The Northern Lights, page 28
Providence had hardly imbued Eyde with the ability for self-criticism and nothing indicates that he was able to adjust and discipline his actions. It made him ignore the limits and restrictions observed by most people. This absence of inhibitions was particularly visible when he saw a possibility for financial profit. Respect for others’ interests did not concern him much.
Despite the shadows that clung to both Eyde and Birkeland, their achievements concerning Norsk Hydro could not be denied. Within Eyde’s lifetime, the company had become the largest, and for many decades the only, multinational enterprise in Norway, employing 20,000 men and women, with capital equal to the Norwegian state budget. After the First World War, the company switched to a purely chemical method of fertilizer production, synthesizing ammonia by the “Haber-Bosch method,” developed initially by BASF. It remains the leading multinational enterprise in Norway, employing 38,000 people, still producing fertilizer but also having diversified into light metals, oil and energy provision, and petrochemicals, with an annual gross income of about 12 billion crowns.
After her divorce from Birkeland, Ida did not return to her family in Raade but moved to a smart new apartment on Elisenbergveien, not far from the church where she was married. Financially well off from Birkeland’s settlement, she spent most of her summers in the south of France, on the Côte d’Azur. She did not remarry, nor did she appear to maintain links with her family other than her sister Camilla. Ida died on 21 August 1926, at the age of sixty-three. The main beneficiary of her will had been her neighbor, but three days before Ida died she altered it and left everything to her sister Camilla on condition that, after Camilla’s death, everything would go to Julia, the only one of the six daughters who had married and had children.
Amund Helland died in November 1918 from heart disease, saddened by the untimely death of his great friend, Birkeland. Henrik Mohn had died on 12 December 1916, but it seems unlikely that Birkeland would have heard this before his own death.
Birkeland’s assistants went on to achieve great things, and one of his lasting contributions to science was considered to be the inspiring leadership he gave to the younger generation. Sem Sæland was elected rector of the Norwegian Technical High School in Trondheim in 1910, despite being the youngest professor there. He later became a professor at the University of Oslo, having been elected rector there too in 1927. He was reelected to this post for a record three terms and died in 1940. Lars Vegard, an assistant of Birkeland’s, was elected to his professorship in 1917, and spent his life identifying and measuring the different spectral lines of the Northern Lights in order to determine which gases are excited in the course of an aurora. He made some pioneering discoveries and accurately compiled a list of about forty auroral colors and the gases with which they are related. Ole Andreas Krogness became the first director of the permanent observatory at Haldde in 1912 and lived on the mountain summit with his wife, Dagny. One of his two children, Synnøve, was born at Haldde. Olaf Devik joined him there in 1915 with his wife, who gave birth to two of their three children, Finn and Ingeborg, on the summit. In 1918 Krogness and Devik established a new geophysical institute in a more clement location, Tromsø, with Krogness as director and Devik as leader of the embryonic field of weather forecasting. Olaf Devik worked as a high-ranking civil servant in the Ministry of Education for many years before he retired; he lived to be over a hundred. The much-loved, jovial Krogness died in 1934, at the age of forty-seven. His friends and colleagues brought a stone from Haldde Mountain to place on his grave. Thoralf Skolem became a professor of mathematics at the university in 1938 and enjoyed an international reputation as a pioneer of modern mathematical logic. Carl Størmer, Birkeland’s colleague in the mathematics department, developed important equations concerning the movement of charged particles in a dipole magnetic field (inspired by Birkeland and his terrella experiments) and accurately triangulated the height of auroras. Bjørn Helland-Hansen, having lost his fingertips to frostbite on Birkeland’s expedition to Haldde, became an internationally respected oceanographer. Karl Devik never returned from Africa and little is known about his life in Rhodesia.
Birkeland devoted his life to an extraordinary journey, to unravel the complex and powerful relationship between the sun and the Earth. In doing so, he introduced modern physics to Norway and almost singlehandedly raised the funds necessary to build an up-to-date physics environment at Christiania University. It is a sad irony that he died while a working committee was considering his nomination for the Nobel Prize, in conjunction with Professor Størmer, for their work on the aurora borealis. The prize could not be awarded posthumously and thus Birkeland never received the recognition he deserved and so wished for. Although his life ended tragically, his resurrection has been steady and continues to this day. As Birkeland himself said, sitting round the fireplace in the administration building in Notodden, in 1910:
A very few lonely pioneers make their way to high places never before visited. Others follow these new paths, and sometimes the pioneers build roads so wide that the masses may follow. These pioneers create the living conditions of mankind and the majority are living on their work.
