Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  Wegener had his first flying lesson with a master of the craft: Arthur Berson, Aßmann’s and Bezold’s scientific coworker since 1890 at the Meteorological Institute in Berlin. Berson was now Aßmann’s top aide at Lindenberg and world-famous for his exploits as a balloonist, though he was also professionally distinguished as a meteorologist. In 1903 he and Aßmann had shared the Buys-Ballot Medal of the Amsterdam Academy of Sciences—an award given once every ten years to the “individual(s) giving greatest service to meteorology in the preceding decade.”38 He had flown more than 100 times and was a public hero in Germany for having taken a balloon up more than 10,000 meters (32,808 feet). He was certainly the most celebrated scientific aeronaut since James Glaisher, the British meteorologist whose dramatic, life-threatening balloon ascents in the 1860s had established the rate at which a rising parcel of air cools with increasing altitude—the so-called adiabatic lapse rate. Berson was forty-six years old and near the peak of his career as a scientist when he took Wegener aloft for the first time.

  Berson and Wegener got an early start on 11 May 1905, lifting off just after 8:30 a.m. from the aerodrome at Reinickendorf (in Berlin) in a hydrogen-filled balloon. Berson was interested (on this particular flight) in measuring the electrical conductivity of the atmosphere and its change with altitude; this was part of an ongoing research program he shared with Aßmann, and Wegener helped with these measurements. Alfred’s real job, however, was to be the navigator and determine their geographic position at regular intervals, as well as keeping the journal and handling the ballast.

  On this flight Wegener was able to find their position with an error of 10–15 kilometers (6–9 miles).39 To anyone who knows celestial navigation with a sextant, that sounds dreadfully inept—and it sounds even worse in an age of global positioning systems and satellite navigation, in which a modestly priced handheld instrument can give a reliable and instantaneously corrected position within a few meters, anywhere on Earth. At the time of these first attempts by Wegener, an aeronaut could give only an intuitive guess at his position by observing the direction of flight and airspeed, or by recognizing landmarks below. Moving laterally at several meters a second and changing altitude almost constantly, and knowing one’s altitude by reference to atmospheric pressure alone, put much uncertainty into a measurement in which (at sea) one corrected not only for the height of the deck of the ship above the sea but for one’s own height above the deck to avoid errors of hundreds of meters. From this vantage it was not such a bad first approximation, and it showed Wegener immediately how a sextant or theodolite had to be modified to make more accurate determinations possible. Wegener and Berson flew for ten hours, got up over 5,500 meters (18,045 feet), and made a perfectly controlled landing in Gleiwitz in East Prussia.

  Wegener’s second balloon flight, which took place about three months later on 30 August 1905, was a somewhat different story. The plan was to observe a partial eclipse of the Sun and, from the faintly visible stars, provide an opportunity for Wegener to practice astronomical position finding while aloft. The balloon’s pilot was Hans Gerdien (1877–1951), an expert on electrical phenomena in the atmosphere, working on the same sort of measurements that had occupied Berson and Wegener in May.40

  The two aeronauts cast off at 10:30 a.m. and rose rapidly to an altitude of 1,000 meters (3,281 feet), where they encountered a cloud layer that drenched their balloon, causing it to descend precipitously to about 500 meters (1,640 feet) and forcing them to drop some ballast. They then rose again rapidly to between 1,300 and 1,400 meters (4,265 and 4,593 feet). “There we floated,” wrote Wegener, “between two cloud layers, and we could again see the sun, so that at noon we were able to measure its altitude and investigate the eclipse as it progressed. The truly remarkable reduction of the sun’s brightness was just right for our mission, but it also made a strong emotional impression.”41

  The clouds were so beautiful that it was hard to concentrate on the scientific work. When they finally dumped enough ballast to rise above the overcast layer, the vista was stunning: a sea of brilliant white clouds with dark, almost black plumes convecting rapidly upward, making a fantastic landscape. They could hear thunder from every direction, and eventually a huge thunderhead—black as iron—built up near them: Wegener said that it was like riding at anchor next to a towering island. Now there was a brief respite, giving time to work with the instruments as the balloon continued its ascent. Gerdien opened the valve on the gas cylinder to inflate the balloon further, and a little after 3:00 p.m. they reached an altitude of just over 6 kilometers (4 miles). It was cold—almost −24°C (−11°F), and as soon as the gas in the cylinder was exhausted, the balloon began to sink.

