The Northern Lights, page 12
As he tried to make himself comfortable in the sleeper carriage, he thought about Louis Pasteur, to whom he had been introduced by Marie Curie when he lived in Paris. Pasteur had vividly described the symptoms of rabies and the difficulties of creating a vaccine for it. After someone was bitten by a rabid creature, it could take up to six weeks for the first sign of the disease to appear, although usually the onset was much quicker. Delirium, hydrophobia, and convulsions invariably resulted in death within four or five days. Patients usually died of a broken neck caused by the violence of their spasms. Birkeland himself was eighteen in 1885 when Pasteur first used the anti-rabies vaccine on a human. Every detail had been reported in the Christiania press. A woman had brought her young son, Josef, to Pasteur’s laboratory begging for help after a rabid dog had attacked him. Pasteur had agonized over the ethics of testing an experimental vaccine on a human being but it became increasingly clear that it was the child’s only chance. The boy was put to bed in an anteroom of the laboratory and syringes of vaccine were drawn from small flasks of yellow liquid that Pasteur had been distilling over the past year. Each was carefully labeled with its strength, and the boy was injected first with the weakest and then gradually the strength was increased. In order to dilute the virus sufficiently to make it safe, Pasteur had infected rabbits with the disease, and when they died he reduced their spinal cords to powder and passed a solution of this material into other rabbits and so on until the virus was sufficiently weak. After being given the vaccine, the young boy made a full recovery and Pasteur became a hero.
When Birkeland arrived in Moscow, he was met on the platform by Surkow’s butler and helped into a carriage. His leg had grown very stiff and was red and hot around the bite. Surkow’s house was in the northeast of the city, on the borders of the new industrial areas growing up beyond the Sadovoye Kol’tso. Until the turn of the century foreign investors had controlled much of Russian industry; Birkeland saw the names Bromley and Goujon on factory walls. However, in recent years there had been substantial growth in the Russian bourgeoisie and their homegrown industries, especially in Moscow. Surkow was an example of successful Russian business acumen. His house was large and imposing; it formed the corner of two streets with gardens behind it. An ornate glass and wrought-iron portico covered the stone steps up to the front door. The butler helped Birkeland up the grand polished staircase to a gallery landing and into a spacious sitting room that led to a bedroom and a bathroom. A fire had already been lit in the rooms. Birkeland settled down in the stiffly upholstered chair to eat the meal that was brought to him. He was tired and shivery, suspecting every twinge and twitch of his wound to be the onset of the ghastly disease. The butler informed him that Governor Korsakoff had arranged for him to visit the Pasteur Institute in the morning.
Birkeland slept fitfully, the sheets rubbing on his injured leg. In the morning, he refused breakfast. The carriage took him to the Pasteur Institute, which was beside the main hospital in a street northwest of the Kremlin. The carriage driver explained that he could not wait directly outside the hospital as security was tight near the Kremlin, but he would return every half-hour to see if Birkeland was ready. Since Czar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881, security measures to protect the imperial family had been increased. With the emancipation of the serfs and the industrialization of the country, numerous anti-royalist groups had emerged and Czar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna were attempting to clamp down on revolutionary fervor. Birkeland waved agreement to the driver and limped toward the laboratory. A blue and white enamel plaque announced that what looked like the hospital laundry or boiler house was really the Pasteur Institute. Birkeland entered a small vestibule with coat pegs and shoe lockers covering two walls and a large samovar pushed against the third. Within a few minutes, a French doctor wearing a laboratory apron appeared with Korsakoff’s telegram alerting them to Birkeland’s imminent arrival. The doctor showed him into a small room and asked questions in French about the incident, Birkeland’s general health, and the behavior of the dog. Birkeland was told that the vaccination process would take at least twenty days and that he might experience unpleasant side effects such as flulike symptoms, headache, nausea, insomnia, and stomach cramps. The alternative, Birkeland knew, was to experience one of the most unpleasant deaths possible. He felt great relief as the first dose of vaccine was administered.
For the next three days Birkeland was obliged to visit the laboratory every morning and late afternoon for inoculation. He would spend the rest of the day sleeping or working. On the fourth day he developed the flulike symptoms he had been warned about, which made leaving the comfort of the house to drive through the dusty August streets of Moscow a torture. After the sixth injection Birkeland had to return once a day for the last seven doses. When the course was complete, he was told not to leave Moscow, but to return in ten days to confirm that the vaccination had worked.
