The Northern Lights, page 9
Birkeland entertained the group with tales of life on the mountain peak, the reindeer rides and the wind strong enough to blow a man off his feet. Julie Mohn asked him many questions about Alten, a small town at the foot of Haldde Mountain, where she had been born and brought up. No one mentioned the tragedy of the avalanche. Ida also had stories to tell of adventurous travels. She had recently spent several months in America and England studying the cooking and customs of those countries. On her return she had found a new position at a school just east of Christiania, and she was living with her uncle and aunt until she could find an apartment of her own nearer the school. Ida’s family lived in Raade, a small rural community south of Christiania near the coast, where her father was the vicar. Ida was clearly intelligent, independent, and stubborn when convinced she was right. Probably a kind teacher, she was not an immediately warm presence, fair rather than friendly. Although she was plainer than Louise and more than a decade older, Birkeland was intrigued by Ida and was pleased to find himself seated next to her for the meal. For several hours he thought and talked of things other than science. At the end of the evening he shook her hand warmly and expressed his pleasure at renewing their acquaintance after so many years.
DYBWAD CALLED Birkeland with the news that the Fridtjof Nansen Foundation would fund publication of the book and Birkeland took Sæland out for a celebratory drink. He confided in the younger man his hopes that the published work would find its way to the desks of the world’s scientists, that his theories would be understood and appreciated, and that Norway’s reputation in the scientific community would be greatly improved. Sæland had no doubt that the professor’s hopes would be realized. Meanwhile, they continued working on the recordings from the Haldde and Talvik observatories and began to look further afield for magnetograms with which to compare their results. In the manuscript of the book they had used results from Potsdam, an observatory at a lower latitude, but Birkeland really needed figures from other areas within the auroral oval. At the back of his mind was growing an idea that he had first had during his captivity in the observatory. He wanted to launch a new expedition, four times more ambitious than the last, with observatories spread around the Arctic Circle within the auroral zone. For the time being the idea remained a daydream.
Birkeland’s only distraction from his magnetic recordings was the time he spent in hydroelectric plants around the southern half of the country. His vow to help develop the hydroelectric industry in Norway, made while visiting Anders Quale in Kaafjord, had borne fruit sooner than anticipated. On his return to the capital the government had asked him to sit on a committee discussing the state of the industry and searching for ways of developing the production of electricity from waterfalls. Birkeland realized that the position would give him carte blanche to experiment with new technology and tremendous voltages in the country’s emerging power stations. He jumped in with alacrity. Several days a month Birkeland examined different plants, rapidly developing such expertise in the practical challenges of hydroelectricity that he was asked to work as a consultant for private hydroelectric firms.
One of these companies was Christiania Lightworks, established in 1891 by Thomas Nordberg-Schultz, who soon became a good friend of Birkeland’s. Only six months older than Birkeland, Nordberg-Schultz was a pioneer of the practical possibilities of electricity in Norway: he had set up the country’s first electric power plant in 1889, with the financial backing of a powerful Norwegian shipping magnate, Gunnar Knudsen. The two men spent many hours bent over circuits and switches, Birkeland benefiting from his friend’s practical experience and Nordberg-Schultz from Birkeland’s theoretical knowledge. As Birkeland had noticed at the hydroelectric plant in Kaafjord, the major difficulty engineers experienced in the power stations was breaking the current once it was flowing— switching the power on and off. Back in his office, he began doodling ideas for a switching mechanism in the margins of his manuscript. Even in the street, he would be utterly preoccupied with this technological challenge, walking absentmindedly between his tram stop and his office.
When Birkeland’s book was published in the late spring of 1901, it made the front pages in Christiania under headlines such as “Riddle of the Aurora Solved!” Birkeland’s photograph was captioned “brilliant scientist,” “brave explorer.” Birkeland wrote elegant and entertaining popular articles for the daily papers that explained in lay terms the complicated events happening in space that were invisible to Earth dwellers but were hinted at by the mystical Lights. In Scandinavia and continental Europe his stock rose rapidly. He gave lectures to general and scientific audiences at the university and the Academy of Science, was feted at dinner parties and grilled constantly about the Lights, space, the sun, and how the elements fitted together. For the first time, listening to Birkeland’s explanations, people began to understand the intimate connection between the sun and the Earth and to realize that the stars in the sky are other suns. The university officially allocated the basement below his office for his use. Only one cloud obscured Birkeland’s contentment. At first it was a minor disappointment.
