The Northern Lights, page 18
When Birkeland tried to perform these experiments on a larger scale, the tubes either shattered at the crucial moment or the curved glass of the cylinder distorted the view of the phenomena occurring inside. He searched in vain for a vacuum chamber that would avoid these problems until, after several months of inquiries, a tube arrived that satisfied most of his requirements. It was almost the size of a man’s torso, oblong with curved corners and sides as straight as it was possible to make. On the morning of the first test of this large terrella, Birkeland arrived at his office early. Standing outside, he could hear the regular breathing of the vacuum pump and the distant grind of the generator. He had slept little the night before, not because of nerves but because of excitement. Birkeland donned his Egyptian fez and slippers and then sat down to do some calculations before his assistants arrived. By ten o’clock the laboratory was buzzing with excited conversation: Birkeland and his assistants had been joined by professors and students who had heard via the grapevine that Birkeland was to make his own Northern Lights that day, in his own miniature universe. Amund Helland was there, laughing loudly at Karl’s retelling of Birkeland’s practical joke of shutting him into the vacuum chamber one day while he was cleaning it. Birkeland loved playing jokes on his assistants. He had once strongly magnetized a metal bar and then casually asked Devik to move it. It was impossible to budge. After a while the other assistants joined Devik and struggled to move it a few centimeters. Just as they were all heaving on the bar as hard as they could, Birkeland switched off the power to the magnet and the bar went flying off the metal table and his assistants flew with it. On this day, however, Birkeland was too preoccupied to think of playing games.
With his usual flair, Birkeland explained to his impromptu audience—which by now also included the director of the Christiania observatory as well as several professors of math, geology, and law, the latter wanting to see the fruits of the process that had been disturbing their lectures for months—the principles behind the vacuum chamber, how it represented the Earth and would show, for the first time ever, how our world reacts to unknown forces in space. The room was crackling with anticipation as Birkeland closed the shutters of the three large windows, orchestrating his own sun-down. The noise of the generator increased and the audience had to shout their questions and observations. After a little while the tip of the cathode, “the sun,” began to glow hot. Still “the Earth” lay in darkness. Once Birkeland was satisfied that electrons were streaming from the cathode, he flicked the switch beside the chamber and powered the electromagnet in the terrella. Within seconds, a purple glow could be seen encircling the Earth at the equator. As Birkeland increased the strength of the magnetic field around the Earth, the circle divided, and two circles began to move toward the poles. The audience fell silent as the two spiral rings of glowing, phosphorescent light hovered around the poles of the Earth, eerie and magical. The miniature auroras were the most supernatural phenomenon the men in that room had ever seen, and yet it was a scientific experiment, aiming to provide explanations and boundaries to an occurrence that had always defied definition. Even the least fanciful of those gathered around Birkeland’s terrella had a fleeting moment of awe, looking at the Earth as if from space. Only Birkeland had any idea of how auroras could be conjured out of nothing, could glow with such lively intensity, could find their way to the poles of the Earth, could be so beautiful. After a few minutes Birkeland turned off the magnet and the cathode in the terrella; the glow disappeared, and the audience took a collective breath. He opened the shutters and laughed at the stunned faces of his visitors. He could not have hoped for more. With this experiment, he was going to make his doubting detractors sit up and acknowledge the value of his theories. Beyond that, he had realized during this first test how much more he had to say about the world. He no longer wanted to concentrate on the Lights alone because here was the canvas he needed to look beyond the Earth to the universe itself.
As Birkeland immersed himself in the excellent results achieved by his second expedition and continued to pursue his terrella experiments, Eyde entrenched his position as director of a multinational industry. He bought one of the first cars to be imported into Norway, a Mercedes with license number plate 50, using large sums of company money. Other board members were furious with him for his profligacy but Eyde explained that he needed to impress visiting dignitaries—the king of Siam was to tour the factory the following year, as was the new king of Norway. For these occasions Eyde actually used different cars and kept the Mercedes to drive around Christiania, where he soon founded the Royal Norwegian Automobile Club, a new forum in which to display his wealth. Eyde was also spending a huge sum building a grandiose “administration” house at Notodden, in conjunction with the new factory. It was an extravagant statement of national and personal pride. There was a central room capable of holding over a hundred people, where he could entertain his guests and impress upon them the glory of the Norwegian landscape with a magnificent view that stretched for many kilometers over Heddalsvann Lake to the Telemark mountains in the distance. The finest wood-carvers in Norway had transformed Old Norse and Viking tales into decorative friezes and reliefs around the fireplace, columns, grand stairway, and gallery. A huge office for Eyde adjoined the main room, and the principal bedroom suite was also for his use. A guest suite, more modest than Eyde’s, was available for important visitors. He was relieved not to have to stay at the old Viktoria Hotel, which was pleasant but could no longer contain his ambitions.