Birkeland was not well enough for work or ill enough to sleep all day. He sat for many hours in the garden, scribbling occasionally in his notebook but otherwise just thinking. The dog bite had made him realize how difficult and unpredictable, as well as expensive, his expeditions were. Although he felt sure that the results they achieved would be worth the difficulty, he began to set his mind to thinking of other ways to study the Earth’s magnetic field and the auroras. The forced rest allowed him to brood upon the problem, without distraction, and an idea began to formulate in his mind of a way to bring the Lights indoors, to re-create them in a laboratory.
On the tenth day Birkeland returned to the institute. The doctor warned him that, although it was extremely unlikely after vaccination, rabies could return at any time within eight years and he should be vigilant for symptoms. For the time being the treatment appeared to have been successful. Birkeland sent telegrams to Korsakoff and Surkow relaying the cheerful news and thanking them for their help. He decided to write to the king as soon as he returned home, recommending that they be awarded medals for their services. As soon as he felt completely recovered from the side effects of the injections, he returned home by train and steamship, arriving in Christiania at the beginning of September.
After only two weeks in the capital, Birkeland left again for Kaafjord in Finnmark, to check the auroral station he was supposed to be in charge of. In his absence it had been managed by Richard Krekling, a science graduate, with the assistance of Olaf Egenæs, an engineer. When Birkeland arrived, Krekling and Egenæs were achieving good results with the magnetometers and meteorological instruments. Two tasks not required of them were to take photographs of the auroras and to measure air electricity. Attempts to triangulate the height of the auroras during the previous expedition had not been successful, as the photographic plates had been too blurred to find exact matching points between plates taken from Haldde and those from Talvik peak. Birkeland deduced by other means that the auroras occurred at about a hundred kilometers above ground. The air electricity meters had recorded almost nothing either, as the electric currents causing the auroras did not come from the ground or the lower atmosphere. One of Birkeland’s great strengths as a scientist was the rapidity with which he drew conclusions from data that more detailed analysis later confirmed, an ability that saved him and his researchers much labor and bore witness to his complete grasp of a subject.
As Birkeland noted later in his account of the expedition in Kaafjord:
The aurora of 24 November in particular was one of extreme beauty. It developed into an auroral corona, which lasted some minutes, then dissolved into a great number of intensely brilliant, red streamers. These moved backwards and forwards across the heavens for some time, making the sky glow with red. The violent storms experienced on former occasions up at the mountain we, that winter, escaped by keeping down in the valley at Kaafjord.
Although the Kaafjord team observed twenty-seven auroral phenomena that winter, cloud cover obscured many more. Particularly in February, large variations in the magnetic needle indicated that auroras were extremely likely, but overcast weather for a week kept them hidden. Birkeland became even more convinced that his plan to bring the Northern Lights into the laboratory, where he would not need to worry about clouds or storms, was necessary to continue his research. As he could not go into space, he would bring space to him and re-create the universe in miniature. He had been a mathematician, a theoretician, and an observer in the field, and now he needed to become an experimenter. Without waiting for the cloud to clear, Birkeland returned to Christiania, leaving Krekling to manage the auroral station for the next five months.
Dietrichson, who had volunteered to give Birkeland’s lectures for one year, continued to do so even when Birkeland returned, allowing the professor complete freedom to research his new idea. Soon after Birkeland’s return from Kaafjord, Henrik Mohn visited him in his office to hear news of his adventures in Russia and to invite him to dinner with his family and niece, Ida. Birkeland was happy to be among close friends again—it had been nearly eight months since the last time—and the evening went well. He again walked Ida to her tram stop and this time, as she shook his hand goodbye, he asked her to accompany him to a Sunday lunchtime lecture to be given by his friend Jens Lieblein, professor of Egyptology, who had recently returned from Egypt with some unusual artifacts. Birkeland hoped Ida might be interested in seeing them and she agreed. For the following months the two attended lectures together every few weeks and took tea afterwards at the Grand. Helland, the only person to whom Birkeland could mention such things, approved of his growing friendship with Ida, but advised him strongly against making the relationship more than platonic. Although Helland enjoyed flustering women with his gifts of potatoes and dried fish, his dalliances were always chaste, as he believed steady emotions were conducive to happiness and productivity. He was virulently against the institution of marriage, believing that it brought out the worst in people and prevented a man from pursuing his work. Helland preferred the companionship of women uncomplicated by any sexual tension, and Birkeland assured his friend that Ida seemed as uninterested in marriage as he himself was.
