Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  As the summer semester came to an end, he worked on the meteorological records for Danmarkshavn and on his thermodynamics, stealing whatever time he could from the former to devote to the latter. In doing so, he put himself in conflict with his own deadline for completing the expedition work. He wrote to the Danmark Committee on 3 September saying that his hopes to have the manuscript of the station measurements completed by the end of September were now dashed by the pressure of work, but that he would come to Copenhagen toward the end of the month with as much of the manuscript as he had been able to complete, and would send the rest as rapidly as he could.35

  He would, of course, easily have finished the reduction of the observations had he not been trying to write a book on thermodynamics at the same time. By the arrival of the equinox he had all but the last part of the measurements in print-ready form and had also completed a very rough first draft of his thermodynamics text. He wrote to Eric Henius (1863–1926), now head of the Danmark Expedition Committee, on 24 September announcing that he would arrive on 2 October to help supervise the typesetting for the tabular material.36

  On 26 September he wrote a postal card to Köppen and asked if he might forward his manuscript on the thermodynamics of the atmosphere so that Köppen could look through it, and then he asked if he might stop by and visit him in Hamburg on his way to Copenhagen, in order to hear his opinion. He planned to stay in a hotel and take the tram to the Köppen house in Großborstel.37 Köppen wrote back immediately and asked that Wegener send the manuscript along, and he invited him to stay at the Köppen house for an extended conversation on his way to Copenhagen, arriving on Friday and staying over until early Sunday.38

  Wegener arrived in Hamburg in the later afternoon of 30 September, and Köppen greeted him warmly; the men immediately sat down and began to work. They worked through the manuscript (about 100 sheets at that time) page by page, Wegener defending and explaining his positions and Köppen constantly rising from the chair to bring in offprints of publications that bore on the questions in Wegener’s book; Köppen provided as well a stream of alternative viewpoints and interpretations. Else Köppen, who two years before had gone to her first formal dinner as Wegener’s partner, was at the time of this meeting between Wegener and Köppen eighteen years old and in her last year of school. She recalled this visit some years later.39 She remembered sitting across the room from them, trying with half her attention to write a school essay and with the other half to hear and see everything Wegener was doing; she couldn’t stop looking at his eyes. Wegener’s skin was still very dark; he spent as much time outdoors as his work would allow, and the balloon excursions were an excellent way to become sunburned. His eyes were a pale blue, the same piercingly gray-blue eyes she had noticed two years before. She said that it was interesting to watch him express his thought processes through his eyes. When he began to develop a line of thought, she said, he would look calmly into the distance as he talked, but then at some point his eyes would begin suddenly to flash from side to side as if he were looking around the room for whatever idea had just occurred to him. As he looked around the room, his eyes would occasionally land on her, causing him to pause in his thinking and his face to dissolve into a bemused smile.40

  At the family meal times, in which Wegener was invited to join, he sat near Else and bantered with her and teased her. She said he was in an infectious good humor, but it took all her concentration just to keep up with him as he launched sally after sally in her direction, flirting with good humor.41 After dinner on both Friday and Saturday night, the men repaired to the worktable in the front room and continued their conversation far into the night. They were congenial companions in this way. Köppen was a night owl, and Wegener typically slept little, often working in his rooms at Marburg far into the night until eyestrain and exhaustion overtook him.

  The meeting was decisive and life altering for both men, and from this point forward in the story of Wegener’s life there is a sense in which almost every major work by Wegener should be considered to have been produced with the aid of Köppen’s advice or collaboration. Here the theoretical daring, physical intuition, and fierce energy of the young man met the sagacity, vast knowledge, and experience of a man already active in every part of meteorology for more than forty years. There was no development Köppen did not know about, no one he had not met, and no information resource of which he was unaware.

  They entered into an absorbing correspondence following this meeting which over the next year or so dominated the intellectual life of the younger man and much occupied the older. Köppen’s knowledge of the literature would keep Wegener from making many mistakes and deepen and broaden his grasp of the problems he had so brashly undertaken to write definitively about. At Marburg, Wegener had had good access to physics books and the more recent monograph literature in meteorology. Köppen gave him access to a much larger universe of thinking. Between Köppen’s private library, which contained several thousand volumes, and the library at the German Marine Observatory in Hamburg, Wegener suddenly had access to vast resources of hard-to-get publications that he could not otherwise have obtained; without Köppen’s guidance, he would never have even encountered them.

  Wegener returned to Marburg and worked furiously to finish the temperature data from Danmarkshavn. By 12 October he was done, allowing him to transmit the manuscript to Copenhagen.42 This task completed, he could turn again to the thermodynamics. As he began to work through the notes he had taken in Hamburg with Köppen, all kinds of new questions occurred to him, and he wrote to Köppen on 28 October asking for more assistance. Köppen once again invited him to Hamburg, an invitation he accepted with alacrity, with Wegener arriving on 4 November, spending a late night with Köppen going over the manuscript once more, and returning to Marburg the next day.43 Köppen loaded him down with books and reprints and promised more, as they should be needed.

