The Northern Lights, page 26
Birkeland wanted to see his own book, the Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition 1902–1903, to check some figures against work he had been conducting in Egypt with the Zodiacal Light, but the book was still unavailable in the library. He was very disappointed but Terada offered him use of the department’s facilities and introduced him to the departmental chairman, Professor Nagaoka, and the eminent retired Professor Tanakadate. Terada noticed immediately that Birkeland had changed since they met in Christiania; his manner was listless and lethargic. Despite this, they talked for several hours about the connection between Terada’s field of study, rapid magnetic variations, and Birkeland’s investigations into the movement of charged particles in the upper atmosphere. Birkeland had received copies of Terada’s published papers, and was flattered by his Japanese colleague with his familiarity with his work. Birkeland decided that he could carry out useful research in Japan and decided to stay for a while.
The Danish consul, Eriksen, reluctantly left Birkeland in the hands of the Norwegian consul, Anker, who invited the professor and a small party of Scandinavians to Hakone, a resort about a hundred kilometers southwest of Tokyo. Birkeland soon grew tired of having nothing to do and wrote to Terada asking him to recommend a quiet hotel in Tokyo. Terada booked him into the Hotel Seiyoken, a small establishment of a few rooms annexed to a tea-house in Ueno Park. Birkeland left Hakone with assurances to Consul Anker and his wife that he would take good care of himself, although he did not tell them where he was going to stay.
The Seiyoken was perfect for Birkeland’s needs. The location was peaceful and the rooms a good size, with beautiful views over the hotel’s azalea gardens to the cherry trees in the park beyond. Birkeland made almost daily visits to the physics department, where he talked with Professor Terada and worked on his own complete cosmogony. Although he worked hard and remained lucid, it was clear to Terada that Birkeland was not well. As he later wrote:
During our repeated discussions it became clearer and clearer to me that Birkeland was somehow melancholy and very nervous. He seemed feverish and as he talked he was continuously wiping away sweat from his brow. His sparse gray hairs were standing out on his head and it seemed as though they were steaming away from him. His face looked cherry-colored and his eyes were vivid.
While Birkeland was in Tokyo, Eyde was preparing to retire from Norsk Hydro. The company’s board of directors had decided that a new ethos was needed. Eyde’s style—his extravagance, large gestures, big risks, and feudalistic management style—was perceived as anachronistic during the war, when teamwork, efficiency, cutting costs, and consolidation in the face of industrial and military hostility were paramount. Despite the board and shareholders’ frustration with Eyde’s inventive accounting and self-aggrandizing schemes, they decided to honor him with a week-long retirement party in June. He was presented with so many gifts that there was no room for them in his large house and he had to store some at Norsk Hydro. One such present was a waist-high replica of a hydroelectric power plant cast in silver etched into which were long columns of grateful employees’ names. Eyde was treated like a hero; his rewriting of history had proved successful and in all the celebrations Birkeland’s name was barely mentioned.
Eyde officially retired on 15 June. That same day, on the other side of the world, Birkeland went to the telegraph office near the hotel and sent a message to his lawyer, Johan Bredal:
REMEMBER WRIEDT COMMITTEE.
When Bredal received the telegram later that day he did not understand what Birkeland meant by it and put it to one side, puzzled. Only the following day did its meaning become clear.
Sending the telegram was Birkeland’s first excursion in nearly a fortnight. He had been closeted in the hotel, working on his treatise in the bright corner of his room near the doors into the garden. Every few hours he would send for a servant, asking him to buy more paper or bring him coffee. He did not eat, take naps, or stroll around the garden but wrote furiously and continuously until he collapsed into bed and called the servant to take a note to Professor Terada at the Institute of Science. In Terada’s words:
One day he asked me to come to his hotel because he had something to tell me which would take some time. I went immediately. He was lying on his bed in his pajamas and he apologized for talking from the bed but he did not feel very well. He said that he was tired and would not like to use German or English, would I mind if he spoke French? Then he began to tell slowly the following story, that was completely unexpected.
