The Northern Lights, page 5
Once Birkeland understood what Gilbert had achieved, he was surprised how few people had heard of him. Queen Elizabeth I had recognized his talents; he was the only person to whom she paid a retainer during her reign and she made him her physician. Newton and Galileo also admitted their debt to him, but few others had understood his ideas because he had been too far ahead of his time to be appreciated.
It was totally dark in the instrument room apart from the strings of light bouncing between the small paraffin lamps, the magnetometers, and the recorders. Only the steady clicking of the mechanisms told Birkeland that the Earth was turning on its axis and day was melting into night. A knock on the door announced dinner and he emerged blinking into the kitchen, a studious mole. He had become used to just three of them sitting down for dinner since Sæland took a sled and left for Talvik peak on the last day of October. The first night without him, they had telephoned and told him to look in a rucksack where Birkeland had secreted a small bottle of akevitt. In unison, across the dark, icy peaks standing sentinel over the mountain slopes, the men raised their glasses and tossed the burning spirit into their mouths.
Only two days varied much from the usual pattern. The first was 24 November, when Birkeland asked his companions to wrap up and accompany him outdoors. The wind was bitter but the cloud was broken and patches of clear sky could be seen. At twenty minutes past eleven the pale, glowing orb of the sun appeared over the low ridge of the Finnmark plateau in the south. The sun grazed the horizon for nine minutes before dropping below it once more. It was the last sunlight they would see for two months; from then on their world would be pitch black except during the three or four hours of twilight around midday. Such deprivation had been known to depress the sturdiest of men, but Birkeland reminded them that the perpetual darkness gave them perfect conditions for studying the Lights round the clock. Every man was on permanent watch for auroral activity.
The second unusual day was 13 December. After delivering the post, Hætta was invited to stay for breakfast and Sæland traveled over from Talvik peak. The kitchen table was loaded with plates of waffles, cloudberry jam, slices of meat and cheese, flasks of coffee, and a small pile of packets, letters, and telegrams. Birkeland was bewildered by the activity until Sæland reminded him of the date. It was Birkeland’s birthday.
Among the messages of congratulation Birkeland received was one from Anders Quale, director of the copper mine in Kaafjord. He and his wife had invited Birkeland and his team to spend Christmas with them. The men were delighted at the prospect of fresh food, warm baths, female company, and soft beds. Birkeland was keen to visit for quite another reason.
On Christmas Eve, Boye harnessed the reindeer. Hætta had brought three more the previous day so there would be enough animals to pull the sleds and riders down to Kaafjord. Then the sleds had to be packed. They were made of thin strips of wood, designed for pliability rather than balance so that they would not shatter on hitting hard stumps, ice packs, and rocks. Their single hull meant they tipped to one side when stationary, particularly when full of heavy objects or people. The only way to start a journey was to leap into the sled just as the reindeer began to move. The forward motion kept it from tipping to the side and throwing the rider out. Unfortunately, reindeer were only semidomesticated and always outraged at the inconvenience of pulling sleds, so the necessary coordination was difficult to attain. Being so low to the ground, the occupant was constantly showered with the snow, grit, slush, and stones thrown up by the high-kicking reindeer, who leapt wildly to left and right and never in a straight line. There was no brake other than arms and legs, and when the path was downhill the sled often descended faster than the reindeer, usually ending with the occupant being thrown out at high speed. As Birkeland wrote in his account of the expedition:
The journey with fresh reindeer was the wildest piece of driving one could imagine and the most exciting couple of hours I have ever gone through. The animals flew like the wind, and galloped along in places where a horse would have gone carefully step by step. We had five reindeer fastened together in a raide, and I sat in the last sled, firmly lashed to it. Occasionally the sled was thrown over the edge of the slope, notwithstanding that I put on all the brake that I possibly could with my elbows. I’m not sure I care to repeat it but I can certainly recommend sled-driving for excitement.
On the edge of the fjord conditions were mild and calm compared to those on the summit of the mountain: Kaafjord was the most northerly point in the world at which wheat ripened and was largely protected from the fierce storms that blew through the mountains. The sleds crossed the town on their way to the director’s house near the copper mine that had been established by the British in 1826, the most northerly industrial enterprise in Europe. From a tiny hamlet, Kaafjord developed into the largest town in Finnmark over the fifty years that copper was drilled out of the seams, then sifted and smelted by hand on the shores of the fjord. Influenza struck the town, and a third of the children and many adults, including the former director’s wife, died. The following year the world prices of copper slumped, the director returned to England, and the mines were closed. The town shrank back to a small village as nearly half the workers and their families emigrated to America, settling in a small corner of Michigan that became known as Little Norway. Those who stayed returned to a semi-nomadic life in Finland and northern Sweden or to farming in southern Norway. The mine was deserted until 1896, three years before Birkeland arrived, when copper prices recovered and it was bought by a Swedish ore millionaire, who sent Anders Quale, accompanied by his wife and four children, to manage the business.