Select Bibliography
IN ADDITION to help I received from the people listed in the Acknowledgments and the information gathered from archives also mentioned there, the following books proved to be valuable for research. The titles of Norwegian books are listed in their original language followed by the English translation.
Akasofu, S.-I. Sydney Chapman, Eighty from His Friends. Privately published (available at the Royal Astronomical Society, London), 1968. ———. Aurora Borealis: The Amazing Northern Lights. Anchorage: Alaska Geographic, 1979.
Alfvén, Hannes. “The Plasma Universe.” Physics Today, September 1986, pp. 22–27.
Alfvén, H., and A. Egeland. “Auroral Research in Scandinavia,” The Kristian Birkeland Lecture 1. Oslo: Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, 1987.
Al-Sayyid Marsot, Afaf Lutfi. Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
———. A Short History of Modern Egypt. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Andersen, Ketil Gjølme, and Gunnar Yttri. Et forsøk verdt [Worth Trying]. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1997.
Birkeland wrote around sixty scientific papers. Among the most important of his publications for this book are:
Birkeland, Kristian. Expédition Norvégienne de 1899–1900. Christiania: Norwegian Academy of Science, Jacob Dybwad, 1901.
———. The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition, 1902–1903, vol. 1, parts 1 and 2. Christiania: H. Aschehoug, 1908, 1913.
———. “Sur la lumière zodiacale,” Académie des Sciences, session of Monday, 15 February 1911, Paris.
———. “Sur la lumière zodiacale,” Comptes Rendus, Paris, 20 July 1914.
———. “On a Possible Method of Photographically Registering the Intensity of the Ultraviolet Light from the Sun and Stars.” Cairo Scientific Journal, vol. 8, 1914.
———. “On a Possible Crucial Test of the Theories of Auroral Curtains and Polar Magnetic Storms,” Videnskapsselskapets Skrifter, I Mat.—Naturv. Klasse no. 61, Christiania, 1915.
———. “Are the Solar Corpuscular Rays That Penetrate into the Earth’s Atmosphere Negative or Positive Rays?,” Videnskapsselskapets Skrifter, I Mat.—Naturv. Klasse no. 1, Christiania, 1916.
———. “Simultaneous Observations of the Zodiacal Light from Stations of Nearly Equal Longitude in North and South Africa,” Cairo Scientific Journal, vol. 9, March 1917.
Bødtker, Henning. En advocat forteller [A Lawyer Reports], Oslo: H. Aschehoug, 1970.
Brekke, A., and A. Egeland. The Northern Light: From Mythology to Space Research. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1983.
Brundtland, T. “The Laboratory Work of Professor Kristian Birkeland.” Report to the Department of Physics, University of Tromsø, 1997.
———. “Instruments in the Arctic: The Norwegian Auroral Expedition to Novaya Zemlya in 1902–03,” Proceedings of the XVIII SIC Symposium Institute for the History of Science and Technology. Moscow: Russian Astronomical Society, 2000.
Chapman, Sydney. “Frederick Carl Mülertz Störmer, 1874–1957,” Biographical Memoirs 41, Royal Society of London, 1958.
———. “History of Aurora and Airglow,” in Aurora and Airglow, ed. Billy M. McCormac. New York: Reinhold, 1967.
———. “Historical Introduction to Aurora and Magnetic Storms,” in The Birkeland Symposium on Aurora and Magnetic Storms, ed. A. Egeland and J. Holtet. Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1968, pp. 21–29.
Cowling, T. G., and V. C. A. Ferraro. “Obituary—Sydney Chapman,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 13, 1972.
Danielson, R., et al., eds. Norway: A History from the Vikings to Our Own Times, trans. Michael Drake. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1995.
De Mairan, Jean-Jacques d’Ortous. Traité physique et historique de l’aurore boréale. Paris: L’Imprimerie royale, 1733.
Dessler, A. J. “Solar Wind and Interplanetary Magnetic Field,” Reviews of Geophysics 5: 1–7, 1967.
———. “Solar Wind Interactions,” in The Birkeland Symposium on Aurora and Magnetic Storms, ed. A. Egeland and J. Holtet. Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1968, pp. 13–19.
———. “Nobel Prizes: 1970—Swedish Iconoclast Recognised after Many Years of Rejection and Obscurity,” Science 170: 604–606, 1970.
