The Northern Lights, page 23
The whisky, however, was drunk in too great a measure to be medicinal. Birkeland’s writing, never neat, became a near illegible scrawl and his observational notes barely comprehensible.
By the beginning of March temperatures in Omdurman started to soar. Birkeland decided that it was time to travel north, away from the intense desert heat to the more temperate climes of Helwan and the resources of the Khedivial Observatory. The idea that Miss Spandonides might also be there was an added incentive, for Birkeland, although he enjoyed the presence of his assistants, missed female company.
The three men packed up their house in Omdurman, gave the furniture and kitchen supplies to their servants, and took the train and boat back to Aswan. There they booked into the Cataract Hotel, where polite replies to Birkeland’s letters about the cannon awaited him. The recipients promised to bear his invention in mind but did not make any immediate commitment to it. There had not been a major European war for more than a hundred years, and although weaponry had been developing during that time, Birkeland’s idea for an electromagnetic cannon was still considered too advanced, experimental, and potentially expensive to develop.
Birkeland, Devik, and Skolem discovered, with delight, that the Cataract Hotel, established in 1899 and run by the Upper Egypt Hotels Company, was a very superior establishment. Its luxurious bedrooms, fine dining room, and cool marble halls worked like a balm on the men who had spent the previous six months in dusty, near-monastic surroundings. Sun- and sand-bathing (the practice of immersing the body in hot sand to ease pain and stiffness in joints and muscles), a golf course, boat trips, donkey rides into the desert, billiards, a library, and exquisitely planted gardens were just a few of the amusements provided for the hotel’s guests. The most entrancing feature of the place, however, was the terrace with its stunning views of the Nile at the First Cataract, busy with sailboats and a few steamers carrying tourists to ancient sites and to view the engineering feat of the Aswan Dam, constructed in 1902. To the strains of a discreetly placed orchestra, the three men enjoyed tea there every day, Birkeland chasing his with whisky and water. As the sun sank lower over the hills in the west, they would take a carriage into the desert with a magnetometer and drawing boards, to study the Zodiacal Light until dawn.
After eight days of delicious teas, the full moon made observation of the Light impossible and Birkeland decided it was time to leave for Helwan. He could send Devik back to Aswan later in the year to make simultaneous observations there before he traveled on to Rhodesia to do the same from a more distant location. The three left the paradisical terrace with some regret and took the sleeper train to Cairo, arriving at Ramses station early the following morning. There they changed to the local Helwan train, a luxurious affair. Painted on the side of the locomotive, amid an intricate pattern of green and gold papyrus flowers, was a roundel bearing the legend EGYPTIAN STATE RAILWAYS flanked by the Egyptian flag of three gold stars above a sickle moon and the royal turban. The carriages were plush, with leather seats and polished wooden tables, a suitably ornate mode of transport for the wealthiest of Cairo’s citizens, who had villas and mansions in Helwan to which they escaped from the heat and dirt of the capital. The khedive and his family came to Helwan to take a cure in the naturally occurring sulphur springs of the town, and since the 1850s it had become a small but fashionable spa. An hour from Cairo, the train pulled into Helwan station, an impressive concoction of ornate plaster and pink paint, from which broad, tree-lined avenues radiated in several directions. On their way to the hotel, they passed small palaces behind elaborate wrought-iron railings, as well as a sign for the golf course.
The Tewfiq Palace Hotel was a grand building, set in well-ordered grounds, with a wide gravel path leading from the street to a broad terrace and the cool marble reception area. They were given large rooms overlooking the gardens and planned to stay there until Birkeland could find a suitable house in which to build his own observatory and laboratory. He left a polite note for Miss Spandonides, who was still resident at the hotel, and the following morning took a carriage, with Devik and Skolem, to the observatory.
