The Northern Lights, page 13
PART II
The Terrella
Kristian Birkeland with his terrella machine simulating the Zodiacal Light in the laboratory at Christiania University, around 1910
8
Explosion!
6 March 1903
University of Christiania,
Festival Hall
They have driven me almost mad
And forced me to curse my fate,
Some of them with their love,
Some of them with their hate.
They have poisoned the cup I drank,
They have poisoned the food I ate,
Some of them with their love,
Some of them with their hate.
HEINRICH HEINE (1797–1856), c. 1827
FOR THREE DAYS, Aftenposten had been running advertisements for an unusual gala lecture to be held on the evening of 6 March in the university’s Festival Hall. There were few attractions to rival such entertainment, for although Christiania was developing quickly, its cinema would not be finished until the following year and the choice of evening amusement was limited to musical recitals, the theater in season, and occasional séances. Now the trampled snow outside the building was illuminated in squares by light escaping through the blazing windows. Figures in top hats and wasp-waisted skirts were silhouetted against the light as they mounted the flight of steps to the columned entrance. Christiania’s elite was in attendance—men from shipping, mining, the railways, the telegraph, politics, banking, and newspapers in a sea of black and white punctuated occasionally by their more decorative wives. Professor Birkeland had arranged this unusual lecture to unveil to a waiting public his electromagnetic cannon. Although there had been many articles and even drawings in the press about his invention, only his shareholders and a few weapons makers in Europe had so far been able to see it.
Birkeland’s prime motivation in demonstrating the cannon was to obtain the funds to turn his dream of “domesticating” the aurora into a reality. He needed money to build and equip a modern laboratory as the only facilities in the entire country were at the university; they were used solely for teaching and contained only rudimentary equipment. His plan was to raise 50,000 crowns from the lecture to build a longer gun that would send larger missiles, up to two tons, shorter distances but at faster speeds, turning the cannon into an electromagnetic torpedo to be fired from a ship just above the surface of the water. Birkeland was aware not only of the escalating naval arms race between Germany and Britain in particular, but also of the limitations in his design—which necessitated a large power source nearby. In a land battle this would be difficult, but on a ship it would be much simpler to connect the torpedoes to generators in the engine rooms.
Although several companies had shown interest in buying his patent the previous year while the gun was still in an early phase of development, he could not have commanded a high enough price to be able to fund his scientific research. The board of Birkeland’s Firearms agreed to postpone selling the patent until the torpedo design was ready for demonstration, but they were not in a position to fund its development. So Birkeland had decided upon this lecture to promote the project; he was convinced that if the gala proved successful, he would solve his money worries for years to come. Looking around the rows of dignitaries, Birkeland felt sure he would have pledges for 50,000 crowns by the end of the night. The front row alone included Gunnar Knudsen, the minister of defense, the head of the army, the head of Coastal Artillery, the commander in chief of Central Operations, members of Parliament, several Danish military officers, and representatives of the companies who had already shown interest in the cannon, including Armstrong and Krupp. Behind them sat a number of university professors and Birkeland’s friends and supporters—Amund Helland, his cousin Richard, his old math teacher Elling Holst, several of the women with whom he grew up in Langes Gate and for whom he was a prodigal son, the Mohn family, and, despite her dislike of weaponry, Ida.
To create more space for the audience, Birkeland had put the large generator needed to power the cannon in the university gardens behind the hall, and had cordoned off a narrow corridor between the gun and the thirteen-centimeter-thick wooden target, although Fridtjof Nansen placed himself within the danger area and refused to move. When the ornate lecture theater and balcony above were full to capacity, Birkeland instructed Sæland to close the doors and took his place before the audience. As he looked down to collect his thoughts, Birkeland noticed that he was standing in the heart of a mosaic of the sun, set in gold tiles into the floor. He was not a superstitious man, far from it, but seeing his feet haloed by rays of light filled him with hope for a successful evening. After welcoming his audience to the demonstration, he briefly explained the principles of the cannon using a large diagram. An instinctive show-man when demonstrating scientific devices, Birkeland built up the tension by reassuring the gathered audience that they would neither hear nor see anything except the noise of the ten-kilo projectile hitting the target, so they should not be afraid.