After his return from Kaafjord, Birkeland received more evidence of the limitations and dangers of observation in the field. His teams in the Arctic Circle were all experiencing great difficulties completing research in the face of terrible weather conditions. Because Birkeland had been unable to accompany Riddervold and his team, Sæland had traveled to Novaya Zemlya to inspect the auroral station in his place, arriving on 28 September and leaving again three days later, on the Wladimir. The need to visit the Russian station had hindered his departure for Iceland and he encountered atrocious weather trying to reach Dyrafjord on the west coast of the island. He described his journey in a letter to Birkeland:
The station in Iceland was established much later than we had hoped. On the journey to Scotland we were delayed due to bad weather and again at the Faroes for another couple of days. By the time we reached the first stop in Iceland we were very late. We rushed around the Icelandic ports and saw the sun for the last time for a couple of months. More fog. More delays. On the last day of October a very heavy snowstorm began and we were forced to stay in Reykafjord for five days. It snowed non-stop and so thickly you could only see a couple of ships’ lengths ahead. When we finally arrived at Captain Berg’s whaling station the wind was so fierce that a portion of the roof was blown off even though it was covered in gravel and earth and tied down with steel wires. The Whaling Station is situated near the isolated promontory I have chosen for the measuring stations but the weather is creating great difficulties—overcast, deluges of snow and rain, high winds. It is the most remote place possible.
A letter also arrived from the team on Novaya Zemlya. Johan Koren had made great efforts to get to know his Samoyed neighbors: he learned their language and came to understand that they were unhappy under Russian rule. They asked Koren to write a letter on their behalf to King Oscar of Sweden and Norway, requesting him to take the islands from the czar “since we Samoyeds are suffering, lacking flavor, sugar, tea, everything . . .” The researchers promised to pass this on to the royal household at the end of the expedition, and, in return, on their hunting trips the Samoyeds carried letters from the Norwegians to their relatives. In this way Birkeland received a letter in Christiania, several months after it had been written, that contained alarming reports of the conditions on the inhospitable island. The weather was utterly unpredictable. Temperatures were often in the minus thirties Celsius and could reach as low as −42°C. Strange effects in changing wind or barometer pressure meant the ice floes in the straits would freeze and flow again with great rapidity and no warning. Sæland had narrowly missed being trapped on the island because only a few days after he sailed away the straits froze over during a snowstorm. When their supplies of fresh food ran low, the three men decided to go hunting, a decision that nearly cost them their lives. The team leader wrote:
We left in a rowing boat and landed on the far side of a little river that could be easily waded. The boat was moored to the bank. Within hours and without warning a terrible storm broke out, with thunder and lightning which was very unusual in those parts. On returning to the boat several hours later the effect of the storm was frighteningly visible. The small stream had become a veritable foaming torrent and the entire tongue of land on which the boat had lain had been washed away.
Birkeland was appalled at the danger the men had put themselves in for the sake of a more varied diet. Memories of Boye’s death made him pray that the young men had not hurt themselves.
It was clear, however, that we must at all costs manage to get home. The fare was not first-class, it consisted of one dish— raw bird. With some old rope and driftwood we made a kind of raft and also found some boards that could be used as oars. It was an exceedingly poor vessel; even when we all three rowed with all our might it made only the slowest progress. When we got into the river current we were carried rapidly out to sea and were soon several kilometers from shore. The worst of it was that the raft began to fall to pieces, so that one man had to hold it together with his feet and hands while the others rowed. After a hard struggle we reached an iceberg that was at least grounded and did not drift. Once more we took the oars and were fortunate enough to get into the counter-current, which carried us shoreward. Once we reached terra firma we saw how great the danger had been, for a fog as dense as a wall came pouring down from the north. If this had come a little sooner, while we were rowing, it is highly probable we would have rowed in a circle while the current took us farther and farther out.