From the hotel, in the northeast of the town, the road rapidly became a narrow street, running between disheveled houses where the servants of the rich lived. As if a line had been drawn at the edge of the last house, the desert began. The carriage emerged into the intense light and parched air of the Sahara, which lapped at the edges of the settlement. The horses climbed a steep track to the top of an escarpment from where they could see the town laid out below in ordered streets. In the distance, the great pyramids loomed out of the shimmering horizon on the opposite bank of the Nile, an extraordinary image that Birkeland had first pictured as a boy when listening to Lieblein.
The carriage continued down a dip between two hills and climbed again, around the escarpment. Looking into the valley below they could see the golf course, made entirely of sand: hard-rolled for the putting greens, raked for the fairways, and loose for the bunkers. They could see a few Europeans playing, accompanied by Egyptian caddies wearing red sweaters over their galabiyyas. As they rounded the bend, the crest of a shallow hill came into view, on top of which two buildings stood on either side of the track. A bungalow to the left was substantial, built of rough stone, consisting of two wings connected by a central hall, set back to allow for a deep, shady veranda. On the right a tall tower built of the same rough stone bristled with weather instruments and around its base was a simple quad of offices. There was nothing green as far as the eye could see and the buildings appeared to float on the sea of sand that stretched to the horizon.
The Khedivial Observatory was Egyptian-owned but run by the British Survey Department, which used it to study the geography and the weather of the region as well as the night skies. The new director, appointed the previous year, was Harold Knox-Shaw, a young graduate of Cambridge University who was not yet thirty years old. His dark hair was cut short, parted down the middle and smoothed away from his forehead with wax. He wore a sober tweed suit and tie and small round spectacles and walked with a pronounced limp due to an attack of childhood polio. When he greeted the visiting scientists, his manner was shy and quiet but friendly. He explained the functions of the buildings they passed as he walked toward the observation dome, situated further along the track, over the brow of the hill. In the main house was the dining hall, where everyone ate together, and the dormitories where they slept. If these were full, tents were pitched behind the house on the rock. The quadrangle of offices was the center for fieldwork of geodetic, seismic, and magnetic surveys, precise leveling and other geographical activities performed by mathematics graduates from Cambridge for the British Survey Department under the direction of a Captain Lyons. In one of these rooms, Birkeland’s boxes were awaiting him. Further on was a building containing the automatic magnetometers, whose recordings Birkeland was invited to use, and nearby was a workshop where several English technicians were repairing instruments. Five hundred meters further into the desert, perched on an incline, was the observatory. It was an elegant, circular building of pale stone with a tapering stairway ascending to double doors. Inside, the desert sand collected in small heaps against the walls and eddied across the smooth flagstones when the men entered the dark lower floor. They climbed a steep wooden ladder and emerged into the dome, where Knox-Shaw wound the mechanism of cogs, wires, and pulleys that revolved the dome to open the shutter, allowing a bright shaft of sunlight to light up the room.
Knox-Shaw’s main interest was studying star nebulae such as supernovas, stellar nurseries, or clusters of stars, the usual object of the telescope’s gaze, but he was interested to see whether the telescope could be used to help Birkeland with his research. It was the largest in Africa and the gift of a Birmingham industrialist, John Reynolds, a keen amateur astronomer. The weather around Birmingham severely hampered his observations and he decided to place a telescope in a better climate as an act of benevolence to other astronomers. He built a thirty-inch reflector and asked the Royal Astronomical Society where it should be situated. They suggested Helwan and Reynolds promptly donated it to the Egyptian government. Knox-Shaw explained that he had come to Egypt immediately after graduating in 1908 to supervise the installation of the telescope. He thought it could be used to help Birkeland measure variations in the intensity of the Zodiacal Light. Birkeland wanted to connect the telescope to a piece of new technology, a photocell, which had been introduced for astronomical use only a few months earlier. Just as he had been able to procure radium from Marie Curie only one year after she had first isolated it, Birkeland now planned to pioneer a revolutionary technique for observing astronomical phenomena.