Birkeland took his time walking from the podium to the gun, building up an atmosphere of anticipation. With one final look around the audience, he repeated that the gun would be totally silent and that there was no need for alarm. He then pulled down the starting switch on the cannon. Chaos ensued. An almighty roar filled the hall, a large flame issued from the mouth of the cannon, and a deafening hiss accompanied a huge arc of brilliant light that shot out toward the audience. The 3,000-amp current had short-circuited in the gun with the most dramatic results. Several people in the audience panicked and the hall emptied in a few minutes, despite Birkeland’s shouts that there was no danger. As he related to an assistant later, “It was the most dramatic moment of my life. With this missile, I shot my stock down from a value of 300 crowns to zero, although it did hit the bull’s-eye!”
Overnight, Birkeland became the talk of the capital, though not in the way he intended. The cannon had been a potential source of huge wealth, not only for the original investors but also for the nation that would have manufactured it. The spectacle of Birkeland’s grandiose scheme backfiring was less than welcome for the numerous dignitaries gathered in the front rows: any event that made Norway a laughingstock was regarded as a major setback in the struggle for independence. It was also a huge blow to Birkeland’s hopes of building his own laboratory.
Birkeland transported the burnt-out gun back to his office and retired to think. Sæland expected him to sink into a black mood but the professor seemed more intrigued by the event than depressed and appraised the whole debacle with good-natured calm. Many of his colleagues kept away, embarrassed for him. Others were secretly pleased by the failure of his latest enterprise. His commercial aspirations for the technological inventions that sprang forth from his unusually broad scientific abilities created resentment among less resourceful professors who had no such opportunities or who failed to spot them. It would have been a simple task for Birkeland to modify his gun to prevent the short-circuits, but the explosion helped him to make a decision. The cannon was not the only application for this technology—there was another use for it that might prove more lucrative, if more time-consuming.
An idea had taken shape the previous month during a dinner party to which Gunnar Knudsen had invited Birkeland upon his return from the auroral expedition in Kaafjord. Sitting opposite him was a man Birkeland was intrigued to meet, Sam Eyde, about whom he had heard a great deal through his work with the hydroelectric industry. Eyde had established a company to buy Norwegian waterfalls on which to build hydroelectric power stations, in collaboration with Swedish financiers whom he had met through his very advantageous marriage to a Swedish countess, Anna Ulrika Morner of Morlanda. He had bought two of Norway’s major waterfalls the previous year, the Rjukan Falls on the upper course of the Skien River and the Vamma Falls on the Glomma, Norway’s longest river. Birkeland had heard that Eyde intended to use these massive sources of cheap electricity to power new industrial enterprises and had been working on furnaces for iron or aluminum production. He was a man of broad vision with an American attitude to time and talent; he promoted young engineers, was the first to chant “time is money,” and had no patience with old-fashioned bureaucracy or traditional niceties.
Although he was only a little taller than Birkeland, Eyde was powerfully built, with plump cheeks, dark almond-shaped eyes, an olive complexion, and a large mustache that curled up at the ends. He was graying at the temples but the rest of his curly crop was combed back from his forehead and held approximately in place with hair oil. He smoked slim cigars; on his left hand he wore a large gold wedding band and on his little finger a chunky signet ring. Eyde exuded an air of charm and unshakable confidence. In between courses, a conversation began among the landowners, shipping magnates, politicians, and other distinguished guests around Knudsen’s table about the crisis looming in Europe over the shortage of fertilizer. At that time the sole agricultural fertilizer available in Europe was a natural sodium nitrate mined in Chile called “Chile saltpeter.” In 1898 Sir William Crookes, an eminent scientist and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, had drawn popular attention to the “near exhaustion of the world’s stock of fixed nitrogen,” the rapid emptying of the Chilean mines, and the impossibility of feeding the world’s population without fertilizer. He noted that demand for saltpeter had increased fourfold in the previous twenty years to 1.5 million tons annually and added that “at the rate required to augment the world’s supply of wheat to the point demanded thirty years hence, it will not last more than four years.”