Birkeland wondered whether the young men were paying enough attention to the scientific goals of the trip or only to hunting and befriending the Samoyeds. The polar bear would arrive in late February and he suspected there would be gaps in the recordings for those weeks. He was correct in his hunch. When the team eventually returned from Novaya Zemlya, Schaaning had amassed a huge collection of rare Arctic birds, eggs, and polar bear hides that he started selling to museums across Europe. Birkeland told him that he could either receive his wages or the income from hunting, but not both. Schaaning opted for the latter and made a great deal of money.
Facing even harsher weather conditions was the group in the station at Axeløen, southern Spitsbergen. The leader of the team was Nils Russeltveldt, who had been recruited from the Meteorological Institute in Christiania and who was managing to obtain excellent results from his instruments despite the climate. It was impossible to send a letter from the island but Russeltveldt wrote a report upon his return:
It must be in great measure due to the tremendously varying conditions of weather that the immense loss of life on Spitsbergen is due. It is no exaggeration to say that all round about our station is one great graveyard. It is for this reason that no one of late has ventured to winter in Spitsbergen; it is only during the last three or four years that it has been done once more, for the polar bear hunting. While we were building the instrument house a hurricane blew up so strongly that it was impossible to stand upright. It was a regular Spitsbergen storm in all its wildness and greatness. We were awakened by the roar and noise occasioned by wind, ice and rain. The wind varied incessantly; at one moment there was none, or a slight breeze, the next it was blowing the wildest hurricane. It was these fearful gusts of wind that were dangerous to anyone going out, for it was impossible to keep one’s balance and gravel, snow and stones were whirled about.
Although we managed to finish it, the hut was torn to pieces and a huge wooden panel hurled a hundred meters away. It will be easily understood that weather such as this places enormous difficulties in the way of observation.
Birkeland’s teams in the field were the human link in the chain of instruments around the Arctic Circle. They did not interpret the results, but their dedication and tenacity in the face of extreme conditions determined how successful the different stations were. They made the bricks, foraged for the stones, and brought them to the building site where Birkeland would use them to construct his theories. If there were too many blocks missing, the house would be prone to collapse. Birkeland believed that observing nature should be the starting point of any investigation into the Earth’s mysteries and that the expedition would provide him with all the details he needed as long as his teams could work accurately under the difficult conditions.
Although Birkeland was proud of his men and of the scale of this expedition, he knew it was time to test his theories experimentally. He needed to build his own laboratory to see if he could discover the scientific formula that defined the drama and beauty of the Northern Lights. To build a laboratory from scratch would require a huge amount of money, more than he would ever be granted by Parliament, the university, or private donors. He would have to raise the money himself, a daunting task for a professor on a modest salary. Birkeland, however, had one opportunity to raise a significant sum: his invention of the electromagnetic cannon. He began to plan how the gun could make his fortune.
When Birkeland arrived in Moscow, he was met on the platform by Surkow’s butler and helped into a carriage. His leg had grown very stiff and was red and hot around the bite. Surkow’s house was in the northeast of the city, on the borders of the new industrial areas growing up beyond the Sadovoye Kol’tso. Until the turn of the century foreign investors had controlled much of Russian industry; Birkeland saw the names Bromley and Goujon on factory walls. However, in recent years there had been substantial growth in the Russian bourgeoisie and their homegrown industries, especially in Moscow. Surkow was an example of successful Russian business acumen. His house was large and imposing; it formed the corner of two streets with gardens behind it. An ornate glass and wrought-iron portico covered the stone steps up to the front door. The butler helped Birkeland up the grand polished staircase to a gallery landing and into a spacious sitting room that led to a bedroom and a bathroom. A fire had already been lit in the rooms. Birkeland settled down in the stiffly upholstered chair to eat the meal that was brought to him. He was tired and shivery, suspecting every twinge and twitch of his wound to be the onset of the ghastly disease. The butler informed him that Governor Korsakoff had arranged for him to visit the Pasteur Institute in the morning.