Professor Birkeland invented some device for military purposes and had recommended its adoption to the French government. Since they declined his proposal Birkeland then went to the British government who performed tests on his invention but finally also rejected it. From that time on he felt that he was being followed by spies from Britain. He went to Helwan in Africa for the purpose of research and to escape the shadow of espionage. While he was observing the Zodiacal Light one night alone in the desert, someone tried to shoot at him out of the darkness.
After that he decided to make a sea journey to the Orient but he felt a spy was already on the ship and watching him day and night. Even after landing in Japan he felt shadowed, in Tokyo and Hakone as well. Only in the Seiyoken Hotel did he feel free but he said he could not be sure for how long he would be safe.
After finishing the story he closed his eyes and became silent, as if exhausted. I left his room without disturbing him.
Terada had no idea what to make of Birkeland’s account. In these strange times of war in Europe he could well believe that such a brilliant man might be pursued for his inventions, but if someone wanted to kill Birkeland it would have been easy to do it in Egypt— why follow him to Japan? He felt alarmed for the professor’s safety but wondered whether Birkeland’s fears were illusory, the result of too much work or some sort of illness. He decided to call his medical friend Professor Miura in the morning and ask him to visit Birkeland. Miura went to see Birkeland and found that he was taking large doses of veronal. He took Birkeland to the hospital for blood and urine tests and to measure his blood pressure, then prescribed him potassium bromide in place of veronal. After a few days Birkeland contacted Terada again to say that he was not sleeping and Miura gave him more potassium salts and a weak compound of veronal salts as well, as Birkeland had insisted on it.
On the morning of 16 June, Professor Terada arrived early at the institute to be told that there had been a phone call from the Hotel Seiyoken to say that Professor Birkeland was gravely ill. He immediately called Professor Miura and together they went to the hotel. When they arrived, the servant boy was waiting for them, extremely agitated. Apparently he could get no response from the professor’s room, however hard he knocked and so he had opened the door with a spare key and seen that the professor appeared to be lifeless. He had called the police immediately, as well as Terada at the institute. When the men entered the room, they saw Birkeland on the bed, behind a mosquito net, and on the table beside him a large, flat pistol and a glass at the bottom of which was a residue of white powder. The servant explained that Birkeland took the pistol with him whenever he left the hotel.
Shortly afterward, the police and a physician arrived. Their examination of the body revealed a deep depression in the skin at the side of Birkeland’s head. They looked agitated until they realized that it was caused by his head touching the edge of the bed. The servant explained to the police that Birkeland had been angry with him when he had returned from the chemist with veronal salts rather than the stronger powder that he usually took. He sent the servant out to buy proper veronal, despite the young boy’s protestations that it would be bad for his health. Birkeland had insisted that it was the only way he could sleep. When Miura checked, he found Birkeland cold, already blue, without pulse and unusually stiff. Assistants from the hospital were called to pump Birkeland’s stomach, attempt artificial respiration, and inject camphor. But, as Miura noted in his account of the case, “it was all in vain and we were not able to wake the world-famous professor from his sleep.”
Professor Nagaoka, from the institute, and the Norwegian consul, with his wife and sister, who had been with Birkeland in Hakone, arrived during the resuscitation attempts. They conferred and the consul decided that, until he heard from Birkeland’s family in Norway, the corpse should be stored at the Department of Anatomy and injected with a fluid to aid preservation. As the physician was doing this, Birkeland appeared to sigh loudly and relax deeper into his sleep. The consul’s sister let out a cry of shock but Professor Miura explained that “sighing” was a common postmortem phenomenon caused by air trapped in the chest escaping as the muscles relaxed.
