The Northern Lights, page 19
The alternative to this bleak scenario also had its costs. To save his furnace from extinction he would have to live in Notodden for the next three months, working night and day, abandoning his laboratory and leaving his assistants rudderless among complicated and dangerous equipment. Ida would be upset that work, as always, took precedence over their life together. Birkeland was curious about why Eyde had come to him to ask for help rather than relying on Næss and the other young engineers, but he knew that Eyde would not give him an honest reply. He told Eyde he needed time to think about it and would give him an answer by the end of the week.
By the time Birkeland arrived home, his mind was made up. He told Ida that he needed to spend the next three months in Notodden. She was very upset, but Birkeland felt unable to put their marriage before his work; he simply did not think it was as important. Ida had already come to suspect that it never would be. He had wanted their marriage to be comfortable, companionable, and convenient for them both. Ida would look after him, and, in return, he would provide financial security, a pleasant house, and company whenever possible. Helland had warned him that Ida would not be happy with that arrangement. The silences that had grown between them over the past eighteen months were so frosty that when Birkeland left for Notodden, Ida did not come downstairs to say goodbye.
Ida found her husband’s obsession with work the largest obstacle to her own happiness. From the first month of marriage, when Birkeland had taken her to Notodden, loneliness had gnawed at her. She had tried to amuse herself by looking around Christiania’s properties for a new house and was pleased with the villa she had found on the corner of Incognitogaten, in sight of the palace and within ten minutes’ walk of the university. It had an Italian feel, with white walls, arched windows, and a central tower one story higher than the rest, with two wings on either side. The house had four large bedrooms, a sitting room looking over the garden toward the palace, an elegant dining room, a study for Birkeland, servants’ quarters, and a carriage house and was approached by a gravel drive sheltered from the street by a low wall, a sturdy hedge, and trees. Ida spent much of her time decorating it as she wished with furniture, crystal, and carpets. The only things Birkeland showed an interest in were paintings and unusual objects that his art dealer, Mr. Wang, occasionally procured from the Far East. Whenever Wang left his card, Birkeland became excited and took Ida to the gallery immediately. He was building up a small collection of paintings by contemporary Norwegian artists, Torolf Holmboe and Eilif Peterssen in particular, who specialized in Norwegian subjects. Holmboe took Nordland in Northern Norway as a theme and Birkeland liked to have reminders on his walls of his time spent watching the aurora. He also bought several large vases and pots from Japan and China painted with exotic birds and plants, but Ida was not fond of these and persuaded Birkeland to keep them in his study.
Just as Ida was beginning to doubt the wisdom of her marriage, her family were coming to accept it—now that Birkeland’s name was connected to the fertilizer process and he was able to look after her well. Her favorite sister, Camilla, had been writing to her from Raade and hoped to visit before the winter set in, while Helga, her youngest sister, who worked as a nurse and was an amateur pianist in Christiania, came round occasionally. Ida had received a telegram from her parents on her birthday and another on Birkeland’s but had not yet visited them. Her father’s refusal to perform the wedding ceremony had hurt her deeply.
Ida was lonelier than she had ever been. Although she volunteered to help with the Tuberculosis Society, through which she met a few other wives, and occasionally managed to entice Birkeland to the theater, she spent much of her time alone. When Birkeland had scientists visiting from abroad, his wife enjoyed having company in the house, even though the conversation always turned to science. Her understanding of Birkeland’s work remained very sketchy; his scientific explanations contradicted her notions of Divine Will and confused her.
BIRKELAND traveled by train to Kongsberg, then took the usual carriage route across the hills to Notodden. Norsk Hydro was building a railway connection from the factory to the south coast, but it was still unfinished. Notodden had developed from a tiny hamlet to a bustling town of at least 5,000 people since the arrival of the Norsk Hydro factory. Further up the valley by the Rjukan Falls, or where the falls had been, the old settlement of a few farming crofts had been supplanted by a population of 10,000 in less than five years. Once a major beauty spot, the falls were now contained in steel pipes at the head of a valley full of rapidly built houses with the smell of saltpeter hanging in the air. The steep sides of the Rjukan valley blocked sunlight from the settlement for six months of the year and the workers and their families were as pale as new shoots.
