The Northern Lights, page 14
The two men shook hands and Birkeland agreed to submit his designs to Alfred Bryn for a joint patent on Friday, 20 February. He asked Bryn to keep quiet about the application as he did not want rumor spreading that he was working on a furnace for fear of inciting competition. He also still had hopes for the cannon and did not want his shareholders to suspect him of divided loyalty, but for the time being the furnace seemed more likely to provide him with the resources he needed to build a laboratory. With some misgivings he asked Bryn to lodge the application with the Christiania Patent Office.
On the back of his copy of the agreement Birkeland wrote:
This contract states that Eyde is joint-owner of the invention but that I am the sole inventor. This document is for historical interest in case Eyde tries to take the whole credit. Kr. B.
From the start, the collaboration between Birkeland and Eyde was riddled with suspicion and doubt, and it proved to be more damaging than Birkeland ever imagined.
9
The Furnace
7 August 1903
Frogner Bay factory, West Christiania
I have never known any other man so engaged with science with such reckless devotion. His capacity for research was part of his innermost mind, it fascinated him and made him work far beyond the resources a human constitution can tolerate without being worn out too early.
SEM SÆLAND, memorial address, 22 September 1919
BIRKELAND marched around the edge of the fjord, west of Christiania, oblivious to everything around him except the rays of the August sun warming his body, which ached from months spent in a cramped workshop. It was the day of the first official trial of the fertilizer furnace. If the furnace produced saltpeter, the project would continue; if not, there was no further money to develop it and the attempt would have to be abandoned. Everything rested on this test. Birkeland, whose nerves were already strained from the heavy workload, could not bear to stand and watch while his assistant engineer, Eivind Næss, ran the furnace.
Birkeland looked very different from the man who had submitted the first patent for the furnace in February. The past six months of intense pressure had taken their toll on him: although only thirty-five, he looked ten years older. He was pale and drawn, and his clothes were baggy on his weak frame as he rarely left the workshop in time to enjoy the summer sunshine or to exercise. At weekends, he went to his university office to continue work on the gun or on switching mechanisms for the power stations, neither of which he felt he could abandon until he achieved positive results with the furnace. One of those ideas had to bear fruit, and allow him to pursue his science beyond debilitating financial constraints.
Birkeland decided that he no longer had time to attend the Sunday lectures with Ida. He explained to her that, for the next few months, he would be completely preoccupied with a project to avert the agricultural crisis in Europe. He emphasized the importance of his task in the hope that she would understand that he had no choice but to stop seeing her for a while. In the face of such a mission, Ida knew she could not make claims upon his time. She took the tram and train back to Lillestrøm, twenty kilometers east of the city, to her school, wondering if this was merely an excuse to terminate their friendship. Birkeland was aware that this was how it must seem to her but he believed he had to choose between his work and seeing Ida. It never occurred to him not to concentrate wholly on his work.
In late February Eyde and Birkeland had set up an unlimited company, Birkeland’s Risk Venture, under the aegis of which Eyde would finance experiments conducted by Birkeland to develop the furnace. During March and April Birkeland began small-scale tests with the furnace design at the university but soon his office became too small and hot to work in. Carl Anton, father of his childhood friend Wilhelm Bjerkenes, told him about a group of warehouses and small factories producing electrical equipment on the western side of the city, by the fjord’s edge, called Frogner Bay. Carl Anton had himself established a makeshift laboratory there a few years before and thought it would suit Birkeland’s needs. Birkeland moved his prototype furnaces there at the end of May and was joined by Eivind Næss, who had worked on the Christiania railway terminus but had been laid off with all the other engineers at the end of the project. Eyde had told Næss to call on Birkeland, but had given him no details about the task he was needed for. When Birkeland asked Næss whether he was an electrician, Næss confessed that he was only an ordinary construction engineer. “No matter,” Birkeland replied, and in that way Næss came to be Birkeland’s chief assistant at the Frogner Bay factory.
