The Northern Lights, page 17
On the launch day of Norsk Hydro, phones in Eyde’s office began ringing with journalists from as far afield as Japan wanting details about the process of making fertilizer from air. The newspapers were full of cartoons of Birkeland wringing dung from the skies. It had been decided that two talks should be given on the same night, one by Birkeland to the Academy of Science in the university’s Festival Hall, and one by Eyde to a general audience at the Polytechnic Society. This was the only way of avoiding the problem of who should speak first. Both men gave speeches to audiences of curious people, delighted at the prospect of Norway taking a leading role in saving the globe from agricultural crisis.
After the public launch, Wallenberg suggested to Eyde that they propose the furnace to the Nobel Committee. Although it was a new prize, founded only three years earlier as part of the will of the reclusive Swedish explosives magnate Alfred Nobel, it had already become a unique accolade in the burgeoning arena of science and technology. To be awarded the Nobel Prize, even jointly with Birkeland, would put an end to the insecurity Eyde felt over his lack of education. He was painfully aware that many of the people he mixed with, including most of his business colleagues, his wife, and her family and friends, were better educated than he was. He had been taken out of school at fourteen to work on a naval ship as he was a slow learner and his parents thought a spell at sea might cure him of being work-shy. He returned to school after a year and eventually finished an engineering course, but he was not gifted academically and made up for the deficiency with his business acumen and a habit of mentioning at every opportunity the famous, well-connected people he knew.
Birkeland also wanted to be nominated for a Nobel Prize, particularly in recognition of his auroral theory, although he realized the furnace was a more likely recipient. When the Nobel Prize was first announced in Aftenposten on 26 June 1900, he had cut out the article and kept it carefully among his papers. As the English did not award the prize, he felt a Scandinavian had more chance of winning it, and he hoped to be asked more details about his furnace by members of the Nobel Committee. He did not know that Eyde, meanwhile, had already furnished the committee with detailed drawings and test results.
Wallenberg informed Eyde within a few weeks that the Nobel Committee wanted to nominate Birkeland alone for the prize in chemistry in recognition of his invention. Eyde was furious, as it was his money that had enabled Birkeland to develop the furnace in the first place, but the committee was only interested in the science behind it, not in its commercial success. Eyde was not a man easily dissuaded from pursuit of a cherished goal and he launched an underground campaign to be jointly nominated for the prize, using all the contacts he had made through his aristocratic Swedish wife. The situation was very delicate for the committee, who balked at awarding the prize jointly but did not want to create a diplomatic incident by angering one of Norway’s most prominent businessmen. Relations between the two countries were still strained after the rupture of the Union and a prize as prestigious and symbolic as the Nobel was a fertile subject for discord. Eyde’s machinations rendered Birkeland’s nomination potentially controversial and it was quietly dropped without Birkeland ever knowing that he had been considered.
Ignorant of Eyde’s sabotage, Birkeland rejoiced in his first financial returns for the years of exhausting work. He sold his patents and shares in the Norwegian Nitrogen Company to ELKEM for 75,000 crowns and received a guaranteed consultancy fee from Norsk Hydro of 5,000 crowns a year for the rest of his life. He retained his position as a director of the NNC and his shares in ELKEM. In one day Birkeland had fifteen times his annual salary deposited in his bank account and the promise that the equivalent of his salary would be paid to him annually for what he hoped would be a few weeks’ work a year. He would have the financial freedom to build his own laboratory, pay a team of assistants, and operate well beyond the scope of the university’s pitiful resources.
11
Looking Back from Space
1906–8
Christiania
The value of his hypotheses I cannot measure and nor can anyone else in the present audience. It is too brave not to be unlikely at some points but even if he has made some mistakes he has also uncovered many remarkable facts and with his extraordinary intuition he had a feeling for the huge electrical importance of the universe. Future research may show that such messages from the sun are equally important to us as Galileo’s understanding of messages from the stars when he took his telescope and studied space for the first time.
