Because the Cöllnische Gymnasium offered little support for their scientific interests, Kurt and Alfred pursued them at home, a place they had increasingly to themselves. Tony had already grown into a woman. She was nineteen when Willi died, nearly finished with her education, and though completely dedicated to her parents, she was already an adventurous traveler and away from home for increasing periods of time. The boys enjoyed her letters and descriptions of distant places, and the three of them would remain close for the rest of their lives. But as Kurt’s and Alfred’s determination to become scientists grew, they created a world of their own within the orphanage. They were able to convince their mother to give them the use of an empty storeroom near the laundry and washhouse, where they established a chemical laboratory. The request came from Alfred. He was clearly his mother’s favorite child—he looked more like Willi (whom she missed terribly) than did Kurt, and he was quiet and rather serene, whereas Kurt was nervous and loud. Whenever the boys decided that they wanted or needed something from their mother, Alfred was made the petitioner, as his chances for success were invariably better than Kurt’s.37
Alfred would later downplay the seriousness of their chemical laboratory efforts—he said that they generally succeeded only in turning their weekly allowance into “fumes and booms.”38 This humorous self-deprecation by a mature scientist should not obscure the reality. In Wegener’s life as in many before and since, household pyrotechnics with simple chemicals were the first steps toward a deep feeling for empirical scientific practice.
Modern industrial democracies have tried to protect their citizens and their environments by restricting access to hazardous chemicals, but in so doing they have also closed the door to an inexpensive and serious (if anarchic) encounter with a broad range of basic physical and chemical phenomena. High school and university chemistry laboratories have now moved toward milliliter- and microliter-scale chemistry experiments, where the results register through microprobes and are read out electronically on computer terminals.
Students can certainly learn chemistry this way, but they cannot so easily see it happen. It is not the same as manipulating a puddle of mercury, or leaving a piece of phosphorus out to smolder into flame at room temperature. It is not the same as experiencing—and helping others to experience—the effects of the synthesis of hydrogen sulfide, and it cannot compare with the pleasures of detonating the proportional combination of sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal. At a somewhat higher level of endeavor, modern children miss the beautiful colors produced by mixing reagents almost at random, as well as the mystery of combining two colorless liquids at room temperature to produce a violent geyser that renders the beaker holding them too hot to handle. The same holds for the miraculous appearance of a solid in a beaker when a solution is titrated past a set point.
Unobstructed by well-intentioned safeguards and without the aid of theory, without much mathematics, without problem sets, and, most of all, without adult supervision, Kurt and Alfred were able to explore thermochemistry and thermodynamics. The great pioneering chemists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—Priestley and Lavoisier, Dalton and Berzelius—had made their own momentous first steps in elemental chemistry with no more direction, with no better apparatus, and with incomparably poorer reagents.
As it was with their homemade chemistry lab, their cherished electric engine gave them similar advantages in mechanical technology. Electricity and electrical apparatus moved with astonishing speed in the 1870s and 1880s out of the laboratory and into factories and households—just as industrial and consumer electronics would do a century later.
Most of the fundamental transformations of energy are codified in the great physical theories of the mid-nineteenth century: mechanical work to electricity, electricity to mechanical work, electricity to magnetism, magnetism to electricity, electricity to heat, and heat to light may all easily be accomplished on a tabletop with a small electric motor and some lengths of wire. Add a small chemical storage battery, and the transformation of chemical activity to electricity and vice versa may be included in the list. Before they had studied theory or measurement, Kurt and Alfred enjoyed the pure, qualitative experience of phenomena—seen, heard, and felt. With electricity, of course, the last of these modes of perception makes the strongest impression, though all the senses are continually exercised in such free-form scientific performance.
As their fascination with these novel materials and ideas enlarged, so did their pleasure in the physical experience of experimental play. The contrast with their schoolwork was increasingly stark and invidious, and their reluctance to go to school grew apace. Their father was unrelenting on this point. It was made clear to Alfred and Kurt over and again that their performance at school had to be superlative, not merely adequate. The hours of classical study that had been subtracted at school by the kaiser’s decree of 1892 were added back by the father at home. Duty came first, and the first duty was to excel academically. There was scarcely a day in their teenage years when they were not required to study something under duress, winter and summer, term time and vacation: Nulla dies sine linea.39
Both Alfred and Kurt were also increasingly committed to a program of physical activity. They were fortunate to have the gym in their home, and most days on their return from school they went directly there for an extensive workout. They learned the standard gymnastic apparatus; they could go into a handstand on the parallel bars, they could vault the horse, and they learned the reverse grip that allowed them to do the “giant’s turn” on the horizontal bar outdoors in the yard—lacking coaching and proper spotting, however, they stopped short of the flying dismount in this exercise, much to their disappointment.40
Only very late in Alfred’s secondary school career did his scientific interests find any substantive resonance with his schooling. It 1897, when he was in Secunda, the second grade from the top at the Gymnasium, the minister in charge of Prussia’s universities, Friedrich Althoff, let it be known that he intended to alter secondary school curricula to link mathematics instruction (always present whatever the educational party in power) to real instruction in physics, allowing physics to become a secondary school subject in its own right.