In December 1906 Eyde made an agreement with BASF to utilize the power potential of the Rjukan waterfall, eighty kilometers north of Notodden. They would collaborate in building a power station and factory there, for which they formed a new company, Saltpetreworks. Birkeland renounced his present consultant position with ELKEM (the company owned mainly by the Swedish Independent Bank), for which he was paid 5,000 crowns, and entered into a consultancy contract with Saltpetreworks that paid 12,000 crowns per year. The position was for life. Surprisingly, Eyde seemed keen to keep Birkeland in the employ of Norsk Hydro, perhaps fearing that he would be outnumbered by the directors and engineers from Germany who now descended on Notodden and Rjukan to plan the latest factory. The permanent factory at Notodden was now finished but still producing under 500 kilos per kilowatt-year. Birkeland tried not to get too involved in the problems and the politics.
WHEN THE FIRST volume of Birkeland’s book was published in early 1908, it was a triumph of completeness, handsome in its gold-embossed calfskin binding. Published in English and distributed by Scandinavian, German, British, and French presses, The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition 1902–1903 assumed landmark status. This monumental achievement, made more remarkable by the fact that Birkeland had needed to earn most of the money to make it possible, cemented Norway’s position in the international scientific arena and encouraged those who were trying to progress beyond the limited vision of the previous generation of Norwegian academics.
The book opened with personal accounts of Birkeland’s adventures in Finnmark, his battles with the weather, descriptions of the local Sami, Hætta the postman, and assorted curiosities to intrigue the reader. He then described the Arctic stations from his second expedition, again emphasizing the tremendous obstacles faced by the pioneering researchers because of the weather and the remoteness of the locations. Encounters with whalers, hunting trips, meetings with Samoyed families, and photographs of the fur-clad explorer-scientists were included to give the work the aura and mystique of polar pioneering. The magnetic recordings from the field studies and from stations around the world were analyzed and compared with the experiments Birkeland had been making with the large Crookes vacuum tubes and terrellas. A few photographs of the small globes with artificial auroral ovals around the poles were included to great effect. Long tables of equations, magnetic recordings, hundreds of maps of the world bristling with arrows showing the direction of the magnetic storms across the surface of the planet, diagrams of current systems and copies of actual magnetograms were also included. It was a paradigm of scientific craftsmanship and research.
The book’s conclusions were no less extraordinary. From the recordings around the globe, Birkeland divided all known storm patterns into three categories, one of which, the “polar elementary storm,” was his own discovery. Birkeland had suspected this form of magnetic disturbance was responsible for creating the auroras during his first trip to Haldde, but did not mention it in the resulting book because he lacked proof. His single Arctic station was too limited to reveal magnetic changes across the region, and most other magnetic observatories were in the midlatitudes and did not pick up evidence of polar perturbations. Establishing four stations during the second expedition had provided the evidence he needed to describe this new category of magnetic disturbance and its relationship to the auroras. Through his study of these well-defined and quite local storms, Birkeland was able to deduce, from his knowledge of electromagnetism, that the energy powering these storms and the Northern Lights had to originate outside the Earth, in space, ultimately from the sun.
This was the most controversial element in his book, as many scientists refused to believe that the sun could be the origin of cathode rays that reached as far as the Earth. Their main objection was that if only electrons, negatively charged rays, were emitted, the sun would eventually become positively charged and also that the repulsive electric forces between electrons would quickly disperse the beams. Birkeland, however, knew that corpuscles of both charges escaped from the sun but deduced, accurately, that mainly negatively charged electrons caused magnetic storms and auroras.
From a physical point of view it is most probable that solar rays are neither exclusively negative nor positive rays, but of both kinds . . . if any positive rays do penetrate into the Earth’s atmosphere, they have hardly any perceptible magnetic effect.
In this way, by using the terrellas in conjunction with magnetic results, Birkeland had surmised the existence of a continuous out-pouring of equal numbers of positively and negatively charged particles from the sun. He knew that the sun must continuously emit charged particles and suggested that the cathode rays that caused auroras were forced into space from the areas around sunspots, and that some were responsible for magnetic storms around the Earth. This conclusion had far-reaching consequences, as Birkeland wrote in his book:
Besides making clear the origin of important terrestrial phenomena, the investigations give promise of the possibility of drawing, from the energy of the corpuscular precipitation on the Earth, well-founded conclusions regarding the conditions on the sun . . . Further researches may lead to a solution of the most attractive scientific problems of our age—the origin of terrestrial magnetism and the origin of the sun’s heat.
Birkeland believed that the electromagnetic influence of the sun on near and distant space was as important as that of gravity. He took the laws of electric and magnetic forces, first written in Maxwell’s equations, and applied them to space. It was a major advance in the understanding of the forces at work in the solar system. Before Newton, it was believed that terrestrial mechanics and celestial mechanics obeyed different laws, but Newton showed that a falling apple on the Earth moved according to the same laws as it does the moon—a great breakthrough in physics and particularly in mechanics. Although later scientists revealed limitations in Newtonian law, Birkeland was the first to stress the importance of electromagnetic effects in cosmic physics. As he realized, cosmic matter is usually conducting and magnetized and these effects are often as great as—if not greater than—mechanical forces in near and distant space. From trying to understand the origins of the aurora borealis, he now wanted to test the boundaries of his theoretical electromagnetic universe.