“Factory” was a grand name for what was essentially a large wooden shed in a junkyard. It had been hurriedly erected in cheap timber planks with a rusting corrugated-iron roof and Birkeland had to pick his way past piles of splintered wood, broken chairs, old packing cases, and anonymous pieces of rusting metal to reach the factory door. A wooden pole lashed to one side of the building supported the electric cables and white enamel insulators that brought power from a small electricity plant nearby. On warm days the sun’s rays beat down on the iron roof and combined with the heat from the furnace to broil the two men inside. Birkeland wore a straw boater to work and kept it pushed to the back of his head throughout the day, refusing to remove it because he felt it protected his head from the heat. Both men wore suits, stiff white collars, and cravats in the workshop despite the dirty, sweaty work they had to do.
The interior was as makeshift as the rest of the building. The walls were unplastered, the roof not insulated, and bare wires ran across the roof joists and hung down into the room like black vines. The furnace was in the center, attached to pumps, magnets, and generators, like the heart of a living organism. Næss had never worked with an experimental physicist using high voltages before. Birkeland warned him of the dangers; he described how flames shot out of the mouth and stomach of an electrocuted person and their insides were liquefied. The guilt and loss he felt over the death of young Boye had instilled in Birkeland a need to keep people safe in his hazardous domain. After the stern advice, Birkeland explained the principles of the design.
The furnace would use a 50-hertz alternating current between two electrodes to produce electric arcs that moved outward in a semicircle under the influence of a strong magnetic field created in the furnace by a number of large electromagnets. These arcs formed, spread sideways, broke, and reformed fifty times a second or more. The alternating current caused the polarity of the electrodes to change, making the arcs flip from one side to the other so fast that they seemed to create a continuous glowing disc with a temperature of 3,000° Celsius. Once the furnace was working properly, ordinary air containing 79 percent nitrogen (N2) and 21 percent oxygen (O2) would be pumped over this disc, the heat of which would force the molecules to move about so fast that they would collide and cause the usually stable N2 to combine with oxygen to form nitrogen oxide, NO2. The resulting gas would be mixed with water to create nitric acid (HNO3) and trickled over limestone (calcium carbonate, CaCO3) with which it would react to make Ca(NO3)2, calcium nitrate, called saltpeter by Birkeland, although that term usually referred to potassium nitrate, an important component in explosives. Schoolboys knew the components of air; the brilliance of Birkeland’s discovery lay in the use of large electromagnets to force the arcs of electricity outward so that they created a disc of sufficient size to make potentially profitable the ratio of energy used to saltpeter produced. To the eye, the disc would glow with the constancy of the sun; only the loud, pulsating roar made as each arc formed would reveal that the disc was an illusion created by rapidly moving individual arcs. The disc would be fully enclosed in firebricks and a metal case, although their working model was protected only by a wall of firebricks that had to be removed and replaced every time an alteration was made.
There were a number of problems with the design that needed to be solved and the two men worked from early in the morning until eleven or twelve at night and occasionally for thirty-six hours at a stretch. They would build, test, and dismantle the 28-kilowatt furnace each day, having to develop from scratch not only every component, but whole new systems and methods. They had no predecessors to guide them; everything was new and unknown. Many nights they locked the factory, disappointed that no progress had been made other than that of eliminating failed possibilities. On other days, a new part or arrangement bore fruit and took them one step closer to a finished design.
Næss and Birkeland were very different in character. Birkeland arrived most mornings with new ideas to try and tremendous enthusiasm for the pure science they were witnessing. Næss was more pragmatic, testing each idea thoroughly and recording the results before moving on to the next, like a policeman eliminating suspects one by one rather than using his intuition to find the culprit. Although Birkeland found Næss’s attention to detail a little frustrating, he realized it had value and the two coexisted contentedly although without the trust and camaraderie Birkeland had experienced during the winter with his assistants on the Haldde summit. Næss was Eyde’s employee, loyal to Eyde, not motivated by Birkeland’s inspirational science.