  Wegener was anxious to proceed with the revisions to his ideas, but he still had the endless correspondence to deal with regarding the expedition results. The expedition committee was becoming restive over the lack of progress on the magnetic and electrical observations that Wegener had passed on to others—coworkers whom he had not been able to contact in the long vacation of late summer when all the scientists were in the field. Perhaps to assuage the impatience of the Danmark Committee, he announced to them that he had enlisted a high school teacher in Marburg, Walther Brand (1880–1968), as a doctoral student, with the understanding that his doctoral work would consist of an analysis of the measurement of atmospheric pressure at Danmarkshavn.44

  He worked on his correspondence with his various coauthors all that day and the next, and by Sunday evening, 6 November, he was able to write to Köppen: “Esteemed professor Now I’m finally back on the tracks having finished with my correspondence and having already smoked 10 cigars, and tomorrow morning early I will begin to work through the rich harvest which my ‘expedition to Northeast Hamburg’ has brought back to my home.”45 He had additional news for Köppen: he had a provisional promise of publication from a good house, Johann Ambrosius Barth in Leipzig, a contract that would allow him at least sixty figures in the text and thirty tables. Wegener continued, “Certainly I will in short order be pestering you with new questions. But I must pause to thank you, esteemed professor, and your family from the bottom of my heart for all your wonderful hospitality for me and for all the trouble and work that you have had on my behalf. I have a terribly guilty conscience that I shall never be able to repay you for all the wonderful friendship flowing in my direction.”46

  Wegener’s life at this time, viewed at the distance of a century, is not so different from the lot of any university instructor or assistant professor at the beginning of his career, especially one like Wegener in a small school, with few students and insufficient library resources. Köppen’s friendship and offer of aid were godsends. Köppen was a generous and large soul, and his nickname, the “Nestor” of meteorology, was here proven apposite,
with his unlimited appetite for conversation, collaboration, and intellectual adventure. Someday perhaps a biography will be written of this remarkable man.47

  Having returned to Marburg with every intention of beginning work on the revisions to his thermodynamics, Wegener found himself overwhelmed with the projects already started. At this point in his life he sometimes appears to be that apocryphal young man who mounted his horse and rode off in all directions at once. On 14 November Wegener wrote to Köppen, “Well it’s all chaos here and I’ve come to a dead stop with the thermodynamics. Once again I had to put it aside and devote myself solely to other work.”48

  The other work in question was a lecture he agreed to give at Göttingen titled “Critical Investigations into the Nature of the Atmosphere above 70 km Altitude,” which he had yet to write. In order to complete it, with the required books not in his own library, he would have to write letters to Potsdam, Copenhagen, Göttingen, and Leipzig, as well as to Hamburg. He was very keen to give this lecture and had already been to Göttingen to visit and lunch with the geophysicist Emil Wiechert (1861–1928), who had a role in selecting the team that was to be in the University of Göttingen’s expedition to Lapland and Spitzbergen, to coincide with Filchner’s expedition to the South Pole. Wegener had gone to Wiechert to sketch out the scientific plan that he and Stuchtey would pursue if chosen, investigating the spectra of the aurora at different altitudes. “If only I had 20,000 marks!”49

  Unable to actually work on the book, Wegener wrote long letters to Köppen over the next few weeks, so that he might at least discuss a variety of questions with someone, and these letters make interesting reading. From no other period of Wegener’s life does there survive such detailed scientific correspondence, with so many hints of the sources of his inspiration. When we considered his work on cloud elements and the ice phase of water vapor in the atmosphere, which led to the theory of precipitation in cold clouds which today bears his name, it was not evident what exactly was the kernel of the idea for this work, although he did say that “fundamentally it was a problem in molecular physics.” Only in his letter to Köppen on 14 November do we discover that the detailed explanation of the phenomenon in question he had learned, in preparation for his own lectures at Marburg, from the work of Otto Lehmann (1855–1922), who had been Hertz’s successor at Karlsruhe. Lehmann had worked on the state of matter called “liquid crystals” and would be for this work continuously under consideration for the Nobel Prize from 1913 until his death nine years later. He was also a pioneer in microphotography of growing crystals, and he had done some concentrated work on the growth of snowflakes and the physics thereof. Wegener sketched out Lehmann’s ideas for Köppen and noted that while physicists were quite familiar with this work, he had yet to see it referenced in any meteorological literature. He asked Köppen, “Can this be entirely unknown to meteorologists?”50

  Only three days later, on 17 November, Wegener wrote another long letter, remarking that the thermodynamics still languished in a corner but that he had now written twenty-five pages of the paper he had not yet begun on the fourteenth. This letter also contained his speculation that the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere was almost entirely a new element, geocoronium, an idea that had already occurred to him but to which he now gave a name. He solicited Köppen’s opinion about this notion, with the idea that the separation of the gases in the atmosphere, with the heaviest closest to Earth and the lightest at the outer reaches, was exactly the sort of phenomenon one observed when one centrifuged atmospheric air at high speeds, with the heaviest gases being thrown the farthest.51