It appears that Alfred’s physics teacher, who was interested in astronomy and had a good-quality refracting telescope, recognized Alfred’s talent and interest and invited him to take up the study by joining him in making observations. For the next year and a half, until his graduation, Alfred pursued astronomy whenever time and weather permitted, walking back to the Gymnasium in the evenings and observing the heavens with his teacher, from the roof of the school.41 He began to read the abundant popular literature on this topic. One of his favorite authors, whom he read for many years thereafter with continued pleasure, was Max Wilhelm Meyer (1853–1910), who wrote The Cosmos—a Popular Astronomy (1898); Meyer had also edited an edition of another of Wegener’s favorites, Friedrich Diesterweg (1790–1866), whose Popular Astronomy and Mathematical Geography was a great favorite among young readers.42 These were books that contained both astronomy and cosmology, with speculations concerning the birth and death of the Sun, the origins of life, the possibility of life on other planets, and fantasies of travel through space. They were instructive but were meant to be inspiring and thought provoking as well, and they portrayed science as a noble undertaking, fully the equal of any other study.
In the summer of 1897, the summer before Alfred passed into Prima at the Gymnasium, the family returned, as they had every year for the past twelve, to their Heimat in Zechlinerhütte. The boys were almost (but not quite) men and were ready to range farther away from home. They had hiked the country everywhere around; now they turned increasingly to the water and the network of lakes and canals. Richard Wegener had, a few years earlier, taken a fancy to the Norwegian dinghies he had seen used as ship’s boats on the freighters that came in and out of the port of Warnemünde, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) northwest of Rheinsberg. These were dorie
s—about 4 meters (13 feet) in length and a little less than 2 meters (7 feet) beam. One person or two could row them, and although they had no weighted keel or centerboard, they could sail very well with a simple gaff or sprit rig, and even better with a jib. Their narrow stems (transoms) made them ideal for rivers because they could be used in rapids both bow and stern first; when loaded, they became more rather than less stable (which is why they were used by fishermen). Best of all, given the ever-slim family resources, they were very cheap to buy. Richard went to Warnemünde, bought one, and had it shipped back by rail and off-loaded at a spot where the rail line passed close to the water, a nice solution since the boat, made of pine and oak, probably weighed 175 kilograms (386 pounds).
It was in this boat that Kurt and Alfred were taught to sail, and during that summer (the last before Kurt went off to university), they made a number of extended voyages through the canals to lake destinations 40–50 kilometers (25–31 miles) away, sailing by day and sleeping in the boat at night. Kurt remembered one particular voyage with Alfred to the Müritz See, the largest of the lakes, some 20 kilometers (12 miles) long. The lock before the Müritz See had a 10-meter (33-foot) fall, and Kurt, not waiting for the lock tender, went to open the upper sluice gate to fill it, while Alfred remained in the boat. He opened the gate too far and the water came rushing in with a roar, creating a huge waterfall and emptying the reservoir, which also functioned as a mill pond, thus disabling the mill for the remainder of the day and infuriating the miller, who was also the lock tender. In the next few days they sailed about having a grand time but managed to get so badly sunburned that their faces swelled up until they were unrecognizable. They could barely see, but at least the miller failed to recognize them on the homeward trip. Back at die Hütte their faces blistered and peeled, and they were in such pain that they could hardly sleep. Anna was horrified when she saw them, but, as Kurt recalled, “she was used to this sort of thing from us.”43
They also talked about their plans. Kurt, who had graduated Primus Omnium (first in his class), had startled his parents in bypassing the universities to enroll in the newly created Technische Hochschule (polytechnic institute) in Charlottenburg, at the other end of Berlin. Education Minister Althoff’s sweeping (and immediately effective) reforms of 1897 had raised these institutes to the level of the universities, allowing the technical schools to grant a doctoral degree to students who agreed to extend the three-year technical course into four years.
Kurt was committed to experimentation as a means of discovery—he was by his own account more a doer than a thinker—and was also mechanically inclined. He was interested in pursuing a program in applied mathematics including engineering mechanics, geodesy (higher-level surveying), and the statistical theory of errors. Althoff’s reform had made it possible for him to follow his inclinations without sacrificing a professional career among the Doktoranden. The immediate social consequences were nevertheless real: it would be a school initially filled by students from secondary Realschulen (the semiclassical schools) drawn from the lower ranks of the middle classes, men who, in spite of their starched collars and carefully knotted ties, were likely to make their living, in part at least, with their hands. From the standpoint of Kurt’s parents it was a perplexing move, the first of many.
Alfred was also ready to make a decision. Though he had another year of Gymnasium to go, he was leaning toward entering the University of Berlin to study astronomy. His decision to attend the philosophical faculty of his father’s alma mater and seek a doctorate in a university subject was greeted at home with a palpable sense of relief and gratitude. If Alfred’s reluctance to become a teacher or classical scholar was now firmly established, the decision to study astronomy was certainly respectable, since it amounted to a decision to seek a career as a university professor; Kurt’s future was much less certain. Though the Wegeners soon came to see that the new technical universities would be permanent features of the educational scene in the new Prussia, they could not help but feel that Kurt had taken a step toward abandoning his place in the Bildungsbürgertum, the educated mandarinate.