During these months of trial and error, Eyde managed to finance the cost of the premises, electricity, and materials, though he did not tell Birkeland how. He traveled abroad nearly every month to develop contacts and keep his name current among the financial elite on the continent. He would work on the train, ship, and carriage and late into the evening if necessary, frequently calling his lawyer, Birkeland, or Næss after dinner and demanding that they come for a meeting immediately. Birkeland complied initially, believing the calls to be urgent, but he soon learned to ignore the phone in the evenings when he realized that Eyde simply expected others to be working if he was. To the great irritation of his wife, Næss regularly had to leave the dinner table to respond to the summons. Eyde came to the factory weekly to inspect their progress and never failed to tell them not to spend more than was necessary. Birkeland was not being paid and Næss’s wages were terribly low, although he did not complain: jobs for engineers were very scarce and he was happy to have work at all.
Eyde put tremendous pressure on Birkeland to get the furnace working fast. He had heard through his contacts in Germany that Badische Annilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF) was also developing a design for a nitrate furnace that the engineer Otto Schönherr had been working on since 1897. BASF was a large company, founded in 1861 to produce artificial indigo, with ample funds for research and development, an industrial giant compared to the tiny Birkeland’s Risk Venture, into which Eyde poured the meager sums he was able to find; Birkeland used the funds immediately for developing the furnace.
Closeted in the dark and steamy factory that made his head and lungs ache, Birkeland was working so hard that he did not even stop to welcome back his teams from the Arctic Circle in late July. Sæland had to find him at Frogner Bay to tell him everyone had returned safely. Though desperate to hear their news, look at the results they had achieved, and start using them to develop his theories, Birkeland had to test the fertilizer furnace ten days later. The furnace had to take priority, so there was no choice but to make the huge sacrifice of postponing seeing the expedition members.
The sacrifice, however, was worth it. On the test day Birkeland entered the dark, intensely pungent workshop and saw Næss swirling a milky white solution around a shallow pan, grinning broadly. Birkeland stared at the evil-smelling liquid and shouted, “Good! Now we are getting rich.” He telegraphed the news to Eyde, who was in Stockholm visiting his wife’s family:
7 AUGUST 1903. CHRISTIANIA. SALTPETRE PRODUCED.
The news came just in time, as there was no more money to fund the research if the trial failed and Eyde was dependent on the fertilizer furnace to keep him from bankruptcy. As soon as he received the telegram, he telephoned some of the influential Swedish financiers he had met through his wife. The first call was to Knut Tillberg, the Swedish banker who had helped Eyde buy waterfalls and had put 35,000 crowns into Birkeland’s Risk Venture in July along with the Swedish consul, Niels Persson. Each had been given a quarter of the company in return, but the money was now spent. Eyde needed Tillberg to use his influence with the Swedish Bank to persuade them to back the company. Tillberg tried and failed, but he did manage to persuade the scion of the Swedish banking family and one of the richest men in the world, Marcus Wallenberg, director of the Swedish Independent Bank, to show interest. Wallenberg promised to look at how the company could be financed, but none of Eyde’s Swedish contacts was ready to put more money into the company immediately. Eyde refused to give up just when they had managed to produce saltpeter, albeit in small quantities.
A few weeks later he traveled to Germany with Birkeland to meet Otto Witt, a consultant to BASF, in an effort to persuade Witt to interest BASF in funding the further development of Birkeland’s furnace in tandem with Schönherr’s design. Witt thought Birkeland’s design showed potential, but BASF decided that their Norwegian rivals were nothing to fear and refused to cooperate, assuming that they could buy them out at a later date if it became necessary. Having come to an impasse, the two men returned to Christiania, Eyde to continue searching for backers and Birkeland to his office, finally, to hear the news about the Aurora Polaris Expedition.