  While they were still packing up their instruments, the balloon descended into the cloud layer and, soaked with water once again, began to fall rapidly. Gerdien jettisoned two sacks of ballast, but this did not entirely control the descent. “We were completely out of the clouds and could already see the earth when I lowered the anchor,” Wegener reported. “We were barely finished packing up the instruments when we were already dangerously close to the ground.” The winds near the surface were brisk—about 15 meters per second (25 miles per hour)—and the balloon was moving very fast across the plain below. They knew they were in for a rough landing, as the means of stopping the balloon consisted entirely in tossing the anchor overboard and waiting for it to catch something and jerk the balloon basket to a halt. At that second the crew was to release the remaining ballast to keep the balloon upright and keep the basket from smashing into the ground—too rapidly. Just before the basket hit the ground, one “pulled up” into the rigging—holding fast to the ropes overhead and lifting one’s feet off the floor of the basket (schoolyard gymnastics to the rescue) to keep from absorbing the full impact.

  Seconds after tossing the anchor, Wegener felt the basket tip and realized that the anchor must have caught; he let go the remaining ballast. Suddenly, there was a tearing sound and the balloon picked up speed again—the anchor rope had torn completely away! “Gerdien, in this critical moment, did exactly the right thing,” remembered Wegener. “He pulled the ripcord and deflated the balloon, and then shouted: ‘Pull up!’ and then came the impact. All I could think about was holding on, and I saw, in a flash, everything go topsy-turvy, and realized that I was being dragged along the ground—then I felt a sharp pull on my body, and saw that my left foot was tangled, and then my left boot pulled off and—I was free.… My stiff collar dug itself into the earth like a plow and my head was covered with dirt.”

  He got unsteadily to his feet and went looking for his boot, and he was delighted to find both it and Gerdien, who had a worse landing—he had hit his knee very hard and wrenched his left shoulder. Searching the area around, Wegener managed to find his house keys and eventually his hat as well. Limping to a nearby farmstead, he and Gerdien learned that they had crashed near the village of Novy Miastov, almost 500 kilometers (310 miles) to the east of their home base, and well inside the borders of Russian Poland. They spent the night quartered in the “disgusting and filthy” village school.

  It took three days to get out of Poland. They packed up the balloon after their sleepless night in the school building, and it was dark before they set out under escort for the nearest Russian military outpost. The road was terrible, and their cart driver, unable to see anything in the gloom, hit a deep rut and pitched them into a roadside pond. Drenched, muddy, and sore (Gerdien had landed on his bad shoulder), they eventually found their instruments and their day packs, containing their only clean clothes, in the deepest part of the pond. At the Russian fort there were endless formalities (“of which we understood not a word”), and they were finally conducted to a room and allowed to sleep. On the next day they were examined by the post surgeon (at their request), and it appeared that the Russians were finally beginning to understand who they were. The surgeon took them to lunch, and that night the colonel threw a full Russian banquet in their honor with (as Wegener ruefu
lly noted afterward) “the obligatory overabundance of hard liquor.” On the following day, transit visas arrived from Warsaw, and they were allowed to return to Germany.42

  Wegener was allowed to write up both the scientific results and the adventures for the Illustrated Aeronautical News, a national magazine devoted to all aspects of aviation and avidly read throughout Germany. It must have been a thrill to have not just his scientific work but his “exploits” featured in a magazine of which he had been, until then, merely an enthusiastic reader. Such exploits and the chance for them were few and far between—as he and Kurt had almost complete responsibility for the daily kite and balloon ascents from the Windenhaus, working on alternate days. With Coym’s arrival, manned ballooning opportunities became even scarcer.