The group received a warm welcome, despite the tensions that existed between Norway and Sweden in the Union. Their house, decorated simply in the Swedish style of pale wood with bright yellow–and–blue painted details, was large, comfortable, and warm. Outside, the layout of the formal garden could be discerned beneath the snow but only the old wooden skittle run and the tennis court had been excavated. Boye and Knudsen spent the afternoon playing friendly matches with the mine engineers, while Birkeland, Sæland, and Quale walked along the Alten fjord until they reached the hydroelectric plant Quale had just finished constructing. This was the real motive for Birkeland’s descent from the peak. He wanted to inspect the hydroelectric plant on a waterfall with the longest usable drop in Europe: 370 meters, a full seventy meters higher than the Eiffel Tower. The plant, which Birkeland had seen being built ten years before, was the highest manmade structure in the world. This far north, it was a remarkable engineering feat, and Birkeland wanted to see how it worked in practice.
The men spent several hours walking among the massive turbines that converted the energy of the water, falling through hundreds of meters of steel pipes, into electricity. Birkeland was particularly interested in the problems Quale reported about mechanisms to turn the current on and off quickly: they had no switching mechanism able to do that, and if something malfunctioned in the plant it was an ordeal to cut the power. It was during the hours spent with Quale at the power station that Birkeland first realized that his knowledge could be combined with his love of inventing machines to help improve the hydroelectric power industry and aid the process of Norway’s transformation from a remote, rural dependency into a fully industrialized power. He decided to spend some time trying to solve the switching problem on his return to Christiania. If successful, he might earn money with his invention that he could put toward further research into the aurora.
On Christmas morning the bells of Kaafjord church called the faithful to prayer and the small wooden building reverberated to the sound of more than two hundred voices, caroling in unison. On either side of the promontory on which the church stood sentinel, the frozen water reflected the singing voices for many kilometers along the fjord. When the singing stopped, the silence echoed against the mountains. In the midday twilight the windows sparkled with candlelight and cast flickering shadows onto the snow-softened graves outside. The congregation was too large to be contained in the simple building and spilled out of the church onto the path. As special visitors, Birkeland and his expedition members were invited to sit in the front pew beside the Quale family. The ceiling and walls were freshly painted in glowing blues and yellows, a renovation paid for by the mine and gloriously incongruous in a sunless landscape of muted whites and deep grays. The most eye-catching feature of the new decor was the barreled roof on which gold stars speckled a deep blue heaven.
After the service a small group stood on the jetty at the end of the Quales’ garden, waiting for the mine steamer The Fortuna to arrive with guests for Christmas lunch. The ship sailing toward them was the brightest object for miles around, dazzling in the night waters with small electric bulbs strung the length of the deck and the portholes blazing with light. The captain, Richard Lange, was a short man in his fifties with strong, rough hands and a short beard that began high on his cheekbones and continued to his cravat. His expression was usually serious and alert, that of a man who had lost several close relatives and friends to the sea. Lange had abandoned fishing for his living when the mine reopened and a steamer was needed to bring people and supplies up the fjord. It was not a more reliable job—copper prices were as unpredictable as herring shoals—but it was a less hazardous one as fishermen were killed every year along the coast, particularly those with their own small, open boats. Lange had been a baby when his father drowned in the notorious storm of 1848 that took the lives of more than five hundred fishermen during a single night. Lange and Birkeland spent many hours discussing the vindlys, the windlights or weatherlights, as the auroras were referred to along the coast by seafaring Norwegians and the Lapps, and the ways in which they could predict the weather. Birkeland was interested in the vindlys because the search for an accurate method of weather forecasting had been uppermost in successive governments’ objectives for decades—to save lives and benefit fishing and agriculture, Norway’s most profitable industries. The Northern Lights had been used to predict weather in the north for centuries and a surprising similarity in their interpretation existed—Scandinavians and Greenlanders used the Lights in similar ways as the Cheyenne Indians of Wyoming and Colorado and the Penobscot of Maine.
Birkeland was convinced that there must be a scientific explanation behind these folkloric predictions and, as no one had yet scientifically observed the weather and the Lights in parallel, he had stressed to Parliament that his expedition would be the first and best situated to do so. Even though proving the link between weather and auroras was not crucial for his theory about how the Lights were created, it was important for attracting funding and was given equal prominence in the title of the expedition manifesto, “Expedition to Study Aurora, Geomagnetism, and Cloud Formations.”
Another tactic Birkeland used to squeeze money out of Parliament was to play on national pride:
15 January 1899
There is, of course, the option of collaborating with foreign scientists and thus continuing the Expedition without further grants from the Norwegian State, but I hesitate to do this because I regard the investigations to be of such importance that I prefer them to be Norwegian.