One hundred million crowns had been poured into the Saltpetreworks. The factory was almost finished; the hydroelectric plant was already providing electricity although work was continuing on the dam that controlled the flow of water to the plant, despite Parliament’s attempts to limit its size. Eyde was not popular with the Norwegian Parliament; it was largely due to his actions that strict Concession Laws regarding foreign ownership of natural resources were being implemented. But Eyde’s contacts in the government kept him informed of attempts to curb his freedom, and he was often closeted with lawyers until past midnight, thinking up ways to circumvent the legislation before it came into effect. Eyde’s informants warned him at ten o’clock one night that a parliamentary debate on tax was actually a cover for new measures to limit the size of dams for hydroelectric plants and for their reversion to state ownership after sixty years. The law was to come into effect at midnight. At eleven o’clock Eyde rang the Rjukan night manager, ordering him to wake up his workers and tell them to start increasing the height of the dam wall immediately. As long as he could prove that work had started before midnight, he could not be stopped.
Arriving in Notodden, Birkeland was relieved that Næss was away working at the Rjukan factory. Birkeland left his bags at the administration building and went straight to the factory. He realized immediately that the problems could not be solved quickly as the engineers had tried everything to fine-tune the furnace and it was still producing only three-quarters of the projected capacity. Birkeland enjoyed the company of his team of young engineers and admired their dedication so he felt comfortable inviting his new colleagues back to the administration house for good food and laughter after frustrating days at work. One of the engineers, Carl Holmboe, wrote home to describe these gatherings.
We have many pleasant evenings in front of the fireplace, together with Birkeland. He unfolds his brilliant knowledge, his view of the universe, his theories of the Northern Lights and, not least, his opinion of life and mankind.
He predicts the possibility of splitting atoms. The existence of ions, he said, demonstrates that atoms have the ability to limit and absorb electric charges, and thus they must be divisible. I asked if the great harmony observed in the living as well as dead nature might not point to some kind of guiding conscious will in the universe, that theologians might call God. This he does not believe in, but said that such questions are in the borderland between knowledge and faith, and you must be an ignorant fool to consider impossible the divine option.
Six weeks before the furnace competition date, Birkeland was sitting in front of the fire in the administration building, feet almost on the burning logs. It was a rainy April evening and, although the house was well insulated in the manner of Norwegian buildings, the exhausted Birkeland was shivery. For over a month he and the engineers had attempted to improve the furnace, to little effect. For the past two days he had not gone to the factory but had lain in bed or sat staring into space, thinking only of the furnace. When the fire burned low, he expected the maid to build it up again but it was Sunday, her day off. He grudgingly heaved a large log onto the embers, and then another. In that instant, he found the answer. The furnace needed to be much larger—perhaps two or three times the size. He scribbled equations through the night, shuffling his papers together at dawn to walk to the factory through the sharp-scented pinewoods. When his small team of engineers arrived, he explained to them that the furnace was inefficient because it was too small. Instead of 1,000 kilowatts, it should be 3,000. The engineers were appalled. They had only six weeks to completely change the furnace. And there was no guarantee that he was right. They all knew of Eivind Næss’s distrust of Birkeland’s seemingly eccentric suggestions. Perhaps Næss was right. Birkeland sensed the mood and quickly set about explaining his thinking. Few men could have persuaded these discouraged engineers that a complete overhaul of the furnace was a wise decision, but Birkeland’s infectious enthusiasm and obvious brilliance tipped the balance in his favor. Eyde had been right to return to the original inventor: only Birkeland could have seen the flaws in his own thinking and taken such dramatic measures to overcome them. However, it would take only one component to be miscalculated, miscalibrated, or misaligned for the entire furnace to malfunction and make them all look ridiculous.