Throughout the previous decade knowledge that the sources of natural fertilizer were running dry had sparked off an intense search to find alternatives. It was well known that ordinary air contained nitrogen and oxygen, which, when combined using high temperatures, became the main components of fertilizer, but furnaces to extract them in a usable form were proving difficult to develop. Birkeland had followed the process with interest. He explained to the dinner guests that all attempts to produce fertilizer on an industrial scale had failed. Eyde, whose interests were in construction and industry, not agriculture, remained silent until Birkeland mentioned furnaces. He inquired what type of furnace was required and Birkeland explained that it should be capable of reproducing the power of lightning on Earth. The strange smell left in the air after a lightning flash was of nitrogen being oxidized by the intense energy of the bolt—exactly the process needed to make fertilizer.
Eyde had been planning to develop smelting furnaces that needed very high amounts of energy, which he could provide with his waterfalls. If Birkeland’s explanation was correct, the same was true of artificial fertilizer production. Producing gold from air was every businessman’s dream, and Eyde, who more than most had his sights firmly on economic and social success, understood that finding a solution to the fertilizer crisis would bring him fame as well as profit.
When the ladies retired to the drawing room and the gentlemen stood around the fire, drinking whisky and smoking cigars, Birkeland approached Eyde and said, “I have the solution.” He explained that his cannon, of which Eyde was already aware through Knudsen, produced high-energy electric arcs if it short-circuited during testing—arcs exactly like bolts of lightning. Birkeland believed this faulty element of his gun design could be combined with electromagnetic furnace technology to ionize air and produce nitric acid. Eyde listened intently, knowing that his ownership of two of Norway’s largest waterfalls gave him the leverage to persuade investors to support the development of a furnace to create fertilizer. Both men fought off the temptation to leave the dinner party immediately to inspect Birkeland’s cannon; a meeting was arranged for Monday morning, in Birkeland’s office.
Birkeland stayed at the university all weekend, looking at the patents for his cannon and sketching new designs that would deliberately create the electric arcs that accidentally occurred during tests. He already had a small electric furnace that he had bought with Brøgger five years before to do some experiments with the composition and formation of rocks in order to find traces of radioactivity and the possible effects on crystal formation of electric currents in the earth. They had not had an opportunity to use the furnace, and it was still in its box with the company name on the side, Wiesenegg of Paris, and the price tag attached—128 crowns. Birkeland hoped it would help him make a great deal more money than that. The furnace, although small, was already equipped with the electrodes needed to make an arc of electricity. He had the weekend in which to design a mechanism that would allow air in and out of the furnace and to retrieve the large electromagnets in the physics laboratory to place around it. His idea was that the electromagnets would draw the arc of electricity into a wide semicircle, much larger than would occur without magnetic influence. He was surprised that he had not thought of using the electromagnetic technology he understood so well to create a fertilizer furnace before. It was not a new idea. Two British scientists, Priestley and Cavendish, who produced tiny amounts of “nitrous acid” using electric sparks, had made the first attempt in 1780. More recently, two Americans, Bradley and Lovejoy, had built a small factory beside Niagara Falls to produce saltpeter at the end of 1902, but their attempt had proved too inefficient to form the basis of a new industry. A description of their furnace had been included in the first edition of a Norwegian scientific publication, Electrochem Indus-tri, launched only the previous month; Birkeland studied the drawings in the new magazine to check that his idea was different, and therefore potentially more rewarding, than theirs. He saw that they had made a myriad of tiny arcs in their furnace, while Birkeland was planning one large arc, repeated at a high rate and swept sideways by the magnetic field to make contact with as much air as possible. It would look like a circle with the shape and heat of the sun.