Sæland was reinstalled at his desk in Birkeland’s office, surrounded by boxes of magnetograms and piles of recording ledgers, trying to put them in some sort of order for the time when Birkeland would be able to start processing the information they contained. The professor was delighted to have him back and for the first time in months he sat down and relaxed, listening to Sæland describe his ten months in Iceland. The experience had clearly been grueling and, at times, dangerous but the expedition appeared to have been a great success. Birkeland looked rapidly through the magnetograms from the four stations. From this evidence, he felt sure he would be able to map the movement of magnetic storms around the polar region for the first time, and judge more accurately not only the way in which electric currents drove these storms but also how they entered the Earth’s magnetic field from the sun.
Birkeland explained to Sæland and Dietrichson, who also shared his office, that he intended to use these results in conjunction with laboratory experiments to try to re-create the interaction that he believed was taking place between the sun and the Earth. From his desk he pulled out sheets of diagrams he had made before he was swamped by the fertilizer project and handed them to Dietrichson, asking him to give an opinion on the feasibility of making the instrument depicted. He had christened it the terrella, “little Earth,” a term Gilbert had used for the lodestones he used to determine the magnetic nature of the Earth. At a cursory glance, Dietrichson could see that the terrella consisted of a magnetized metal ball (Earth) within a large vacuum tube (space) at one end of which was a cathode to send out electric particles (the sun). He was excited by the notion of the experiment and agreed to make detailed plans. Sæland would start processing the results from the field trips to provide Birkeland with the information he needed along with his machine. It was impossible for Sæland to do more than scratch the surface of the material on his own but for the time being there was no money to hire assistants, to build the machine, or to construct even a basic laboratory. In order to obtain money, Birkeland would have to work on the furnace for at least another six months and they would have to continue alone, following his guidelines.
Sæland and Dietrichson were amazed at Birkeland’s stamina and his ability to juggle several projects at once. Now that the saltpeter had been produced, however, Birkeland stopped working on switching mechanisms for the hydroelectric industry—he simply did not have time—but he kept the gun project simmering, writing letters to potentially interested parties and improving its design. In July he had corresponded with a British woman, Lady Sander, in Geneva, proposing to develop the gun full-time if he could be released from the university. He suggested that the British could purchase a world monopoly on the design, at a certain price. He had also received an enthusiastic letter from Major Edward Palliser, who wanted more information about the gun and proposed a meeting with Birkeland. Although nothing developed further from those contacts, Birkeland had come so close to enjoying a huge success with his cannon that he was loath to abandon it entirely.
Birkeland’s brief respite from the furnace came to an abrupt end at the beginning of September when Eyde returned to Christiania having made a new deal without consulting him. Eyde had created a new company, which did not use Birkeland’s name but was called the Norwegian Nitrogen Company, in which Tillberg and Persson had invested 400,000 crowns each. They had then issued shares to the value of 100,000 crowns, which Wallenberg had bought. Birkeland still owned one-fifth of the shares, as stated in his previous contract with Birkeland’s Risk Venture, but he had less control in this larger company. He questioned the wisdom of having such a strong Swedish interest in the project given the tense situation between the two countries, but Eyde ignored him.
The Frogner Bay factory was too cramped for Birkeland to produce an industrial-size furnace and so they moved to a transformer station at Ankerløkken in the northwest district of Christiania. Eyde put tremendous pressure on Birkeland to make a prototype to secure investment and recoup expenses before the German competition entered the fray. Birkeland, Næss, and Dr. Birger Halvorsen, a chemist engaged to work on the gases produced by the furnace, worked every day, including Sundays, inspired by the dedication Birkeland showed for the task. Throughout the autumn and winter the men stopped only for two days at Christmas. Birkeland had been invited to spend the holiday with his brother and nine nieces and nephews, but had to decline. The Mohns asked him to have Christmas dinner with them and Birkeland went, but if he had hoped Ida would be there he was disappointed, as she had returned to Raade to be with her family.