In England, reviews of Birkeland’s book were few and unfavorable. As it was published in French, a number of journals did not even review it, assuming their subscribers would not be reading it. Those that did, particularly the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, attacked the book as fundamentally flawed. British scientists had one very strong belief: that space was an empty vacuum. This uniformity of opinion of the British scientists was in part due to the hegemony of the Royal Society over scientific institutions in Britain. The Royal Society, once chaired by Sir Isaac Newton, vetted scientific papers, awarded prizes, and conferred influence upon those with whose theories the chairman and his committee agreed. Election to the Royal Society was a great honor and a badge of approval for the work of the new member. By the time Birkeland published his book, the Royal Society was fast becoming the most influential scientific institution in the western world and the man elected its president was treated with awe. Until recently, the position had been held by Lord Kelvin, a very great mathematician and physicist, whose work in thermodynamics helped to develop the law of the conservation of energy and the absolute energy scale, from then on measured in degrees Kelvin. He also presented the dynamical theory of heat, developed theorems for the mathematical analysis of electricity and magnetism, and investigated hydrodynamics, particularly wave motion and vortex motion. Birkeland had enormous respect for Kelvin, but the great man had made an almost throwaway remark in 1892 that had been slavishly followed ever since. The Proceedings of the Royal Society published in May that year reported Kelvin’s statement that the sun could have no effect on geomagnetic activity and that the correlation between these storms and sunspots was illusory.
There is absolutely conclusive evidence against the supposition that terrestrial magnetic storms are due to magnetic actions of the sun; or to any kind of dynamical action taking place within the sun, or in connection with hurricanes in its atmosphere, or anywhere near the sun.
The supposed connection between magnetic storms and sunspots is unreal, and the seeming agreement between the periods has been mere coincidence.
Given the esteem in which Kelvin was held, few scientists were prepared to stand up against such an unequivocal statement. It was doubly ironic that Kelvin was, inadvertently, the source of his present woe because it was Birkeland who had been instrumental in Norway’s being represented at the celebrations to mark Kelvin’s fiftieth year in science. Because of Kelvin’s pronouncement on the matter, the British had thrown out Birkeland’s entire thesis and he was bitterly disappointed at their offhand and negative reception. He suspected that in Britain, Norwegians were thought of as the poor relatives of Vikings, fisherfolk with a quaint attachment to skiing and polar exploration, and that he himself was regarded as just a small man, in a tiny physics department, from an unremarkable university in a diminutive colony of Sweden. As he saw it, the argument between him and his British colleagues was a perfect reflection of Norway’s and Britain’s relative positions in the world. He perceived the Earth as a small planet, part of a huge solar system, under the influence of a much larger force—the sun—but with its own protection and independence in the form of the magnetic field. For the British scientists, as far as Birkeland could tell, Earth stood in splendid isolation in empty space, impenetrable to outside cosmic forces other than that of gravity, which, after all, was British.
It was obvious that he would need to make a much greater impact to be noticed in Britain. He returned to the idea of mounting a more ambitious expedition, establishing four observatories around the Arctic Circle. By gathering data simultaneously from different points along the auroral oval, he could build up a picture of how and where magnetic storms started and abated and where the auroras appeared. By adding to this data recordings taken at observatories in lower latitudes, he would be able to create a global map of magnetic storms. Then, Birkeland was convinced, the weight of evidence would prove that such storms could not originate on Earth but only from a body as powerful as the sun. The British would be forced to reconsider his theory.
Characteristically, Birkeland became consumed by the idea of a new expedition, but there was one major obstacle in his path: lack of money. He was out of favor with the government, despite the success of his book in Norway. He had acquired a reputation for being cavalier with budgets and a hopeless financial organizer— accusations, Birkeland knew, that were probably true. When it came to science, money was simply a means to an end. He frequently became so absorbed in what he was doing that he would forget to eat, sleep, change his clothes, or pay his bills. He was careless not only with government money, but also with the university’s and his own. He frequently spent his salary on new instruments without giving it a thought. While lecturing he would blow expensive fuses with complete abandon, pushing the equipment to its maximum to see what would happen. His students loved his approach, but the administration did not.
Funding for the new expedition was going to be a major hurdle. At the same time as Birkeland’s book was published, another work of tremendous effort was sent to the government: the accounts Sæland had been preparing for over a year. At the bottom of the meticulous calculations Birkeland wrote, “Mainly correct. The smaller details I cannot remember.” The figures showed that Birkeland had spent three times more than the amount originally allocated to his expedition. The final sum was 38,297.02 crowns instead of the original budget of 12,000. The government had already paid 31,100 crowns but still owed Birkeland 7,000—more than a year’s salary. He knew from talking to politicians at Helland’s salon that individual members of the government appreciated his work but that many members of Parliament did not understand it and knew only that he had spent three times more than he should—an inexcusable lack of economy in a country that prided itself on financial prudence.
He would have to find the money himself. The only potentially lucrative work Birkeland engaged in was with the hydroelectric industry. If he could design and patent a switch that would allow the huge currents in power stations to be switched on and off quickly, then he might be able to earn the funds he needed. He asked Sæland to start exploring suitable locations for the new expedition and the equipment and resources that would be necessary, while he spent many hours at Christiania Lightworks. As when he had worked beside Dr. Quale in the Kaafjord hydroelectric power station, Birkeland felt at home surrounded by engineers and technicians in the massive turbine rooms of the plants. He began experimenting on a new design for a switching mechanism. Although he made rapid progress developing the idea, his experiments did not always go according to plan. He learned how unpredictable electricity can be when, on several occasions, he was thrown high into the air by a massive spark that jumped between the main conductor of the switch and the bar he pulled out to break the current. He would cheerfully point out as he picked himself up, “You learn more from your mistakes than your victories.”
