The Northern Lights, page 20
The draw had turned a simple decision into a sensitive situation in which politics played the leading role. Eyde explained the decision had been made that four-fifths of the furnaces in the new factory were to be of German design and one-fifth Norwegian. Birkeland was dumbstruck. It made no sense and would cause deep divisions among the workers unless a satisfactory explanation for this seemingly arbitrary act was forthcoming. Eyde explained that Birkeland, although not technically wrong in making such large changes to his design, was ethically wrong. In practice, the German machine had been competing against a different furnace and this was not in the spirit of the competition. Birkeland realized that Eyde had expected the Norwegian furnace to lose all along and had asked him to spearhead their entry into the competition, rather than his favorite engineer, Næss, so that Birkeland could bear the responsibility and shame of losing to the Germans. If Næss had been in charge, Eyde would have had to accept ultimate responsibility, as Næss was clearly his employee. As Birkeland was the inventor, Eyde could hide behind him. Birkeland felt tricked into abandoning his wife, his laboratory, his work, and his assistants in order to be the scapegoat for Eyde. He went to the factory, explained the situation as he saw it to his disappointed engineers, and took a carriage to Kongsberg.
As soon as he returned to Christiania, Birkeland wrote a letter to Eyde and the board of Norsk Hydro:
7 July 1910
It is evident that when such a cowardly deal becomes known to the public, then it will be clear to all that it is without honour for the people from Baden, and possibly also for Norsk Hydro, because they have given in to the brutality of the Badeners.
As he picked up the blotter to dry the ink, he noticed a folded piece of paper underneath it. It was a short note from Ida informing him that she was leaving him and had gone to stay with a friend.
13
Vast, Infinite Space
1911–13
Christiania
“So what do you say, Captain?” I asked at last. “I can really do anything, whatever you wish. What am I saying? I would have to be a poor fellow if I didn’t do more than just what I was set to do. I can take two watches in a row if necessary. It’ll do me the world of good, and I believe I can take it.” Then he put me to work. Once out in the fjord I straightened up, wet with fever and fatigue, looked in towards the shore and said goodbye for now to the city, to Christiania, where the windows shone so brightly in every home.
KNUT HAMSUN (1859–1952), winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature; Hunger, 1890
AFTER IDA’S DEPARTURE, Birkeland rarely left his laboratory. His house felt like a museum, full of strangers, lawyers, friends of Ida, and appraisers poking into every corner to draw up inventories and assess the worth of the contents. He was concerned for Ida, as she must have felt desperate to take the drastic step of leaving. For the daughter of a vicar, divorce was only slightly less shameful than suicide, and the unsteady relationship with her family must now be in tatters. Birkeland instructed his lawyer, Johan Bredal, to provide generously for his wife, so generously that the lawyer demurred and asked him to reconsider, bearing in mind there were no dependent children. Birkeland insisted, demanding that a clause be inserted into the divorce papers to the effect that Ida was blameless and any fault lay entirely with him. Bredal warned Birkeland that the divorce would not be granted until he and Ida had lived apart for two years and that drawing up a settlement would take time due to the extent of Birkeland’s assets.
Draft: Divorce settlement for Mrs. Birkeland; itinerary of household items to form part of her settlement. NB: silver, glass and cellar contents not yet listed. J.B.
If I, Kristian Olaf Bernard Birkeland, die before Mrs. Ida Charlotte Birkeland, from my estate 50,000 crowns will be put into an account the interest on which will go to Mrs. Birkeland and after her death to Tønnes Birkeland or his children if he so decides.
As his personal life disintegrated, Birkeland threw himself into work with dedication. Back in the laboratory, the presence of his young, enthusiastic assistants and the extraordinary beauty of the terrella experiments helped block out the pain and difficulties of life outside. Birkeland frequently fell asleep on the old fold-up bed at night or, if he did go home, slept in the chair he had inherited from his father, nursing a large whisky into which several grains of veronal had been dissolved.