This tactic had proved fruitful: the Ministry for Church and Education, responsible for research projects, granted Birkeland 12,000 crowns for building and equipping the two observatories, more than twice Birkeland’s annual salary. They realized that it would be a disgrace if a Norwegian did not receive the honors for solving a centuries-old mystery for want of a few thousand crowns.
However, Birkeland was already in trouble for overspending and failing to keep proper accounts. Since the early summer he had been receiving complaining letters and telegrams from the ministry, demanding that he send accounts and justify all future expenditure to the finance committee. These Birkeland had largely ignored, other than sending replies requesting yet more money and giving the reasons for needing it. On 22 December he had received a telegram informing him that all monies would be frozen until he sent full accounts as the expedition was already overspent by 16,000 crowns, nearly one and a half times the original budget. Birkeland usually recorded expenses on scraps of paper that he then lost, making accurate accounting a difficult task, but two days before Christmas he sent a telegram in reply saying that he had posted his accounts on 22 October along with a request for another 1,000 crowns.
I cannot believe that they have not reached the ministry. Everyone is asking me for money every day. I used one thousand crowns of my own pay for the transport up the mountain, to keep everyone quiet until parliament has handled my request for more money. When I receive it I will be able to pay the wages.
It is unlikely the accounts were ever sent. Birkeland simply did not think about expenses and budgets when he was preoccupied with science, and he hoped to distract the ministry and cajole Parliament into granting extra money by reporting progress on the question of weather prediction.
Captain Lange himself did not know whether the Lights created cloud but he was quite sure they predicted weather. If the Lights moved to the south, the weather would turn milder, especially if the Lights were bright. If the Lights were red it would rain or snow very hard. If the Lights made an archway between northwest and southeast without much motion then the conditions would be cold and clear, but if there was much movement the forecast was for windy weather. The more the rays were playing, igniting and extinguishing, the stronger the wind expected. If there was a very dramatic show of Lights fishermen would avoid going to sea the next day, for a storm would be expected. Birkeland paid particular attention to Lange’s observation that there had been fewer auroras over the past two or three years and that the weather had, by and large, been milder.
With only three months left on the mountaintop, if Birkeland did not soon find solutions to the questions he had set the expedition, the whole enterprise would be condemned as a failure, Norway’s pride would be dented, and the country’s reputation as a scientific backwater confirmed. Birkeland’s own standing as a scientist might be diminished to such an extent he would find it hard to obtain funding for any future research. Too many sacrifices had already been made, including Hansen’s career as a surgeon, for failure to be entertained as a possibility. Although he enjoyed the Christmas celebrations and fruitful conversation with Lange, Birkeland was keen to return to the mountain as soon as he could.
4
A Warning
New Year, new century 1900
Auroral observatory, Haldde Mountain
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living.
HENRI POINCARÉ (1854–1912), Science and Method
IT WAS THE last day of 1899. The wind whipped around the observatory, brushing spumes of powder snow from the summit until the mountain range looked like a string of smoking volcanoes. Not a crack of light escaped from the sturdy building, every source of drafts having been blocked up and papered over in an attempt to keep warm.
Birkeland’s hope for the coming century was that the value of their work would be recognized by the government and that the observatory would become permanently manned, the auroras and magnetic field recorded every day for a number of years. A more comfortable house could be built on the flat ground at the base of the final peak and a group of scientists, or even a family, could live all year round on the mountain. His personal dream was to earn enough money to build his own observatory and laboratory, staff it with young, talented scientists, and follow his ideas in complete freedom, released from teaching duties, beyond the confines of a conservative university and without having to beg the government for every thousand crowns or fill in pages of paperwork to account for it. At five to twelve Birkeland rose unsteadily to his feet and reminded the small group that they were the first men in history to celebrate New Year on that remote corner of the Earth. He raised a toast to the twentieth century and the men drained their glasses of akevitt as the clock chimed.
The first ten days of January were cloudless and intensely cold with temperatures down to −25° Celsius. For three nights in a row the auroras danced from six in the evening until two or three in the morning. Their beauty alleviated the continuous dark of the polar winter and the group understood why the Lapps believed God gave them the Northern Lights to compensate for the disappearance of the sun. Birkeland noted in the ledgers that, when the Lights were at their brightest, he could read print of about this size. The men never grew accustomed to their beauty, blasé about their arrival, or tired of watching their sensuous, fluid flames traversing the heavens. They took readings round the clock, free from all distractions, and a new sense of purpose set in. The phone line between the observatories was always open for the two stations to make simultaneous observations and take simultaneous photographs. Several answers to the minor questions Birkeland had set the expedition were already clear. The auroras did not touch the ground and therefore could not singe hair or burn flesh. Birkeland’s opinion was that the lowest edge of the auroras was about a hundred kilometers above the ground. None of the group had suffered headaches while the Lights snaked across the sky, nor had they heard any of the crackling and hissing noises several eminent observers had noted.