The great relief of Richard and Anna in Alfred’s choice had much to do with his apparent allegiance to the privileges of his estate. However sorry Richard might be not to have a son follow him exactly, what a bitter irony it would have been to have both his sons abandon the traditional family status and inherited professional standing he had toiled to preserve for the scores of orphans who had passed under his tutelage in the previous twenty-five years! If Alfred worked hard, his future would be secure. His parents would support him through the university years, as they would Kurt. They planned as well to equip the boys for their compulsory military service. The boys would, of course, be officer candidates: their automatic eligibility for this desirable option was another benefit of their educational and civil service status. The Wegeners also planned to lend some financial support to the boys beyond graduation from the university. Even with their doctoral degrees, it would still take them many years to climb the ladder to fully salaried and pensioned (the magic word!) employment in the educational system.
In the winter of 1899 Alfred passed his Abitur, the final and comprehensive examination that guaranteed automatic admission to the university system. As Kurt before him, he graduated Primus Omnium, to his parents’ great pride and pleasure. He was near his full height (about 5 feet 10 inches) and had as yet a compact build that would only later fill out. He had not finished growing; this was evident from the way his ears stuck out from his rather large head—an exaggeratedly youthful appearance that would persist through his university years. A quizzical smile was often on his lips, as if enjoying a private joke, but perhaps it was only covering the uncertainty of late adolescence in that strange limbo where one is no longer a boy but not yet a man. He was quiet and almost stolid, warming to enthusiasm for his favorite pastimes, but for the rest rather self-contained. This was in marked contrast to Kurt—tall, thin, often with a slightly melancholy or even puzzled expression, and looking at age twenty like a man in his thirties.
Alfred was physically strong and agile from many years of sport and exercise, but he was mentally strong as well. He had mastered what the Germans call Sitzfleisch, that special form of perseverance that allows one to stay at exacting tasks for long periods of time, without succumbing to boredom or restlessness in a way that makes work impossible. In an age before typewriters and calculators (let alone word processors or desktop computers) it was an extremely valuable acquisition, because every intellectual task took much longer then than the same task does now.
Most of Alfred’s later achievements in science would have been impossible without his exceptional ability to focus and keep himself on task. He had demonstrated this power in school and out of school, and usually in combination with Geduld (patience or forbearance). The two are different, but the combination of the two is much more powerful than either one alone. In particular, the ability to concentrate is much impaired by impatience, even if one can stay “in the seat.” Alfred seems to have had an uncommon and precocious strength in this area, and he practiced perseverance and patience not only as disciplines but also as virtues, which indeed is the way his parents had taught them to him.
The coming transition to the university from the Gymnasium was momentous and exciting for Alfred largely because it meant the freedom to choose his courses and to study henceforth nothing but science and mathematics. It was not to be socially liberating, at least not immediately, for he would still be at home and under parental influence and authority. In any case, the university was not much farther from the orphanage in one direction than the Cöllnische Gymnasium was in the other, so there was not even much new to see outside. But inside, in what he later liked to call his Allerheiliges—his inner sanctum or spiritual center—things would be different.
2
The Student
BERLIN-HEIDELBERG-INNSBRUCK-BERLIN, 1899–1901
In earlier days every new impressi
on, every new fact entered into my growing individuality as an integral factor, and my individuality grew in proportion to the amount of the facts it took in. Through every new experience I gained a new means of expression; every point of view strengthened my consciousness of self, and therefore it was not senseless if I lived in hope, as it were, of snatching from without what spurred me on from within, though it had not yet revealed itself to me.
HERMANN KEYSERLING, Travel Diary of a Philosopher (1918)
Friedrich-Wilhelms University, Berlin
With the opening of the academic year on the first Monday after St. Michael’s Day (Michaelis), 2 October 1899, Berlin University celebrated its eighty-ninth birthday; Alfred Wegener was a still a few weeks short of his own nineteenth. He had obtained his identity card and the Anmeldungsbuch (Registration Book) that would follow him through his academic career. Here his professors would confirm his registration in their courses, as they would note at the end of the semester whether he had attended them.
Alfred walked the kilometer or so from the orphanage past the palace to the University Physics Institute, a spacious three-story facility that occupied a full city block along the Spree—ten to twenty times the size of his old Gymnasium. The institute was only slightly older than he was, having opened in 1878. Designed by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) himself, it had a lecture hall that seated 200 students, a large teaching laboratory, a physics library, and a number of special laboratories for optics, acoustics, mechanics, and electrical work. Until 1870 the library, apparatus, and laboratories of the Berlin Physics Institute had been limited enough to be housed within the residence (a Baroque palace to be sure) of Helmholtz’s predecessor, Professor Gustav Magnus (1802–1870). It was very much a statement about the new scale of Berlin physics when Helmholtz specified that the new institute should be big enough to contain an apartment to serve as his residence—which it did.1
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