He hired several more graduates to help process further results from the 1902–1903 expedition in order to publish the second volume of the Aurora Polaris book and to assist with the large number of experiments he was performing. Two of his favorite assistants were moving to higher positions: Sem Sæland had been appointed to the Trondheim Technical High School and Krogness was preparing to live on the summit of Haldde with his family. Money had been granted by the Norwegian Parliament to make Haldde a permanent observatory and to build a more comfortable house, linked to the observatory by a tunnel. Birkeland hoped that it would operate for at least two solar cycles, or twenty-two years, to provide valuable continuous information about the solar-terrestrial relationship. Magnetic readings would be taken, and the permanent station could provide weather forecasting details, give early warnings of storms and eventually provide evidence for the effect on the weather of the auroras and the changes in the magnetic field. Meanwhile, Dietrichson, Birkeland’s old friend, had fallen seriously ill and could no longer work in the laboratory. Birkeland felt his loss keenly but Olaf Devik was available to help with the new experiments he was planning.
Birkeland’s main preoccupation was to build a much larger terrella machine in which to re-create many phenomena of the solar system beyond the Earth. He drew up plans for a new machine unlike anything that had been made before. The simplicity of the design reflected the brilliance of the idea. Instead of using a Crookes tube, he would make a large glass box, like a spacious aquarium, which would provide a window into space. The box would be pumped out to create a vacuum and he would use larger globes and a more powerful cathode to produce charged particles. With so much more room he would be able to see effects, obscured in the smaller tubes, that could take his Northern Lights theory one step further—into a complete cosmogony, a theory of the origins of the universe.
No one had ever attempted to create a vacuum chamber on this scale before and the task was fraught with difficulties and dangers. The four sides were of flat plate glass, 20 millimeters thick, made specifically to Birkeland’s calculations to withstand a high vacuum. It took many hours and much sweat to make the glass plates because even the slightest fault could cause the chamber to implode under pressure. With the strength of vacuum Birkeland required, an implosion would fling shards of glass at great force around the small office, certainly proving fatal to those nearby. Once the specially made plates arrived, they were cemented together and fitted with a bronze roof and floor. These conducted electricity when the machine was on and touching them would cause a severe, possibly lethal, electric shock. The glass box was placed on a sturdy wooden frame with a rail extending beyond the metal to keep people away from the electrified parts.
Then the laborious work of sealing the joints began. To keep the vacuum chamber airtight, layer upon layer of foul-smelling black “picein,” a tarlike sealing agent, was painted over all the joints. For this, Birkeland hired Olaf Devik’s younger brother, Karl, who showed tremendous patience with the task and was also slim enough to fit inside the box to clean it. Once the joints were airtight, a circular globe and a cathode were fitted.
The size and flat sides of the terrella made visibility much better than had been the case in the Crookes tubes, and Birkeland realized quickly that with such a machine, he could change the globe from simulating the Earth to simulating the sun. The terrella, without its phosphorescent coating, became the cathode emitting charged particles—like the sun. All sorts of beautiful solar phenomena could be re-created this way, such as the sun’s corona, the shining layers of the sun’s outer atmosphere, usually visible only during a total eclipse. He could reproduce sunspots that moved across the surface of the terrella and down toward the equator as he increased the globe’s magnetism. By examining the terrella under a microscope afterwards, Birkeland found small pits and craters where the sunspots had been, providing more evidence for his theory that the sun throws out material during solar flares. Birkeland knew that sunspots could not be the sole cause of magnetic disturbances, however, as their appearance did not always coincide with maximum disruption to the Earth’s magnetic field. “The results suggest that sunspots and magnetic storms are both manifestations of the same primary cause.” He deduced that there must be regions on the sun that emitted huge disruptive electric discharges into space, the source of magnetic storms, the aurora borealis and the Zodiacal Light. These areas remained active during several complete rotations of the sun, causing similar auroral displays at periods of twenty-seven to twenty-nine days. Similar processes could also explain planet formation, according to Birkeland, as “atomic dust” thrown up by the sun slowly clumped together into large masses under the influence of magnetism. He considered the asteroid belt to be solar dust halfway through the process of transforming into planets.