The photocell was 100 times more sensitive than a photographic plate and worked by pointing a lens at a small area of the sky. A light particle, or photon, passed through the lens into a lightproof box in which was a cathode coated with an alkaline metal. When the photon hit the cathode, an electron was released that traveled across to an anode. The moving electron set up an electric current that could be measured using an electrometer: the stronger the current, the greater the density of light. The German scientist Wilhelm Hallwachs had discovered this photoelectric effect in 1888. He realized that certain metals released electrons when exposed to light, although the theory behind the reaction was not established until 1905 by Einstein; it was for this that he received the Nobel Prize, not for his theory of special relativity, announced the same year. The instrument Birkeland had brought with him to Egypt was made by Elster and Geitel, pioneers in the field and the foremost constructors of photocell equipment in the world. Birkeland was the first to point it at the Zodiacal Light.
He explained that he wanted evidence of electron radiation from the sun to prove his theory that electrons caused magnetic storms, the Northern Lights, and the pulsating Zodiacal Light. Knox-Shaw agreed to begin the observations as soon as Birkeland brought him the photocell equipment, but he seemed dubious that electrons from the sun could reach the Earth, citing the work of Schuster. Birkeland was dismayed that even in Egypt, so far from the Royal Society and other institutions of British science, he still could not escape from these prejudices. Fortunately, Knox-Shaw’s study of star nebulae furnished him with knowledge of the forces of magnetism and some interest in the influence of electromagnetism and he kept an open mind.
After an introductory tour of the observatory, Birkeland arranged to return the following day to search through his boxes for the photoelectric equipment. The three Norwegians retreated to the Tewfiq Palace Hotel, pleased to be able to work with Knox-Shaw but thankful not to be living in an English enclave on a barren escarpment. Miss Spandonides was sitting on the terrace when the three men arrived back at the hotel, and the acquaintance formed briefly in Alexandria was renewed over dinner.
15
War
Helwan, Egypt
Spring 1914
And so I beg the darkness:
Where are you my loving man?
Why gone from her whose love
Can pace you, systematically, to your desire?
Song, Egypt, 1300 B.C.
DURING THE SPRING of 1914 Birkeland settled into life in Helwan. He spent many days at the observatory with Harold Knox-Shaw, working on the photocell equipment and trying different telescopes to achieve better results. Using the large telescope had initially proved disappointing, as the Zodiacal Light appeared very distant and faint in the huge, thirty-inch silver reflector. They changed to a smaller, refractor telescope using lenses to focus the image of the Light onto the photocell, but this was not very effective either. Birkeland realized that perhaps he needed to use much thinner lenses with a shorter focal length. As he noted in an article in The Cairo Scientific Journal later in 1914, he should have learned from his experiences of photographing the aurora:
I had a similar misfortune before in photography; it was in 1899 when photographing the polar aurora from the then newly erected Haldde observatory. We used great heavy Zeiss lenses, constructed solely for that purpose, and got nothing of value. Some years later, Professor Störmer succeeded very well using a little thin cinematographic lens.
As always, Birkeland was well informed about scientific developments occurring elsewhere. He chanced upon a small article in a German scientific journal in which he read that two scientists had examined the power of various metals to reflect light and noticed that each metal had different reflective properties, absorbing or reflecting different wavelengths. Birkeland noted that silver did not reflect ultraviolet light well, which was a problem, as he believed the Zodiacal Light consisted in large part of ultraviolet and blue light, near the end of the spectrum visible to the human eye. The silver reflector of the Reynolds telescope was absorbing light at these wavelengths and thereby obliterating Birkeland’s evidence of variation. He needed to find the substance that would reflect it powerfully onto his recording equipment. Another article, this time in French, about the light wavelengths allowed through different types of lenses, confirmed Birkeland’s suspicion that the ordinary glass lenses he had been using were not ideal as they also absorbed ultraviolet.
It is obvious that the most effective rays in the Zodiacal Light must have a wavelength of about 0.32μ and thereunder. If we want to construct a good lens for photographing the Zodiacal Light, we therefore have to choose from the materials: fluorspar, quartz, and Jena glass. If we want to produce a mirror to reflect the rays of the Zodiacal Light it is best to choose Mach’s mirror metal which reflects ultraviolet light very much better than all other known metal or nickel.