While Birkeland’s body was prepared for removal to the anatomy department, Professor Terada looked around the sparse hotel room. He noticed that Birkeland had been shopping during his stay in Hakone, as there was a large brass dragon in one corner of the room and a calendar, decorated with a black cockerel, hanging from a pillar near the bed, which had not been there when he had come to inspect the hotel for his distinguished guest. Birkeland’s clothes hung neatly in the closet—the work of the servant rather than the professor—but his other belongings, hair and clothes brushes, collar box, cufflinks holder, a number of books, and some small instruments, were strewn across the dressing table and the floor, as if Birkeland had been searching for something or had been reviewing his life through these ordinary possessions. As Terada remembered:
On the table in the corner of the room was a stack of paper that looked like a draft for a treatise; so here he had been sitting every day writing this manuscript, I thought, taking up a sheet of the papers and glancing at it. When Professor Nagaoka noticed this he hurried over to me, tore it out of my hands and shouted to the servant to tie it up. Then he delivered the package to the consul and solemnly requested that the manuscript be properly sealed and sent home to Norway’s university.
After the body had been removed and only Professor Terada remained, the servant took Birkeland’s pistol into the garden where two other boys from the hotel joined him in a thorough examination of the weapon. After a few minutes they started firing the pistol into the azalea bushes at the edge of the garden, talking and laughing loudly. When all the bullets were spent and the bush was completely destroyed, they wandered off. The ground around the azalea bush was littered with shredded white blossoms.
Science College, Imperial University,
Tokyo, Japan
16 June 1917
To the Rector of the University of Christiania,
We feel it our painful duty to convey to you the mournful news that Professor Birkeland was found dead in his hotel on the morning of 15 June. He was suffering from insomnia and seems to have taken an overdose of veronal. The physicians took every available means of recovery, but all in vain. We tried every means of making him tranquil; he was sometimes quite cheerful, but sometimes extremely depressed. This melancholy seems to have resulted in insomnia and the sorrowful end. It is an irreparable loss to science, and heartrending when we consider that he was solitary and far from home.
Yours very truly. H. Nagaoka T. Terada
Professor Birkeland’s body was kept in the morgue of the anatomy department at Tokyo University until a telegram was received from his brother, Tønnes, with instructions that Birkeland be cremated and the ashes returned to Christiania once the war was over. A postmortem revealed that Birkeland had taken ten grams of veronal the night he died instead of the 0.5 grams recommended. The time of death was estimated at three in the morning. When Professor Miura researched the popular sleeping drug, he found a large number of letters to the British Medical Journal warning of the side effects; many doctors, indeed, had discontinued its use. Although a very slow poison, its excessive use by sufferers of insomnia had resulted in grave disorders of the nervous system, ataxia, hallucinations, tremor, and even death. In addition, a deterioration of the moral sense occurred, as in the case of morphine and cocaine dependency, which led to a reckless use of the drug, with dangerous or fatal overdosing often a consequence.
The Norwegian general consul, Mr. Anker, arranged for a Christian service to be held in a church in Ichibanchoo. The rainy season had ended and a strong, dry wind shook the leaves on the trees, revealing their delicate, white undersides as the cortège moved slowly along the path to the church doors. As there was no one present who knew Birkeland well, the consul gave the address. A Norwegian music teacher sung an aria, which shocked the Japanese mourners: such a noise would never be allowed to disturb the silence of a Japanese funeral. Professor Nagaoka made a short speech and closed with the statement:
What Birkeland has achieved in the fifty years of his life is as brilliant as the dazzling waves of the aurora, which have exerted such a mighty attraction on him.
After the service the body was taken to the crematorium, from where the ashes were collected the following day by Professors Nagaoka, Terada, and Tanakadate. As Professor Terada recollected:
The very brittle remains were placed in a snow-white urn. In the unusually large cranium there were still remains of unburnt brain, which looked like asphalt. Professor Nagaoka lifted it up with a bamboo stick and said, “In this there have been many great ideas” and then he carefully placed it in the urn.
A month later the consul sent Terada the bronze tiger that Birkeland had bought during his stay in Hakone, accompanied by a message explaining that it was a souvenir of Professor Birkeland. As Terada did not like the sculpture, he kept it in a closet for many years, where it jolted painful memories on the rare occasions he glimpsed it. The events weighed heavily upon him and he did not tell anybody what Birkeland had related to him until late in his life, in 1935, when he wrote an account of the scientist’s sad last days, to be published posthumously. Every year, when late spring turned into summer and the azalea bushes were in full glory, he was reminded of Birkeland’s death.