  While most of his correspondence, at least the part in 1910, was Wegener asking for and receiving assistance from Köppen, he was occasionally able to do something for the older man. Responding to a letter from Köppen, Wegener wrote on 28 November to advise him on the perils and prospects of polar meteorology. Filchner had asked Köppen what sort of atmospheric investigations might best be pursued in Antarctica, and Köppen wrote to Wegener to solicit his advice. Wegener responded in great detail. He counseled Köppen to tell Filchner that winching up and down kites by hand just wasn’t worth the time and effort it took to get the results: “This was the hardest work I have ever done and ever expect to do, and after all the work you have done you find out generally that the drive mechanism has frozen or that the pen has become stuck or did not write or that the record has been erased by driving snow.” Filchner would be much better off making a judicious and restricted use of rubber balloons, as the parchment balloons were too fragile. Wegener’s disgust with the amount of work he had performed for such meager results in Greenland was matched only by his despair at the time consumed in editing and publishing it.52

  In this period of their correspondence the dialogue between Wegener and Köppen had a consistent structure. Wegener claimed to have found a new element in Earth’s atmosphere and thought about calling it “Geo-coronium,” and he asked Köppen for his advice. Köppen asked him, “Where’s the spectral data for the isolation of atmospheric gases at different altitudes?” Wegener went out and found it and dutifully responded. Wegener said that he thought that there was a layer boundary at 225 kilometers (140 miles) just as there was at 70 kilometers (43 miles). Once again Köppen wanted to see the evidence. Wegener said that he had uncovered the mechanism for precipitation in cold clouds, connected with the way ice crystals form in oversaturated environments, and Köppen pointed out to him that this had been under discussion for a long time and sent him another set of papers to read on the subject.53

  Of the many directions in which Wegener was riding off all at once, the direction he seems to have favored in October and November of 1910 was his attempt to build a cross section of the atmosphere from the surface up to 500 kilometers (311 miles). He was by now convinced that the outermost portion of Earth’s atmosphere consisted almost entirely of a new element, his conjectural geocoronium. Dmitri Mendeleev, using the same logic that led to the discovery of germanium, had in 1904 proposed an extremely light element of atomic weight 0.4 and suggested that this element was identical to the coronium detected in the Sun’s atmosphere.54 The question remained open whether what Wegener called geocoronium was a terrestrial appearance of the same gas already seen in the Sun’s atmosphere. While there were many persuasive reasons to accept this identity (for example, comets passed through the coronium and meteors through the geocoronium without burning), still the spectral lines were distinct near 530 Å (530.2 Å, 530.4 Å, 531.5 Å, and so on) for coronium and 557 Å for geocoronium.

  On 1 December Wegener wrote to Köppen again.55 He told him that he had just given a colloquium in Marburg on this subject of a novel atmospheric gas shell, and that Emanuel Kayser, distinguished geologist and dean of the university, had mentioned after the lecture that geologists knew that a lot of meteors contain hydrogen and therefore he, Wegener, would have to make a stronger demonstration that the combustion of a meteor could describe the composition of the atmosphere at any given altitude, especially at the higher altitudes. Wegener said he would have to go back into the literature and find some confirmation; he was nevertheless certain that the meteors could not contain enough molecular hydrogen to create all the trails that were observed.

  He was thoroughly convinced that there was a new element revealed in the upper atmosphere by these spectral lines. He noted that the spectrum of the upper reaches of the polar lights, at the “twilight limit” (the blue light limit at 225 kilometers), was monochromatic and gave a hydrogen signature—as did about half of the shooting stars. Yet at much greater altitude there was this 557 Å line, which was not exactly the same spectral line as the Sun (although it was impossible to rule out some modification of the spectral signature of coronium). Wegener knew that many gases had very different spectra depending on temperature and pressure relations and positive or negative electricity. It was even possible that the hydrogen trail of meteors was actually a spectroscopically recorded interaction with the green polar light. He
wanted, nevertheless, to have geocoronium accepted as a “working hypothesis” until further spectroscopic studies could be conducted.

  Here, as in many of his papers in these years, he took everything one step further than his peers and formulated a law, a relation, or a structure, in each case as a “working hypothesis” pending further research.56 These speculations functioned as a series of moves that might establish his priority in some discovery, or at least a share in it. Wegener’s impulse was to determine what was qualitatively plausible and to propose a measurement protocol or test that would lead to either certainty or rejection.

  Wegener wanted to publish this material in a professional journal, as much as anything else to determine its suitability to be included in his book on thermodynamics of the atmosphere, which he had guiltily ignored finishing in order to pursue these other lines of investigation. The notion that these speculations about the outermost shell of Earth’s atmosphere might have a prominent place in such a text was important to him. As he wrote to Köppen, “I put myself in the position of drowning in work, but it’s also time for me to get ready finally to work on the long-promised thermodynamics. I have promised the press to deliver the manuscript before the Christmas vacation. My contract specifies that. Over Christmas I will also work on my own things.”57 One of the reasons that he wanted to incorporate this work on the outer reaches of the atmosphere into his textbook was that he saw this text not as “his own things” but a collection, principally, of other people’s work, and he thirsted for some novelty.