Birkeland slept fitfully, the sheets rubbing on his injured leg. In the morning, he refused breakfast. The carriage took him to the Pasteur Institute, which was beside the main hospital in a street northwest of the Kremlin. The carriage driver explained that he could not wait directly outside the hospital as security was tight near the Kremlin, but he would return every half-hour to see if Birkeland was ready. Since Czar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881, security measures to protect the imperial family had been increased. With the emancipation of the serfs and the industrialization of the country, numerous anti-royalist groups had emerged and Czar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna were attempting to clamp down on revolutionary fervor. Birkeland waved agreement to the driver and limped toward the laboratory. A blue and white enamel plaque announced that what looked like the hospital laundry or boiler house was really the Pasteur Institute. Birkeland entered a small vestibule with coat pegs and shoe lockers covering two walls and a large samovar pushed against the third. Within a few minutes, a French doctor wearing a laboratory apron appeared with Korsakoff’s telegram alerting them to Birkeland’s imminent arrival. The doctor showed him into a small room and asked questions in French about the incident, Birkeland’s general health, and the behavior of the dog. Birkeland was told that the vaccination process would take at least twenty days and that he might experience unpleasant side effects such as flulike symptoms, headache, nausea, insomnia, and stomach cramps. The alternative, Birkeland knew, was to experience one of the most unpleasant deaths possible. He felt great relief as the first dose of vaccine was administered.
For the next three days Birkeland was obliged to visit the laboratory every morning and late afternoon for inoculation. He would spend the rest of the day sleeping or working. On the fourth day he developed the flulike symptoms he had been warned about, which made leaving the comfort of the house to drive through the dusty August streets of Moscow a torture. After the sixth injection Birkeland had to return once a day for the last seven doses. When the course was complete, he was told not to leave Moscow, but to return in ten days to confirm that the vaccination had worked.
Birkeland was not well enough for work or ill enough to sleep all day. He sat for many hours in the garden, scribbling occasionally in his notebook but otherwise just thinking. The dog bite had made him realize how difficult and unpredictable, as well as expensive, his expeditions were. Although he felt sure that the results they achieved would be worth the difficulty, he began to set his mind to thinking of other ways to study the Earth’s magnetic field and the auroras. The forced rest allowed him to brood upon the problem, without distraction, and an idea began to formulate in his mind of a way to bring the Lights indoors, to re-create them in a laboratory.
On the tenth day Birkeland returned to the institute. The doctor warned him that, although it was extremely unlikely after vaccination, rabies could return at any time within eight years and he should be vigilant for symptoms. For the time being the treatment appeared to have been successful. Birkeland sent telegrams to Korsakoff and Surkow relaying the cheerful news and thanking them for their help. He decided to write to the king as soon as he returned home, recommending that they be awarded medals for their services. As soon as he felt completely recovered from the side effects of the injections, he returned home by train and steamship, arriving in Christiania at the beginning of September.
After only two weeks in the capital, Birkeland left again for Kaafjord in Finnmark, to check the auroral station he was supposed to be in charge of. In his absence it had been managed by Richard Krekling, a science graduate, with the assistance of Olaf Egenæs, an engineer. When Birkeland arrived, Krekling and Egenæs were achieving good results with the magnetometers and meteorological instruments. Two tasks not required of them were to take photographs of the auroras and to measure air electricity. Attempts to triangulate the height of the auroras during the previous expedition had not been successful, as the photographic plates had been too blurred to find exact matching points between plates taken from Haldde and those from Talvik peak. Birkeland deduced by other means that the auroras occurred at about a hundred kilometers above ground. The air electricity meters had recorded almost nothing either, as the electric currents causing the auroras did not come from the ground or the lower atmosphere. One of Birkeland’s great strengths as a scientist was the rapidity with which he drew conclusions from data that more detailed analysis later confirmed, an ability that saved him and his researchers much labor and bore witness to his complete grasp of a subject.
As Birkeland noted later in his account of the expedition in Kaafjord:
The aurora of 24 November in particular was one of extreme beauty. It developed into an auroral corona, which lasted some minutes, then dissolved into a great number of intensely brilliant, red streamers. These moved backwards and forwards across the heavens for some time, making the sky glow with red. The violent storms experienced on former occasions up at the mountain we, that winter, escaped by keeping down in the valley at Kaafjord.