The following Monday Eyde and Birkeland spent the morning together at the university, inspecting the strange-looking furnace and weighing each other up as potential business collaborators. The first prototype, cobbled together in a few hours, beautifully demonstrated Birkeland’s idea of using magnetism to make large electric arcs and the tremendous noise and smell it produced were persuasive testimony to its potential. Birkeland was wary of telling Eyde too much about the principles upon which the design was based as Eyde was trained as an engineer and could potentially steal his ideas. Eyde had less to fear from the professor—no one could appropriate his waterfalls or business contacts—but he wanted to be sure Birkeland was not bluffing. Birkeland’s main preoccupation, until Knudsen’s dinner party, had been with weaponry, not fertilizer, and his collaboration with Eyde could be a ruse to interest Eyde’s commercial contacts in the cannon. Equally, if Birkeland was happy to swap from one idea to another so easily, he might do the same later if a seemingly better invention occurred to him. The hours passed in cautious and provisional exchange, the professor answering some of Eyde’s questions about the method of creating the electric arcs and in turn asking Eyde about financing, power provision, and how a company could be organized. By lunchtime, they decided to sign an agreement to take out a joint patent the following day.
As soon as Eyde had left the university, Birkeland called Gunnar Knudsen and asked to meet him that evening. He needed to know more about Eyde before collaborating and sharing the profits with him on an idea that was entirely his own. When he arrived at Knudsen’s house, he did not tell him exactly what he and Eyde were considering working on, as Knudsen was one of the main shareholders in the cannon and Birkeland did not want him to think he had given up on that project. Knudsen seemed content with Birkeland’s evasive explanations and told him what he knew about Samuel Eyde. They had first met when Eyde moved to Christiania from Lübeck in Germany in 1898 and set up S. Eyde’s Engineering Office, which soon became one of the largest in Scandinavia with thirty full-time engineers. Eyde and his German colleague, Gleim, had won the contract to build the new railway stations of Christiania and Stockholm, worth nearly 53 million crowns. However, the economic crash of 1898 had badly affected the construction industry and, as soon as the stations were finished the previous autumn, Eyde had been forced to lay off all his engineers. Birkeland now understood the reason for the urgency Eyde had demonstrated to make progress on the fertilizer furnace: his business was in crisis. Eyde’s father had gone bankrupt when Eyde was a schoolboy and Knudsen felt that his tremendous ambition was partly due to not wanting history to repeat itself. Knudsen would not have picked out Birkeland and Eyde as potential collaborators but each man held vital cards and a trade was the only way forward. He advised Birkeland to proceed with the venture, exercising caution to ensure his interests were secured.
The following afternoon Birkeland went to Eyde’s office at 20 Rådhus Street, next to the National Bank of Norway and close to the harbor. Although the large sign above the entrance announced “S. Eyde’s Engineering Office” and another “Gleim and Eyde Construction,” the office was empty except for his secretary, an attractive woman in her late twenties whom Eyde introduced as Tara Kjørstad. Birkeland was shown a legal document that Eyde had drafted, a formal agreement in which credit for inventing the furnace was given entirely to Birkeland, who was named as “inventor,” but both Birkeland and Eyde were named as owners of the invention.
Mr. Professor Kr. Birkeland, Christiania
According to our agreement today I confirm with this, the agreement between us, that we together shall apply for patent for the process invented by you [Birkeland] to, by means of electric arcs, produce nitrogen compounds or other chemical compounds of air or other gas combinations.
Birkeland was deeply unhappy about having to share credit with Eyde, who had no part in the technical development of the idea, but he was forced to collaborate because only Eyde had access to the huge amounts of electric power that would be needed to run the furnaces. Birkeland knew his position as inventor was tenuous. With Eyde’s name on the patent as well as his own, and Eyde’s money and contacts in the business and banking worlds, Birkeland knew he would be easy to sideline once the furnaces were developed and his expertise was no longer needed. Eyde himself was well aware of this and believed he could nudge Birkeland into a nominal consultative role as soon as the furnaces were productive.