THE MORNING that Birkeland’s body was discovered, telegrams were sent by the Norwegian consul to the Foreign Ministry in Christiania advising them of the sad event. Birkeland’s lawyer, Bredal, was the first to be informed and it was then that he at last realized the significance of Birkeland’s mysterious telegram. He must have known that death was near—either he knew himself to be ill or he was convinced that spies were closing in on him—and was telling Bredal to see if a medium could contact him after death. That way, they could have conclusive proof as to whether there was any truth in the claims of spiritualists or not.
To Bredal fell the difficult task of relaying the tragic news to Tønnes and Richard Birkeland and Ida—all beneficiaries in the professor’s will. Birkeland’s affairs were in disorder; his will was in a bank box which had to be broken open because no one could find a key. There were no clear records of his assets or bank accounts, and it took Bredal several months to prepare the final settlement of the will. Ida Birkeland was given the interest on 60,000 crowns for as long as she lived, after which it was to be divided equally between Tønnes and his children. She also bought Birkeland’s grand piano for 1,000 crowns. The rest of Birkeland’s considerable fortune was divided equally among Tønnes and his ten offspring. Richard Birkeland had the pick of the professor’s books; all his instruments were donated to the university. The contents of his beautiful house on Incognitogaten fetched the considerable sum of over 53,000 crowns at auction. His personal letters were given to Tønnes and Ida; his fez and slippers went to Norsk Hydro as mementoes. The house in Helwan was a difficult matter to settle from Norway, and Bredal wrote to the consul, Hooker, to establish the state of Birkeland’s affairs in Egypt.
Norwegian Consulate, Cairo, Egypt
Ayerst Hentham Hooker, Acting General Consul
To: His Excellency the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,
Christiania
14 August 1917
Professor Birkeland Deceased
Dear Sir,
I have the honor to report that on receipt of your telegram since confirmed announcing the death of Professor Birkeland at Tokyo, I at once proceeded to his house in the town of Helwan and in the presence of the consular janissary, placed consular seals on the doors and windows of the house and laboratory. I was unable to enter the house as the keys were left with the Danish consul’s wife who has since handed them over to me.
I found a considerable number of firearms, four rifles and an automatic pistol with ammunition, these I have removed to the consulate in order to avoid possible conflict with the military authorities. I would suggest that the property be liquidated as early as possible as current expenses are considerable—taxes, watchman, water rate etc.
In the laboratory I found items of furniture belonging to a Greek lady who I last heard was in Athens seriously ill with consumption.
Best regards, A. H. Hooker
On 22 September 1919, Birkeland was buried in the Vest-gravlund, Christiania, at the expense of the university but not of the state. No reason was given why such a prominent Norwegian citizen was not afforded the honor usually accorded to individuals who had made great contributions to the nation. Due to the circumstances of his death, the shadow of suicide hung over his name and unfairly obscured the glory that should have been his.
Birkeland was buried in the afternoon as the sun was dropping toward the horizon and the long shadows of the birch trees standing sentinel around the cemetery threw the mourners into and out of darkness with every step. Birkeland’s brother was there with his cousin Richard, who had been the closest to Birkeland of all the family and was one of the angriest about his lonely death and the lack of recognition for his work. Kaya Geelmuyden and her brother and sister, the Mohn family—accompanying Ida—Brøgger and several other professors from the university gathered at the service and around the grave. Other mourners included engineers who had been inspired by the professor, his lawyer, and past colleagues whose lives had been deeply affected by knowing Birkeland, including Olaf Devik, Sem Sæland, Bjørn Helland-Hansen, Ole Andreas Krogness, and Karl Devik, who mourned deeply for his friend and resolved to return to Africa to settle Birkeland’s estate in Egypt and recover any of his papers and personal effects that he could. Sam Eyde did not attend.