SEM SÆLAND, memorial address, 22 September 1919
Dear Professor Wille,
Thank you for your Christmas greeting and I send you best wishes for a Happy New Year. I have in mind acquiring a cat and some advice from you would be very valuable. Best wishes from Kristian and Ida Birkeland
Professor Wille, cat lover, wrote a long and detailed letter to Birkeland on the characters of different breeds, particularly emphasizing those known for keeping mice at bay. Birkeland enjoyed Wille’s poetic descriptions of feline hunting skills but thought a more affectionate cat was called for as he and Ida had decided to buy one to keep her company when he was away. The cat was only one factor in the changes Birkeland had agreed to in the hope of making Ida happy; the most significant was Ida’s desire to find somewhere new to live, a home of their own that she could decorate and to which she could invite people. Birkeland’s apartment in Lysaker was shabby and masculine despite Ida’s efforts to improve it and she launched into house hunting in the smart area of Christiania behind the palace. The professor felt released to go back to his work, where he lost all notion of time; frequently Ida had to ring his office to remind him to come home and occasionally she even went to the university to collect him. Their relationship had settled into a pattern that suited them both for the time being.
During the years Birkeland had worked on the nitrogen furnace, he had not had time to analyze the results of his Aurora Polaris Expedition or to publish scientific papers. He decided that it was time to plan a major scientific treatise, based on these new data, in which to present his ideas to a wider audience and convince those who still doubted the correctness of his vision. He now had the money to hire assistants and to build a laboratory in which to do experimental research. Although most professors bemoaned the impossibility of hiring and keeping good assistants, Birkeland was able to poach the best young men with promises of exciting research and a generous salary. Ole Andreas Krogness and Lars Vegard, both graduates of Birkeland’s physics course, were employed to help Sæland process measurements and observations from the Aurora Polaris Expedition.
Birkeland wanted his treatise to be a monument in the vast landscape of scientific publications and decided to make it a three-volume work to be published in stages. The first was to be written immediately and would cover the Northern Lights research and his theories about magnetic storms and currents. His assistants set to work writing descriptions of the Arctic stations, the instruments used, the weather conditions, and the results obtained. Records were collated and processed, maps drawn, and notation systems established. Since the end of the expedition three years earlier, magnetograms had also arrived from twenty-three observatories across the globe: Honolulu, Bombay, Dehra Dun at the foot of the Himalayas, Baldwin in Kansas, Sitka in Alaska, Cheltenham near Washington, D.C., Christchurch, Toronto, Kew, Stonyhurst, Greenwich, San Fernando in Spain, Wilhelmshaven, Munich, Potsdam, Pola on the Istrian Peninsula, Pavlovsk, Tiflis, Ekaterinburg, Irkutsk, Batavia on Java, Zi-ka-wei in China, and Val Joyeux near Paris. As Birkeland wrote in the resulting book, “Our observational material of magnetic storms was, I may safely say, the largest that has ever been dealt with at one time.”
While the professor’s office filled with enthusiastic assistants, the new king and queen were crowned in Norway’s ancient Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim on 22 June 1906, the first rulers of an independent Norway for over 600 years. Birkeland was not in Christiania to enjoy the coronation celebrations because Eyde had asked him to go to Berlin to present a lecture about the fertilizer furnace, arranged by Otto Witt. It was part of Eyde’s plan to secure the cooperation of BASF and Birkeland had little choice but to interrupt his laboratory preparations. His scientific rival, Schönherr, was in the audience, and Witt introduced them after the talk. Schönherr, now a director of BASF, saw that collaboration with Norsk Hydro might be favorable due to the latter’s access to cheap hydroelectricity. Germany had only expensive coal-fired plants, and it was no longer an option to buy Norwegian waterfalls since the Norwegian Parliament had introduced the Concession Laws to protect the country’s natural resources from foreign interests. Schönherr promised to look into the possibility of building a new factory in Norway and combining BASF’s technical developments with those of Norsk Hydro. The two men enjoyed each other’s company so much that Schönherr confided in Birkeland that his wife was suffering from depression and sleeplessness. Birkeland wrote to him upon his return to Norway recommending the use of veronal and enclosing the label from one of his own packets of the drug. He had used it only rarely since his collapse two years before, but he kept it on his bedside table in case of a relapse.
