
The first encounter with Adalbert Stifter took place in the summer of 1845, when Stifter, together with his wife Amalie, visited Simony in Hallstatt; further meetings should follow. Finally, Simony found her way into literature in the character of Heinrich Drendorf in Stifter's "Nachsommer". Here is a passage from volume 2 of the three-volume work (1857) with reference to earth science: "Or does the activity through which the mountains were lifted still continue today, so that through internal force they replace or exceed in height what they lose from the outside? Does the lifting force ever stop? If the earth has cooled further after millions of years, its bark is thicker, so that the hot river inside it can no longer drive its crystals up through it Or does it slowly and imperceptibly spread out the edges of this crust as it raises its loads? If the earth radiates heat and becomes more and more cold, doesn't the speed of rotation of its circles change? (Thomas Hofmann, July 20, 2021)