With this extraordinary machine Birkeland was able to simulate Saturn’s rings, comet tails, and the Zodiacal Light. He even experimented with space propulsion using cathode rays. Sophisticated photographs were taken of each simulation, to be included in the next volume of Birkeland’s great work, which would discuss the electromagnetic nature of the universe and his theories about the formation of the solar system.
As the experiments yielded increasingly spellbinding phenomena and startling results, Birkeland decided that even bigger terrellas were needed. Over the next two years, yet larger vacuum chambers were built, until they reached the huge size of 1,000 liters, with glass walls 5 centimeters thick. The resulting phenomena were remarkably beautiful, as Birkeland acknowledged in his written accounts of the terrella experiments.
It will be easily understood that in addition to the purely scientific reasons for doing this, I have also a secondary object, which is to give myself the pleasure of seeing all these important experiments in the most brilliant form that is possible for me to give.
Birkeland’s immersion into the universe of his vacuum chamber was so complete he had little time for any other activities other than, as always, keeping abreast of theoretical and technological advances in physics and other fields that interested him, such as astronomy, weather prediction, engineering, and mineralogy. He was fascinated by experiments of the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Ernest Rutherford, reported in 1911, that proved that the atom consisted not only of electrons, as J. J. Thomson had shown in 1897 (in a paper in which he cited Birkeland’s work), but also of a nucleus. Until that time, it was known that atoms must have negative and positive charges in order to be electrically neutral, but the model used was Thomson’s “plum pudding,” in which electrons were embedded in a positively charged material that constituted most of the mass and volume of the atom. Rutherford devised an ingenious experiment in which tiny alpha particles, emitted from a radioactive substance at high speed, were shot at a strip of gold foil. The particles passed through the foil almost as if it were empty space but a few were strongly repelled as if they had hit something very hard. If atoms were compact spheres, as Thomson had suggested, most of the alpha particles would have been scattered by the foil. Rutherford deduced that the few alpha particles that were deflected had hit the nuclei of the gold atoms, a concentrated area of positive charge. From this, Rutherford was able to conclude that the atom is mainly empty space, roughly one-hundred-millionth of an inch in diameter but made up of a positively charged nucleus 10,000 times smaller than that and negatively charged electrons, minute in comparison to the nucleus. Rutherford did not know the exact structure of the atom but discovering the nucleus was an important stepping stone toward learning it. Reading Rutherford’s paper, Birkeland regretted not pursuing his own idea of splitting the atom to create energy. He had written to Wallenberg in 1906 for funding to explore this but Wallenberg had politely declined, accepting Birkeland’s idea as “titanic” but explaining that he needed the nitrogen furnace to be working efficiently before he had money to spare for further speculation.
The laboratory became a beehive of productivity with Birkeland throwing out ideas like confetti. His assistants described how he would go out for walks and return a few hours later, refreshed, hat pushed back on his head, with an idea for rocket propulsion or a hearing aid or a new telephone. In tandem with his terrella work, he began experiments with hydrogenating vegetable oil to make margarine. The law professors soon complained of the terrible stink of burning fat disturbing their lectures. They also complained that he had taken over half the lecture hall for other experiments; nor did they care for the large antenna that he requested be fixed to the roof so that modern communications technology could be installed.