Now that Birkeland had the financing for his scientific work, the furnace was a distraction. On 15 August 1906 he resigned the directorship of the Norwegian Nitrogen Company that he had retained when he had sold his shares and patents the previous year. He no longer felt the need to be involved in a company that was simply a subsidiary of Norsk Hydro and ELKEM. He also wanted to sell his shares in ELKEM. To put these decisions into effect, Eyde asked Birkeland to meet him at his office to sign a new contract. An uneasy truce had developed between the two men. They were like opposite ends of a bar magnet, inexorably tied together through the company they had forged but unable to connect.
On the closely typed pages of the new contract it was stated that the professor, co-inventor of the Birkeland-Eyde Fertilizer Process, would receive a one-time payment of 60,000 crowns for his shares in ELKEM, plus an annual salary of 5,000 crowns to act as technical consultant to the company. Combined with his 5,000-crown consultancy salary from Norsk Hydro and previous one-time payment for the sale of his Norwegian Nitrogen Company shares, Birkeland had earned 135,000 crowns from shares and would receive 10,000 crowns a year as a consultant plus his 5,000-crown professor’s salary. In return, he was bound not to set up a competing company and to be available to give technical advice if needed. Birkeland felt sure he would not be needed, as he was certainly not wanted. Næss in particular had made it clear that he could get on better without the professor. Watching Norsk Hydro turn into an international corporation had confirmed to Birkeland that power came from wealth and ownership. Intelligence was necessary but was always outmaneuvered by the influence that money conferred. Eyde’s entrepreneurial skills had given him the biggest weapon in the battle for ownership of the nitrogen process.
As Birkeland read the contract, he realized that to sign it meant bowing out of a project that had absorbed his every waking moment for three years and wrecked his nerves. But he could see that he was not suited to big business; he could not be economical with the truth, hide his opinions, or care enough about money to pursue it as a goal in itself. He signed the contract. As he left the building a sense of freedom and optimism rose in his chest. He strode down Carl Johan Gate to the university and his own domain.
14 November 1906
Professor Birkeland,
Dr. Isaakson will take over your teaching duties at the university in order that you may continue to process your data from the 1902–3 Aurora Borealis Expedition. You are responsible for paying him to teach your lectures. University Administration
Birkeland decided to return to his plan to re-create the Northern Lights in a laboratory, but at the university he had none of the facilities he required. The university had never needed to build and equip a modern research laboratory since so few students chose to study physics. Of the 250 students admitted each year, only fourteen majored in sciences and those were divided among geology, botany, mathematics, zoology, astronomy, mineralogy, chemistry, and physics. With his usual lack of regard for convention, he wrote to the administration of the university, informing them that he would need to convert the basement below his room to hold a generator. He also notified them that
I have taken half of the lecture hall for a new laboratory. By putting the students closer together, there is enough space in the reduced hall.
A testy reply granted him permission to use the room but stressed that all alterations and equipment must be provided at his own expense. Telegrams were dispatched to the best scientific equipment manufacturers in Europe and Russia with requests for catalogues and prices, technical performances, and speed of delivery.
Within weeks, the first of Birkeland’s purchases began to arrive in the university courtyard, including a 15,000-watt Swiss-built generator that delivered a voltage as high as 20,000 volts and provided a loud background hum to the law lectures given nearby. Boxes marked “fragile” and “heavy” appeared in his office, and, like a child at Christmas, Birkeland rushed to discover their contents. Over the course of a few weeks the bare concrete shell of the basement was festooned with wires, fuse boxes, tool racks, wooden plinths, camera tripods, buzzing and sparking machines, vacuum flasks, electric cables, plugs, batteries, buckets of pitch, and brushes. It soon became apparent that the room was too small for Birkeland’s extraordinary plans and the lecture hall too distant to be practical. The only solution was to put some of the equipment in his office, linking it with the basement below by boring small holes in the floor through which to pass electric cables. Birkeland asked the administration for yet another room to use as an office. Meanwhile, a third science graduate, Olaf Devik, was hired to help Birkeland and Dietrichson with the experiments.