———. “The Evolution of Arguments Regarding the Existence of Field-aligned Currents,” in Magnetospheric Currents, Thomas A. Potemra, American Geophysical Union Monograph 28, Washington, D.C., 1984.
———. Honors Ceremony for Hannes Alfvén for the American Geophysical Union, EOS, 70, 10, Washington, D.C., 1989.
Devik, Olaf. “Kristian Birkeland As I Knew Him,” in The Birkeland Symposium on Aurora and Magnetic Storms, ed. A. Egeland and J. Holtet. Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1968, pp. 13–19.
———. Blant fiskere, forskere og andre folk [Amongst Fishermen, Scientists, and Other Folk], Oslo: H. Aschehoug, 1971.
Devik, Olaf, and Ole Andreas Krogness. “Professor Kr. Birkeland,” Naturen, 1917, pp. 193–204.
Eather, Robert H. The Majestic Lights: The Aurora in Science, History, and the Arts. Washington, D.C.: American Geophysical Union, 1980.
Egeland, Alv. “Kristian Birkeland: The Man and the Scientist,” in Magnetospheric Currents, ed. Thomas A. Potemra. American Geophysical Union Monograph 28, Washington, D.C., 1984.
———. “Birkeland’s Electromagnetic Gun: A Historical Review,” Plasma Science 2, vol. 17, April 1989.
———. Kristian Birkeland. Oslo: Norges Banks seddeltrykkeri, 1994.
Egeland, Alv, and E. Leer. “Professor Birkeland: His Life and Work,” IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, vol. PS-14, no. 6, December 1989, pp. 666–67.
Eyde, Sam. Mitt liv og mitt livsverk [My Life and My Life’s Work]. Oslo: Eget Forlag, 1956.
Friedman, Robert Marc. Appropriating the Weather: Wilhelm Bjerkenes and the Construction of Modern Meteorology. N.Y. and London: Ithaca Press, 1989.
———. “Civilization and National Honour: The Rise of Norwegian Geophysical and Cosmic Science,” in Making Sense of Space: The History of Norwegian Space Activities, ed. Jan Pettar Collet. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1995.
Fuglum, Per. Norge I Støpeskjeen, 1884–1919 [Norway Reshaped, 1884–1919], vol. 12 of Norges Historie [History of Norway], ed. Knut Mykland. Oslo: Cappelen, 1979.
Gilbert, William. De Magnete, London, 1600. English translation by P. Fleury Mottelay. New York: Dover Publications, 1983.
Hartmann, Edel. Kjent folk gjennon årene [Well-known People Through My Years]. Oslo: Olaf Norlis Forlag, 1936.
Haslip, Joan. The Lonely Empress: A Biography of Elizabeth of Austria. Cleveland, Ohio: The World Publishing Co., 1965.
Hassan, Hassan. In the House of Muhammad Ali: A Family Album, 1805–1952. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2000.
Hellemans, A., and B. Bunch. The Timetables of Science. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.
Hestmark, Geir. Vitenskap og nasjon, Waldemar Christopher Brøgger, 1851–1905 [Science and Nation, Waldemar Christopher Brøgger, 1851–1905]. Oslo: H. Aschehoug, 1999.
Holmboe, Carl Fredrik. Ingeniør ser seg tilbake [An Engineer Looks Back]. Oslo: H. Aschehoug, 1948.
Holst, Helge, ed. Opfindernes Liv [Lives of the Inventors], part 2. Copenhagen and Christiania: Nordisk Forlag, 1915.
Huntford, Roland. Nansen. London: Duckworth, 1997.
Keilhau, Wilhelm. Det Norske folks liv og historie 1875–1920 [The Life and History of the Norwegian People, 1875–1920], vol. 10. Oslo: H. Aschehoug, 1935.
———. Det Norske folks liv og historie i vår egen tid [The Life and History of the Norwegian People in Our Own Time]. Oslo: H. Aschehoug, 1938.
Kitroeff, Alexander. The Greeks in Egypt, 1919–1937: Ethnicity and Class. London: Ithaca Press, published for the Middle East Centre, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, 1989.
Lang, Kenneth R. Sun, Earth and Sky. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1995.
Lauritzen, Åse Katherine. “Vitenskapsmann som teknolog, Kristian Birkeland, 1901–1908” [“A Scientist as Technologist, Kristian Birkeland, 1901–1908”]. Unpublished thesis in history, University of Oslo, autumn 2000.