Birkeland was aware that his work was unpopular with many of his colleagues, and assumed that they were resentful that he had effectively given up teaching and was free to pursue his ideas without the financial constraints they labored under. The fact that he employed the cream of the university’s graduates only added to their jealousy. When Birkeland complained about the ill-feeling to Helland, the latter agreed that there was a certain Norwegian temperament that did not like one person doing better than others. To add to his colleagues’ chagrin, the newspapers were full of the triumph of Birkeland’s furnace being officially adopted for the newest factory, Rjukan II, in the Rjukan valley, eighty kilometers north of Notodden. The decision, however, had been motivated by politics rather than design following a crisis in Morocco. An uprising in Agadir had been suppressed by the French military in July. In order to protect their own interests in the face of the unrest and French military activity, the Germans sent a gunboat to Agadir as a warning that they would not tolerate increased French influence in the region. An agreement was eventually reached but the French government put pressure on Paribas to push the Germans out of Norsk Hydro to hinder their access to saltpeter, a key component in explosives. Aware of the reason behind the decision, Birkeland could take little personal pride in the choice of his furnace, but he was pleased that his consultancy fee had been almost doubled to 22,000 crowns a year, averting the funding crisis he had envisaged had only German technology been used at Rjukan II. Birkeland was also delighted that this triumph of Norwegian technology added to the glory of the emerging nation, still only seven years old. On 14 December 1911 Roald Amundsen planted the Norwegian flag at the South Pole— first in the race to reach it. The country’s fight for recognition, in which Birkeland played a prominent part, was being won.
IN THE NEW YEAR of 1912 Birkeland was invited to lunch by his lawyer, Johan Bredal, to sign a number of papers concerning the divorce agreement. Although it would not take effect for another year, the details were now largely decided. Once the legal matters were dispensed with at Bredal’s office, the two men went for lunch at the Grand, during the course of which Bredal asked for Birkeland’s help. It emerged that Bredal had allowed himself to be elected to a committee at the suggestion of two women, Ella Anker and Hermione Ramsden. He explained that they wanted to arrange a séance with a famous medium, to be performed under the supervision of a scientific committee that would give unbiased evaluation of her abilities. He explained that Oskar Jæger had been the only professor at the university to show any interest in spiritualism but would unfortunately be away at the time of the proposed séance. Kaya Geelmuyden had suggested Birkeland as a replacement. Bredal himself had agreed to join because the number of his friends and acquaintances espousing the virtues of spiritualism with vague and spurious evidence distressed him. He worried that in this era of tremendous scientific and technological advancement, people wanted to switch off their new electric lighting and return to the mysticism of the Dark Ages.
Birkeland agreed to join the committee, hoping to repeat the success of the Society of Psychical Research in unveiling Madame Blavatsky. He knew of her notion that the Northern Lights were manifestations of spiritual energy, as Silvanus Thompson had sent him a copy of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine to amuse him. Bredal told Birkeland that a medium had been chosen, a Mrs. Wriedt, who had been popular during a previous visit to the capital. She had been expected in April, but due to the sinking of the Titanic had had to postpone her visit. The owner of Julia’s Bureau, for which she worked, was a Mr. Stead, who had perished in the disaster. Mrs. Wriedt claimed to be able to contact him, and her services were in great demand by relatives who hoped to have messages from their loved ones, directly or through Mr. Stead’s spirit. Birkeland was relieved that the ordeal would be delayed and returned happily to his laboratory.
Mrs. Wriedt eventually arrived in Christiania on 12 August and retired with her retinue to Saint Olav’s Hotel. The following day, Birkeland, leader of the committee, met his colleagues in the foyer of the hotel. They were Johan Bredal, Mr. Damman, a wholesaler, and the editor of Elektroteknisk Tiddsskrift magazine, Hans Berg-Jæger. They attended three of Mrs. Wriedt’s famous gatherings, after which Birkeland reported the findings of the committee to Ella Anker and Hermione Ramsden and wrote a long article, printed in Aftenposten on 25 August, exposing Mrs. Wriedt as a fraud:
I have been present at three séances with Mrs. Wriedt, to see and hear her spirits in action, and I shall give an account of her best performance—the thin aluminum tube through which the spirits “speak” by suddenly jumping a meter or so off the ground and hitting one of those present. I wanted to blow into the tube before the séance began but Mrs. Wriedt refused, explaining that the spirits would not speak through it. At the séance, nothing noteworthy happened until we heard a little bang followed by “noises from the spirits” as the tube jumped and hit the head of Miss G. When the light was switched on again I felt inside the tube where water had condensed and I could smell explosive gas. This was substantiated by three of those present. I had briefly examined the tube before the séance, until it was wrested from my hand by the medium, and it had been dry.