Copies of Birkeland’s 300-page book were sent to the great scientists of Europe, to crowned heads of state, to Wallenberg and Eyde. He received acknowledgments from King Edward, King Haakon, King Oscar, and Kaiser Wilhelm, as well as from Henri Poincaré, Sir William Crookes, and many other scientists. In France his work was read with interest but elsewhere, particularly in Britain, it was largely ignored, and the few reviews it received were negative. Birkeland was furious that the British refused to even consider the possibility that he might be correct and was disappointed that he was now unlikely to be proposed as a Fellow of the Royal Society. It would have been a great achievement to convert his detractors to his ideas, as he knew that British science was increasingly predominant in the world and that it was necessary for the British scientific establishment to accept his theories if they were ever to become widely disseminated. There seemed no chance of that now. As Arthur Schuster, Fellow of the Royal Society and a prominent scientist in the field of terrestrial magnetism, said about Birkeland’s work, “The limits of allowable heterodoxy in science are soon reached” and Birkeland had stepped too far out of line. Schuster condemned Birkeland’s theories for assuming that only negative rays were emitted by the sun. Had he read more carefully, or with a more open mind, Schuster would have realized that Birkeland knew that both positive and negative particles were thrown out, but had deduced that only negative ones caused auroras. However, Schuster dismissed Birkeland’s huge volume with a terse comment in the Society’s Proceedings:
Even originally well-defined pencils of cathode rays from the sun cannot reach the Earth. For Birkeland’s theories to be correct, the existence of such cathode rays is clearly presupposed to be necessary . . . and this assumption is untenable.
12
The Divine Option
March 1910
Christiania and Notodden
The Years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
W. B. YEATS (1865–1939), The Countess Cathleen, 1892
FOR TWO YEARS after the publication of his book Birkeland enjoyed a period of relative peace. Ida, keen to leave Lysaker, found an apartment in Drammensveien, at number 45, midway between the palace park and the waters of Christianiafjord, into which they moved temporarily. A year later the perfect house came on the market and they moved again. Ida occasionally persuaded Birkeland to spend time with her in the evenings and the postcards they sent at Christmas and New Year were signed “Kr. and Ida,” but these were rare shows of unity. Her success at enticing Birkeland away from his laboratory was limited; his fascination with the relationship between the sun and the Earth far outweighed interest in his own marriage.
While Birkeland was pursuing his terrella experiments, he began to hear rumors that all was not well at the new factory site of Rjukan. Relationships between BASF and Norsk Hydro were strained to the breaking point. BASF was unhappy about the original agreement it had made in 1906; they wanted more control over the planning and execution of the new sites. It was not only a managerial problem. The international band of workers in the Rjukan valley, where a power plant and the new factory were being built, were close to coming to blows. As Admiral Børresen, a Norwegian shareholder in Norsk Hydro, wrote to a friend, “The Scandinavians and French on one side and the German interests are opposing each other like hostile forces.” Birkeland tried to ignore the gossip he heard, mainly at Helland’s salon, but soon he had no choice but to listen.
In the early spring of 1910, he was working in the laboratory when the door opened and Sam Eyde stood blinking into the darkness, outlined against the light in the corridor. Birkeland was in the process of taking a photograph of the terrella and shouted to Eyde over the din of the machinery to shut the door. Eyde entered but did not move from the door lest he touch one of the electrified surfaces or fall over the instruments scattered across the floor. After a few minutes of clicks and shuffling about, Birkeland shut down the generator and turned on the light. He was intrigued by the sudden appearance of Eyde, whom he had not seen for many months, and knew it must be related to the rumors.
Eyde did not hide the urgency of his visit. He told Birkeland directly that his furnace was going to be scrapped in favor of the German version unless he could prove by the end of June that it was a superior design. It was March already and Birkeland’s mind was not on saltpeter but on space. Eyde explained that BASF had been complaining to the shareholders of the Saltpetreworks Company that the Birkeland-Eyde furnace was inefficient compared to the German design. The shareholders, mostly non-Norwegians, had no loyalty to either furnace and simply wanted the best return on their investment, so it had been decided that a competition should be held over a twenty-four-hour period and the most efficient furnace would be chosen for the new factory at Rjukan. Birkeland would have his consultancy fees canceled if the furnace was abandoned and Eyde would lose the entire value of his half of the patents as well as the influence that using “his” furnace gave him on the shop floor. Moreover, if the German furnaces were adopted, Norsk Hydro would be Norwegian in name only. For Eyde, whose business interests operated on an international level, this would be a deep blow to his reputation, his prospects, and his finances. Birkeland, meanwhile, saw the luxury of having his own laboratory crumbling before his eyes. Without the annual salary from Norsk Hydro and the Saltpetreworks he could not afford to hire assistants and would have to scale down his experiments dramatically.