Luetken, André, and Helge Holst, eds. Opfindelsernes Bog [Book of Inventions], vol. 2. Christiania and Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag, 1913.
Mehren, Tonje Maria. “Norsk Selskap for Psykisk Forskning” [The Norwegian Society for Psychical Research]. Unpublished thesis, University of Oslo, spring 1999.
Mohn, Johan B. Christian Joachim Mohn, hans forfædre, liv og etterkommere [Christian Joachim Mohn, His Ancestors, Life, and Descendants]. Oslo: Mostue, 1928.
Nelson, Nina. Helwan Shepheard Hotel—A History. Cairo: Al-Ahram, 1992.
Nielssen, Alf Ragnar, and Arvid Petterson. Nordlyspionerene [The Pioneers of the Northern Lights]. Oslo: Grøndahl og Dreyer, 1993.
Norman, Howard. Northern Tales: Traditional Stories of Eskimo and Indian Peoples. New York: Pantheon, 1990.
Norsk biografisk leksikon [Norwegian Biographical Encyclopedia]. Oslo: H. Aschehoug, 1923–83.
Peratt, A. L. “The Legacy of Birkeland’s Plasma Torch.” The 9th Birkeland Symposium. Oslo: Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, 1995.
Potemra, Thomas A., ed. Magnetospheric Currents. American Geophysical Union Monograph 28, Washington, D.C., 1984.
Rypdal, K., and T. Brundtland. “The Birkeland Terrella Experiments and their Importance for the Modern Synergy of Laboratory and Space Plasma Physics.” Journal de Physique 4, supplement of the Journal de Physique 3, October 1997.
Savage, Candace. Aurora: The Mysterious Northern Lights. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995.
Schuster, Sir Arthur. The Progress of Physics. New York: Arno Press, 1911.
Sonbol, Amira, ed. and trans. The Last Khedive of Egypt. Reading, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 1998.
Soueif, Ahdaf. The Map of Love. London: Bloomsbury, 1999.
Stadler, Valerie. Legends and Folktales of Lappland. London: Mowbrays, 1972.
Störmer, Carl. The Polar Aurora. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1955.
Sæland, Sem. “Professor Kristian Birkeland,” Fysisk Tidsskrift 16, 1917–18, pp. 34–53.
Terada, Torahiko. “Death of Professor B.” Literature, Japan, July 1935. Trans. into Norwegian by Lars Ulsnes, 1978, and into English (main part) by Professor N. Fukushima, Tokyo, 1989, and (last part) by Truls Lynne Hansen, Tromsø, 2000. All Norwegian and English translations are unpublished.
Tromholdt, Sophus. Under the Rays of the Aurora Borealis: In the Land of the Lapps and the Kvæns. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Riving-ton, 1885.
Turner, H. H. “From an Oxford Notebook” [about the Helwan observatory]. The Observatory, vol. 32, 1909.
Wikan, Stein. Johan Koren. Oslo: Christian Schibsted, 2000.
NEWSPAPERS AND REPORTS
Det Kongelige Fredriks Universitets aarsberetninger [Annual Reports of the Royal Norwegian Fredrik’s University]. Christiania, 1885–1919.
Det norske Stortings forhandlinger [Proceedings of the Norwegian Parliament], Christiania, 1898–1920.
“Soflekker og nordlys, et budskap fra solen” [Sunspots and the Northern Light, a Message from the Sun] in Verduns Gang, Christiania, 16 September 1898.
“Professor Birkeland’s elektromagnetiske kanon” [The Electromagnetic Cannon of Professor Birkeland] in Aftenposten, Christiania, 7 March 1905.
“Birkeland-Eyde, hvorledes den Birkeland-Eydske opfindelse er bleven til” [Birkeland-Eyde, How the Birkeland-Eyde Method Was Developed], open letter from Birkeland in Aftenposten, Christiania, 24 June 1915.
LETTERS
The letters quoted in this book come from the archives of the Norsk Hydro Industry Museum at Notodden, the Norwegian Technical Museum, Oslo, and the Manuscript Department of the National Library of Norway, Oslo.
PICTURE CREDITS
The photograph of Birkeland on deck is from the archives of the Norsk Hydro Industry Museum, Notodden.
LUCY JAGO
The Northern Lights
Lucy Jago is a former documentary producer for Channel 4 and the BBC. She has been awarded two academic scholarships and a Double First Class Honours Degree from King’s College, University of Cambridge, and a master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute, London. She lives in Dorset, England.