Although the Kaafjord team observed twenty-seven auroral phenomena that winter, cloud cover obscured many more. Particularly in February, large variations in the magnetic needle indicated that auroras were extremely likely, but overcast weather for a week kept them hidden. Birkeland became even more convinced that his plan to bring the Northern Lights into the laboratory, where he would not need to worry about clouds or storms, was necessary to continue his research. As he could not go into space, he would bring space to him and re-create the universe in miniature. He had been a mathematician, a theoretician, and an observer in the field, and now he needed to become an experimenter. Without waiting for the cloud to clear, Birkeland returned to Christiania, leaving Krekling to manage the auroral station for the next five months.
Dietrichson, who had volunteered to give Birkeland’s lectures for one year, continued to do so even when Birkeland returned, allowing the professor complete freedom to research his new idea. Soon after Birkeland’s return from Kaafjord, Henrik Mohn visited him in his office to hear news of his adventures in Russia and to invite him to dinner with his family and niece, Ida. Birkeland was happy to be among close friends again—it had been nearly eight months since the last time—and the evening went well. He again walked Ida to her tram stop and this time, as she shook his hand goodbye, he asked her to accompany him to a Sunday lunchtime lecture to be given by his friend Jens Lieblein, professor of Egyptology, who had recently returned from Egypt with some unusual artifacts. Birkeland hoped Ida might be interested in seeing them and she agreed. For the following months the two attended lectures together every few weeks and took tea afterwards at the Grand. Helland, the only person to whom Birkeland could mention such things, approved of his growing friendship with Ida, but advised him strongly against making the relationship more than platonic. Although Helland enjoyed flustering women with his gifts of potatoes and dried fish, his dalliances were always chaste, as he believed steady emotions were conducive to happiness and productivity. He was virulently against the institution of marriage, believing that it brought out the worst in people and prevented a man from pursuing his work. Helland preferred the companionship of women uncomplicated by any sexual tension, and Birkeland assured his friend that Ida seemed as uninterested in marriage as he himself was.
After his return from Kaafjord, Birkeland received more evidence of the limitations and dangers of observation in the field. His teams in the Arctic Circle were all experiencing great difficulties completing research in the face of terrible weather conditions. Because Birkeland had been unable to accompany Riddervold and his team, Sæland had traveled to Novaya Zemlya to inspect the auroral station in his place, arriving on 28 September and leaving again three days later, on the Wladimir. The need to visit the Russian station had hindered his departure for Iceland and he encountered atrocious weather trying to reach Dyrafjord on the west coast of the island. He described his journey in a letter to Birkeland:
The station in Iceland was established much later than we had hoped. On the journey to Scotland we were delayed due to bad weather and again at the Faroes for another couple of days. By the time we reached the first stop in Iceland we were very late. We rushed around the Icelandic ports and saw the sun for the last time for a couple of months. More fog. More delays. On the last day of October a very heavy snowstorm began and we were forced to stay in Reykafjord for five days. It snowed non-stop and so thickly you could only see a couple of ships’ lengths ahead. When we finally arrived at Captain Berg’s whaling station the wind was so fierce that a portion of the roof was blown off even though it was covered in gravel and earth and tied down with steel wires. The Whaling Station is situated near the isolated promontory I have chosen for the measuring stations but the weather is creating great difficulties—overcast, deluges of snow and rain, high winds. It is the most remote place possible.
A letter also arrived from the team on Novaya Zemlya. Johan Koren had made great efforts to get to know his Samoyed neighbors: he learned their language and came to understand that they were unhappy under Russian rule. They asked Koren to write a letter on their behalf to King Oscar of Sweden and Norway, requesting him to take the islands from the czar “since we Samoyeds are suffering, lacking flavor, sugar, tea, everything . . .” The researchers promised to pass this on to the royal household at the end of the expedition, and, in return, on their hunting trips the Samoyeds carried letters from the Norwegians to their relatives. In this way Birkeland received a letter in Christiania, several months after it had been written, that contained alarming reports of the conditions on the inhospitable island. The weather was utterly unpredictable. Temperatures were often in the minus thirties Celsius and could reach as low as −42°C. Strange effects in changing wind or barometer pressure meant the ice floes in the straits would freeze and flow again with great rapidity and no warning. Sæland had narrowly missed being trapped on the island because only a few days after he sailed away the straits froze over during a snowstorm. When their supplies of fresh food ran low, the three men decided to go hunting, a decision that nearly cost them their lives. The team leader wrote:
We left in a rowing boat and landed on the far side of a little river that could be easily waded. The boat was moored to the bank. Within hours and without warning a terrible storm broke out, with thunder and lightning which was very unusual in those parts. On returning to the boat several hours later the effect of the storm was frighteningly visible. The small stream had become a veritable foaming torrent and the entire tongue of land on which the boat had lain had been washed away.