To the casual visitor, the laboratory appeared to be the work of medieval visionaries with futuristic dreams. The noises, flashes, smells, and heat were overwhelming and lurking within were a number of very real dangers. The vacuum pumps released poisonous mercury fumes; the small amount of radium salt that had been given to Birkeland by Marie Curie was left on a shelf beside a box of new lightbulbs, leaking lethal radiation; explosions and implosions from the vacuum flasks were an ever-present risk; the generator had moving parts that could slice off fingers. Everyone working there suffered frequent electric shocks of varying severity caused by experimental, hurried wiring and the occasionally capricious behavior of electric currents and equipment. Birkeland and his assistants adopted the practice of working with one hand in their pockets so that, if they sustained a large electric shock, it would travel down their bodies rather than across their hearts. Birkeland’s own safety precautions caused some comment among his assistants and colleagues. On arriving in the morning, he would replace his hat with an Egyptian fez and put on a pair of red leather Egyptian slippers with long, pointed tips. To those who asked the reason for his fanciful attire, he explained that he suffered from frequent headaches due to the harmful rays emitted by his experiments and that the fez protected his head. Although it was true that he suffered from headaches, he was perfectly aware that a small felt hat would not stop radiation and he told the tale merely to see who was gullible enough to believe it. As for the slippers, it was simply to avoid wearing wet boots in the laboratory.
Birkeland’s Egyptian accessories were more than just a joke, though. Egyptology had been fashionable throughout the West in his youth due to the enthralling excavations in the pyramids and Valley of the Kings. His isolated boyhood had been punctuated by Professor Lieblein’s Sunday lectures about ancient Egypt. Lieblein’s son, Johan, was one year older than Birkeland and the two were friends. Birkeland used to go to the professor’s house, where he listened to stories about the excavations in Luxor and at the pyramids at Giza, heard about the glories of the pharaohs and the worship of Ra, the sun god. Lieblein, together with Ibsen, had represented Norway at the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and he had described how they had sailed up the Nile to the cataracts, as the guests of Khedive Ismail, Egypt’s ruler.
The sun was the celestial body that held the greatest fascination for Birkeland. When his interest in physics developed, he realized that Egypt was also the land of a strange phenomenon as mysterious as the aurora borealis. The Zodiacal Light appeared in equatorial skies after sunset and was sometimes considered the natural explanation behind Moses’ “Pillar of Fire” because it was shaped like an elongated pyramid of glowing light stretching from the horizon into space. It was another of Earth’s mysteries that taunted the scientists who traveled to study it, and Birkeland hoped that one day he would experience for himself this mystical phenomenon. Until then, his fez and his slippers were a reminder that the sun’s influence stretched around the globe, from the flickering lights of the Arctic to the glowing columns in the night skies of Arabia.
The instruments for re-creating the Northern Lights did not exist beyond Birkeland’s dreams and drawings, so he and Dietrichson set about constructing them themselves. Initially they used Crookes tubes, glass cylinders first made in the 1850s for experiments where a vacuum was needed. At one end of the tube was a cathode, a negatively charged electrode that emitted a beam of high-velocity electrons or “cathode rays” when heated; at the other was an anode to receive the rays. In Birkeland’s experiments the anode was given the form of a small, magnetized metal globe, representing the Earth. He called it a terrella, after Gilbert. Birkeland found it immensely satisfying to be performing his experiments almost exactly three hundred years after Gilbert first published his thesis on the Earth’s magnetism. The terrellas Gilbert used were naturally magnetic lodestones whereas Birkeland was able to magnetize his globes artificially by fitting them with an electromagnet consisting of an iron core wound round with copper wire insulated with silk. The ball itself was made from a thin sheet of brass covered with a coat of barium platinocide that was phosphorescent and would glow when hit by flying electrons. The magnet within was mounted slightly off vertical to imitate the tilt of the Earth’s poles. When Birkeland turned on the cathode, the electrons would stream into the vacuum in all directions until he turned on the magnet in the globe. Once in a magnetic field, the electrons were guided to the poles of the Earth in spiraling streams, creating glowing ovals around them, just as Birkeland suspected auroral ovals formed around the poles of the planet.