Birkeland sent off to Europe for new, thinner lenses and a mirror made of Mach’s metal and set about creating his own photocell equipment, which appeared to work far more efficiently. He was able to record small variations in the intensity of the Zodiacal Light and worked with Knox-Shaw to check his results. They decided to focus the photocell equipment on stars to verify that they did not register variations, light emitted from stars being constant with only a few exceptions. They saw almost no variations, which reassured Birkeland that his new device was working well.
These happy and productive months in Birkeland’s life were marred only by news from home, in a letter from his cousin, Richard Birkeland, at the end of March:
Eyde is working hard to get the Nobel Prize and it is said that he is doing it so that you don’t get it but I’m not sure about that. It will be an enormous scandal if he gets it and you don’t. He is going to make a speech at the Swedish Technology Association in Stockholm and has been making speeches everywhere it seems, in universities and schools, to give himself a “scientific image.”
Eyde’s scandalous rewriting of the history of the furnace did not surprise Birkeland. Eyde was attempting to impress influential people—be they scientists, politicians, newspaper owners, aristocrats— using Norsk Hydro’s leverage, and often money, to render favors that could help him win the prize. It seemed that his tactics were bearing fruit, but there was little Birkeland could do from Egypt and he tried to ignore the news.
Birkeland, Devik, and Skolem spent many days absorbed in the complexities of the Zodiacal Light, sometimes with the help of Knox-Shaw, sometimes in their own small team either at the hotel or in the desert at night. After a few weeks, however, it became clear that the hotel was not a suitable home for the three men as their nocturnal hours were causing some complaints. Birkeland asked Miss Spandonides whether she knew of a villa they could rent through one of her Greek friends. Within days, a suitable house had been found not far from the hotel but nearer the desert and the road to the observatory.
Mister K. Birkeland, professor of the University of Christiania (Norway), hires the house of Mme. Salech Pascha, Helwan, near Cairo for a price of 85 Egyptian pounds a year. He has the right to erect a wooden wall on the roof, to put two stoves in one of the rooms and to use one of the two kitchens as a laboratory.
Helwan, 1 May 1914
Kr. Birkeland
Mme. Salech Pascha
The wooden rail was to keep the scientists safe while making observations from the roof at night, the laboratory was primarily for developing photographs of the Zodiacal Light, and the stoves were to keep Birkeland warm. Despite the balmy days of April and May in Egypt, Birkeland often suffered from shivering attacks and cold feet and hands. His drinking remained steady, and his consumption of veronal was more frequent than his brother had advised, although he tried not to take too much because it produced unpleasant side effects, including drowsiness and shaking hands. He considered the other symptoms from which he suffered to be due to the deleterious effect of working so intensely on the fertilizer furnace and his inability to tolerate extremes of temperature, cold or hot. It was primarily through his ailments, and his need to find accommodation, that a relationship developed between Birkeland and Miss Spandonides. Birkeland learned that the initial ‘H’ on the concert program from Alexandria stood for the highly unusual name of Hellas, the Greek word for “Greece,” although she usually shortened it to the more European-sounding Hella when abroad. She had been named after her country by parents proud of their heritage, an attitude Hella had adopted wholeheartedly. She not only wore ancient Greek designs onstage but also played and promoted the music of contemporary Greek composers throughout Europe.
During April and May Hella helped Birkeland find linen, items of furniture, and even a bath and lavatory for his new villa, recommending merchants Birkeland should visit. On several occasions she accompanied him to Cairo on shopping trips. She learned of his delicate health and he of hers: Hella was in Helwan to be treated for tuberculosis. The small town was home to a renowned medical center devoted to the treatment of the disease, located in a palace donated by the sister of the khedive.
Within weeks, Birkeland was doing Hella’s shopping for her when she felt ill and was visiting her in the evenings. On the days they could not meet because she was singing, playing the piano, or feeling unwell, they would write short notes to each other.