Back in Christiania, a few days after Birkeland’s departure for Notodden, Kaya Geelmuyden called on Ida, knowing he was away and his wife might be at loose ends. Kaya was the sister of Hans Geelmuyden, director of the Christiania observatory and professor of astronomy at the university, and of Marie, who had been a student of mathematics and physics at the same time as Birkeland and was married to his great friend Wilhelm Bjerkenes. Birkeland knew the Geelmuyden siblings well and had invited them to dinner on a few occasions since his marriage. Kaya had an interest in spiritualism and was hoping to start a Norwegian Society for Psychical Science with her friend Ella Anker and an Englishwoman, Hermione Ramsden, granddaughter of the Duke of Somerset, who was living in Norway. The society would investigate the possibility of communication with spirits, taking as its model the Society for Psychical Science in London, which boasted many eminent scientists among its members, including Sir William Crookes. It had been established in 1882, with the objective of seeking scientific explanations for psychical phenomena, spiritualism included. Many mediums used quasi-scientific ideas to bolster their credibility, following the success of Madame Blavatsky, who established the Theosophical Society with the aim of reconciling ancient spiritualistic traditions with modern science. She attracted followers with dazzling psychic tricks and attempted to convince them that all matter was an expression of immaterial force that scientists called “energy” but she knew was “spirit,” a “conscious guiding” influence, “Angel or God, Spirit or Demon.” As she related in The Secret Doctrine, which appeared in 1888, only a few individuals were blessed with the gift to see the spirits that gave life to physical phenomena:
Standing on an open plain, on a mountain summit especially, gazing into the vast above and the spatial infinities around, the whole atmosphere seems ablaze with them, the air soaked through with these dazzling coruscations. At times, the intensity of their motion produces flashes like the Northern Lights.
Blavatsky’s philosophy had been popular in Paris when Birkeland was working there, although he had never paid any heed to it. She was eventually exposed as a fraud by the Society for Psychical Research but it did not dent her appeal. Although she died in 1891, Blavatsky’s theosophical quest to unite the spiritual and the scientific realms continued among her large following.
Kaya invited Ida to attend a séance conducted by “The Extraordinary Madame Wriedt,” whose specialities included levitation, materialization of spirits, and, most important, summoning spirits— “channeling”—who spoke to her through a metal tube like a trumpet, often in foreign tongues, even though she herself spoke only English. Kaya showed Ida an advertisement for the event in the newspaper Morgenbladet, dominated by a picture of the medium sheathed in glowing light. As a Christian, Ida did not believe in fortune-tellers but she decided to attend the séance for amusement and to take her mind off her failing marriage. When she had been in London and New York, ten years before, spiritualism was all the rage and queues often stretched around the block for séances with the best mediums. In Norway too, over the past three or four years, séances had become a popular form of entertainment and Ida would not be flouting social convention by attending.
Mrs. Wriedt was an American medium employed by “Julia’s Bureau” in London, performing in Norway for one week only at the Saint Olav’s Hotel near the state hospital. Arriving at the dingy hotel with Kaya, Ida saw row upon row of women, occasionally accompanied by sad or embarrassed men, all waiting for news, relief from mental anguish, or something to talk about to their friends. After a few minutes of whispering, the audience fell silent as the lights were turned off and Mrs. Wriedt appeared behind a glowing, phosphorescent screen. As she began to speak, in English, her face changed as rapidly as the sky on a windy March day. One moment laughing, the next sobbing and crying out, she would throw her body around and then stand as if frozen, with a strange glow hovering around her like greenish-gray steam. After twenty minutes of these calisthenics, Mrs. Wriedt abruptly stopped “channeling” and placed a metal tube in the center of the floor, explaining that the spirits would send a message through the “trumpet.” She bade the spirits to enter it and, after several tense moments, a small bang was heard and the metal tube flew into the air and landed in the lap of an elderly lady. The medium rushed to grasp the surprised woman’s hands and stared into her eyes with utmost concentration. After several minutes of general observations to the woman about the spirits wanting her happiness, Mrs. Wriedt was overcome by exhaustion and left the séance.