By late autumn, Birkeland thought he had ironed out the problems with his new circuit-breaker switches and was ready to experiment with an emergency stop procedure at the ten-kilovolt station at Maridalshammeren. His colleagues in the hydroelectric power committee gathered to watch the demonstration. Events did not go quite as planned. When Birkeland pulled out the metal “knife switch” that should have broken the current, a huge arc of electricity jumped from the circuit to the metal switch in Birkeland’s hand and gave him a shock powerful enough to throw him across the engine room. All the fuses were destroyed, the circuit board broke in half, and the entire power station was plunged into darkness and began to burn. While the members of the committee and the employees ran for their lives, Birkeland sat on the floor laughing until his sides hurt and the fire was extinguished.
“It was the most cheerful moment of my life!” he said to Sæland the next morning when recounting the extraordinary events. Birkeland believed that he had found the answer to his prayers. The switching device he had been working on turned out to have another use entirely. The experimental switch used a solenoid, a large coil of metal connected to an electric circuit. Birkeland noticed that when he switched on the power, two metal screws were sucked into the solenoid with great force. When he reversed the current, they were ejected from the solenoid so violently that they had given him two little bruises on his hand. When he showed the effect to the engineers, they said they had seen it before but it was rare enough not to be a problem. For Birkeland it was not a problem but rather the solution to his funding worries. In a moment of intuitive brilliance he had glimpsed a use for the solenoid that everyone else had missed. Leaving Sæland puzzled as to his meaning, Birkeland hurried upstairs to his office, sure that he would now find the means to finance his great expedition.
6
The Cannon
Early September 1901
University of Christiania, Norway
“Mother, give me the Sun.”
HENRIK IBSEN (1828–1906), Ghosts, 1881
FOR TEN DAYS passersby on the Carl Johan Gate saw flashes of light and heard loud bangs emanating from Birkeland’s office. Groups of students bunched below his windows trying to guess what strange activities were taking place within, and on several occasions the law professor had to dispatch a student to request silence as the explosions and crackles were distracting attention from his lectures. Oblivious to the curiosity he was arousing, Birkeland worked furiously on hundreds of equations and detailed plans for currents, switches, circuits, and barrels. He set up a large solenoid coil on his desk and looped electric cable across the ceiling, down the far wall, and through a hole he had drilled in the floorboards to the cellar, where he had installed a generator. Three bangs on the floor and Sæland would start the generator to power up the solenoid. Birkeland tested different strengths of current to see which forced the metal out of the solenoid at the greatest velocity, and soon the plaster on the far wall of his office began to look like the last retreat in a shoot-out. Sæland asked Birkeland several times how these experiments would help develop the switching mechanism he had been asked to create for the hydroelectric industry but the professor would purse his lips, gently shake his head, and say nothing.
One afternoon in the middle of September, Birkeland threw down his pen, pulled on his coat and hat, rolled up several large sheets of plans, drawings, and equations, and left the university, walking east toward the Parliament. Just to its right, on Carl Johan Gate, was a large, brown-brick building with ornate cream pediments above the windows. Birkeland barely altered his pace as he burst through the heavy entrance door past the sign:
Alfred Bryn
Patent Office
From that day on Birkeland’s life took a different turn. Alfred Bryn, the most important patent issuer in Norway, could see that the plans Birkeland was showing him were extraordinary. He had first met the professor nearly six years before, in January 1896; Bryn remembered the date well as he had gone to the university to watch Birkeland give a demonstration of X-rays just days after Roentgen first announced their discovery. The professor had set up the X-ray equipment in his office and a long queue of people had formed in the narrow corridor outside, all wanting to be the first in history to see the bones in their own hands, or the coins in their closed purses. Birkeland claimed then to have been experimenting with X-rays before Roentgen’s announcement. Whether or not that was true, Bryn had admired Birkeland’s performance at the demonstration and felt sure that one day the professor would walk through his doors with an idea every bit as revolutionary as X-rays. Maybe that day had arrived. Bryn could see that what set Birkeland above his peers was his ability to extract big ideas from tiny seeds of chance. He seemed to have an intuitive understanding of events that allowed him to push them instantly to their limits while other people were trying to categorize, regulate, repeat, systematize, and render “scientific” their experience. Birkeland was so instinctive a scientist that he had the confidence to use his imagination like an artist; he could picture what space must be like because he understood so well the essential forces that kept the world turning. In the same way, he had seen a radical new use for a solenoid.