  Changing Course

  By the end of the summer, Alfred had come to see what sort of place Lindenberg was, and what sort of scientist Aßmann. Whether or not the latter was afflicted with Bauwut (building mania), as Knowles Middleton suggested, his career shows that the best is indeed the enemy of the good.43 While Teisserenc de Bort had moved ahead to discover the stratosphere with a controlled series of ascents using equipment of fixed design that he knew well, Aßmann was trapped in an endless sequence of instrumental prototypes. This impetus to push instrumentation to the “edge of resolution” is indeed part of science, and in this case it shows that Aßmann understood his legacy (instruments) as well as Teisserenc de Bort understood his (discoveries about the atmosphere). It was, however, clear to Alfred and Kurt and to everyone else at the station, except perhaps Aßmann himself, that Lindenberg was not going to be a place where major new discoveries would be made. It would be a place where they were elaborated and confirmed, and their underlying evidence more precisely measured, but it was not a place where anyone was likely to see something not seen before.

  Toward the end of October 1905, and shortly before his twenty-fifth birthday, Alfred read a newspaper feature story about a Danish polar explorer, Ludwig Mylius-Erichsen, who was preparing to mount a two-year expedition (1906–1908) to the far northeast of Greenland, to map the last uncharted section of Greenland’s coast and carry out an extensive scientific program. The account given was of a great public meeting in the Copenhagen Concert Hall on 17 October 1905. Mylius-Erichsen, just back from a two-year expedition to the west coast of Greenland, spoke feelingly about the nobility of the quest and the importance of the opportunity—almost the last chance offered to any man or nation to fill in the final blanks on the map of Earth. The meeting in Copenhagen had made a big splash—on the podium, in addition to famous naval officers who had explored Greenland, were representatives from parliament, the university, scientific societies, and the press, as well as even Crown Prince Frederick (soon to be King Frederick VIII).44

  The alacrity with which Alfred responded to this news is an index of his desire to depart from Lindenberg and also of the depth of his ambitions to take part in the exploration of Greenland—the vision he had shared with fellow students at Berlin. A part of the Mylius-Erichsen expedition plan, as described in the press, included the possibility of a four-man team crossing the ice cap well north of Nansen’s route, from the east coast to the west—exactly what Alfred had told friends he wanted to do.45

  On his birthday (an auspicious beginning), 1 November 1905, Alfred sat down to compose a letter of application. Not knowing how to contact Mylius-Erichsen, he wrote instead to Professor Adam Paulsen (1833–1907), a distinguished Danish meteorologist and director of the Danish Meteorological Institute, who had considerable experience in Greenland, dating back to the International Polar Year of 1882–1883. Alfred, taking great pains with his penmanship, sent off this letter to Paulsen:

  Distinguished Herr Professor

  I have read that Herr Erichsen will undertake a Greenland Expedition in the coming summer, and not knowing his address, I take the liberty of asking you to please tell me whether, and under what conditions I might still be able to become a member of the expedition.

  Since you do not know me, please allow me to acquaint you with the following particulars about me. I am 25 years old and since 1 January of this year a technical assistant at the Royal Aeronautical Observatory at Lindenberg, near Beeskow. I majored in astronomy in which I already have my doctoral exams out of the way, so that I have mastered enough astronomy to carry out the essential position-finding tasks of an expedition. (I have most recently occupied myself with astronomical position finding in balloon flight). My actual present occupation is that of meteorologist. I have already taken part in a number of scientific balloon ascents, and I have been entrusted at the Aeronautical Observatory with carrying out the daily kite ascents. In geology I’m only an amateur, to be sure, but I have pursued it sufficiently on my own that I believe I may be able to be of some use in this area.…

  I would also like to emphasize that I have been a keen alpinist, and together with my brother have carried out a large number of glacier ascents- unguided—in the Tirol. This past winter I have made my first attempts at skiing, on the Brocken.

  Should the expedition offer the possibility of making kite ascents, I hope to be able to assemble a scientific kit for this purpose, though this opportunity is not a condition of my taking part in the expedition.

  I ask you again to forgive me for bothering you about this matter. If it should be possible, through your mediation, that I should be able to take part in Herr Erichsen’s expedition, and thereby make a wish long fostered in me, come true, I would be deeply in your debt.