Birkeland was appalled at the danger the men had put themselves in for the sake of a more varied diet. Memories of Boye’s death made him pray that the young men had not hurt themselves.
It was clear, however, that we must at all costs manage to get home. The fare was not first-class, it consisted of one dish— raw bird. With some old rope and driftwood we made a kind of raft and also found some boards that could be used as oars. It was an exceedingly poor vessel; even when we all three rowed with all our might it made only the slowest progress. When we got into the river current we were carried rapidly out to sea and were soon several kilometers from shore. The worst of it was that the raft began to fall to pieces, so that one man had to hold it together with his feet and hands while the others rowed. After a hard struggle we reached an iceberg that was at least grounded and did not drift. Once more we took the oars and were fortunate enough to get into the counter-current, which carried us shoreward. Once we reached terra firma we saw how great the danger had been, for a fog as dense as a wall came pouring down from the north. If this had come a little sooner, while we were rowing, it is highly probable we would have rowed in a circle while the current took us farther and farther out.
Birkeland wondered whether the young men were paying enough attention to the scientific goals of the trip or only to hunting and befriending the Samoyeds. The polar bear would arrive in late February and he suspected there would be gaps in the recordings for those weeks. He was correct in his hunch. When the team eventually returned from Novaya Zemlya, Schaaning had amassed a huge collection of rare Arctic birds, eggs, and polar bear hides that he started selling to museums across Europe. Birkeland told him that he could either receive his wages or the income from hunting, but not both. Schaaning opted for the latter and made a great deal of money.
Facing even harsher weather conditions was the group in the station at Axeløen, southern Spitsbergen. The leader of the team was Nils Russeltveldt, who had been recruited from the Meteorological Institute in Christiania and who was managing to obtain excellent results from his instruments despite the climate. It was impossible to send a letter from the island but Russeltveldt wrote a report upon his return:
It must be in great measure due to the tremendously varying conditions of weather that the immense loss of life on Spitsbergen is due. It is no exaggeration to say that all round about our station is one great graveyard. It is for this reason that no one of late has ventured to winter in Spitsbergen; it is only during the last three or four years that it has been done once more, for the polar bear hunting. While we were building the instrument house a hurricane blew up so strongly that it was impossible to stand upright. It was a regular Spitsbergen storm in all its wildness and greatness. We were awakened by the roar and noise occasioned by wind, ice and rain. The wind varied incessantly; at one moment there was none, or a slight breeze, the next it was blowing the wildest hurricane. It was these fearful gusts of wind that were dangerous to anyone going out, for it was impossible to keep one’s balance and gravel, snow and stones were whirled about.
Although we managed to finish it, the hut was torn to pieces and a huge wooden panel hurled a hundred meters away. It will be easily understood that weather such as this places enormous difficulties in the way of observation.
Birkeland’s teams in the field were the human link in the chain of instruments around the Arctic Circle. They did not interpret the results, but their dedication and tenacity in the face of extreme conditions determined how successful the different stations were. They made the bricks, foraged for the stones, and brought them to the building site where Birkeland would use them to construct his theories. If there were too many blocks missing, the house would be prone to collapse. Birkeland believed that observing nature should be the starting point of any investigation into the Earth’s mysteries and that the expedition would provide him with all the details he needed as long as his teams could work accurately under the difficult conditions.
Although Birkeland was proud of his men and of the scale of this expedition, he knew it was time to test his theories experimentally. He needed to build his own laboratory to see if he could discover the scientific formula that defined the drama and beauty of the Northern Lights. To build a laboratory from scratch would require a huge amount of money, more than he would ever be granted by Parliament, the university, or private donors. He would have to raise the money himself, a daunting task for a professor on a modest salary. Birkeland, however, had one opportunity to raise a significant sum: his invention of the electromagnetic cannon. He began to plan how the gun could make his fortune.