It was still light when Ida took her leave of Kaya to walk back to Incognitogaten, deep in thought about the séance. As she walked up her drive she saw a gentleman at the door, ringing the bell insistently. He turned as she approached, an Asian man with an extremely thin mustache that fell from the corners of his mouth to the lapel of his cape. On his left cheek was a dark mole from which grew two or three black hairs that exceeded the droop of his mustache. His face was round and soft, the color of pale honey, but his presence, so soon after the séance, seemed sinister. The stranger executed a quick bow and introduced himself, in English, as Professor Terada from Tokyo University. He had come to visit Professor Birkeland, whose famous work on the Earth’s magnetism and the Northern Lights had reached Japan. Ida explained that her husband was working away from the capital and was not expected to return for some weeks, and gave him the number of the administration building in Notodden. She invited Professor Terada to stay for tea but he seemed embarrassed to be alone with a woman, handed her his business card, thanked her, and left. The card was printed on both sides, one giving his name in English, the other in Japanese. The episode disturbed her and she put the card on Birkeland’s desk in his study, where she would not have to pass it every time she went out.
Her trip to Mrs. Wriedt gave Ida a taste for séances. It was not so much the “messages” from the spirits that she enjoyed as watching the audience’s reaction to them. She rarely told Kaya when she was attending a séance because she did not want Birkeland to find out about her new interest, sure that he would disapprove. She scoured the papers and was usually able to attend at least one séance a week. She loved to watch the different techniques of the women with their props. Mrs. Wriedt’s “trumpet” was not exceptional; there were jumping tables, flashing lights, books that opened by themselves, and all manner of voices, dances, and contortions performed as the spirits moved the “vessel.” People from all backgrounds were drawn to the events, which allowed them to reveal and indulge their emotions, to think about what might bring them contentment. Few left disappointed. In Ida they awoke a powerful desire to seek happiness.
THE TEST DAY at Notodden was a tense affair. The German engineers kept to themselves, even at mealtimes, and the competition had a gladiatorial air. The furnaces were started at four o’clock in the afternoon and left to run for twenty-four hours. The engineers could make adjustments and repairs to the machines if necessary, and neither furnace was left unattended at any moment for fear of sabotage. The following morning Eyde, a number of shareholders, board members, and two independent overseers arrived to begin their inspection. The overseers spoke only to ask technical questions and sat by themselves at lunch, despite Eyde’s attempts to draw them into conversation. The furnaces were switched off at four o’clock, the precious white powder carefully sifted and weighed, and power consumption recorded to produce the final figures that would show which machine was the most efficient at saltpeter production. For two hours Birkeland and his team of engineers speculated about the result. They were delighted that the new furnace, three times more powerful, had functioned perfectly but they were still not sure that production was as efficient as they hoped. The absorption system had always been the weak point, and a third of the gases were escaping before they combined with the water in the cooling towers.
At seven Eyde called Birkeland, the leader of the German engineers, and their senior assistants to his office in the administration building. He explained that, technically, the result was a draw. While the Norwegian furnace was slightly more efficient, the BASF design had better absorption ratios. Birkeland was briefly elated; developing this larger furnace would improve its efficiency and was the best solution for the new factory, perhaps combining it with the German absorption system. BASF, however, wanted the Norwegian furnace disqualified. The German engineers were furious that the Norwegians had changed the size of their furnace at the last moment and complained that this contravened the rules of the competition. Birkeland protested that there was no regulation to say that such changes could not be made and that their furnace had proved the equal of BASF’s, and in some respects its superior. Eyde had been aware of Birkeland’s plan and had not made any objection to it so the professor expected him to back up his argument. Eyde, however, said little. Tempers were high as the engineers had been working for thirty-six hours without sleep and some of Birkeland’s team had been working at this pace for the past two weeks.