  I am with deepest respect, sincerely yours,

  Dr. A. Wegener 46

  Paulsen did not respond to Wegener, but on 3 November he forwarded the letter to Mylius-Erichsen with a brief note—no advice or recommendation—merely saying that he had received a letter from a Dr. A. Wegener who hoped to take part in the expedition to Greenland.47 Wegener could not know how indistinct the expedition plans actually were and how far from picking a scientific team Mylius-Erichsen was at this point. Wegener’s phrasing in his letter to Paulsen, “whether I might still be able to take part,” indicates that he thought that time was short and the expedition well under way; in reality, other than a paper plan, there was no expedition yet for him to join.

  Mylius-Erichsen was, at the time of Wegener’s letter, in a white heat of fund-raising following his public appeal. Jens Christensen (1856–1930), a leading officer in the Danish government, had promised that if Mylius-Erichsen could raise half the money necessary to fund the expedition, Christensen would see that parliament provided the other half. Mylius-Erichsen had to come up with 130,000 kroner (his share) in a very short space of time.48 It is hardly surprising that Wegener’s first letter got no response.49

  Alfred waited two weeks, and when no response was forthcoming, he wrote again, this time to Mylius-Erichsen directly, assuming that his letter to Paulsen had gone astray. He sent the same letter he had sent to Paulsen, this time assuring Mylius-Erichsen that he would certainly provide a full scientific kit for atmospheric research, but again emphasizing that he would come on the expedition whether or not there was any need or desire for such research: he wanted to go, and he was willing to suspend his career to do so. This letter apparently brought no response either.50

  He was not to be deterred. He wrote to Mylius-Erichsen again around 26 November, reminding Mylius-Erichsen that he had written “about two weeks ago” and had received no answer. “I can well imagine,” Wegener wrote, “that you are overwhelmed with work, but could you get back to me as soon as possible?” Wegener explained to Mylius-Erichsen that he was in a bind: if he were to go on the expedition, he would have to give up his place at Lindenberg on 15 April 1906, which entailed giving notice by 1 January 1906; without such notice, he ran the risk of not being released to join the expedition, even if chosen. Moreover, he had to straighten out his military obligations, so that they would not hinder his participation in the expedition, and he needed some sort of answer from Mylius-Erichsen to accomplish that.
“Under these circumstances,” he wrote, “even a provisional and non-binding response would be of great value to me.”51

  Still hearing nothing from Mylius-Erichsen, Alfred could stand it no longer, and he obtained a brief leave to travel to Copenhagen, where he arrived on Sunday, 17 December, and checked into the Hotel Victoria. Disappointment awaited him here as well—in quantity. He called at Mylius-Erichsen’s home the next day, only to be told that Mylius-Erichsen was in Norway until the following Friday. Not sure how to proceed, he then called on Paulsen, at the Meteorological Institute. Paulsen’s news was bitter: Mylius-Erichsen was billing the expedition as an all-Danish affair, in order to assure a good response to the public appeal for funds, and in the hope of arousing patriotic sentiment and royal patronage. No non-Danes, whatever their suitability and experience, could currently be considered. Even though “Wegener” was a common Danish name, it would soon come out that Wegener was German, and there wasn’t really much hope. Wegener returned to the Hotel Victoria and penned a disconsolate note to Mylius-Erichsen: “Prof. Paulsen has informed me that, as a matter of principle, only Danes will take part in your expedition. I must hereafter assume that no prospect remains for me to take part in the expedition. If you should, however, change your mind, I hope to hear from you as soon as possible.”52

  That was that. Alfred returned to Lindenberg and went back to work. When the New Year arrived, he did not give a notice of departure to Aßmann; there was no need. He would be at Lindenberg through the summer, at least. He could console himself that he was not the first man ever to be turned down for an expedition. In this case, he was a victim of politics and circumstance, and not left out by any fault or lack of his own, save that he had been born German and not Danish. He would have to bide his time by the ticking of Lindenberg’s chronometers, while he waited for “another ship.”