The most important reconnection of Wegener’s Hamburg trip was, however, with Köppen and his family. Köppen’s daughter Else, then sixteen, got permission to stay away from school to attend Wegener’s lecture. Returning home on the afternoon of the lecture, she spoke to her godfather about how wonderful and exciting she had found Wegener (and his lecture). Later that day, to her surprise and delight, her godfather presented her with an invitation to the official banquet—the first time in her life she would attend a formal dinner; she was to be Wegener’s guest at table. She was extremely nervous and unsure of herself, and Wegener did what he could to put her at ease. When the speeches began (in Germany, as elsewhere, the prescribed punishment following every official meal), Wegener pulled a stack of expedition photos from his pocket and passed them to her one by one under the table.15
Wegener stayed on after the meeting for the field trip to the Kite Station at Großborstel, and he accepted Köppen’s invitation for an informal dinner with family and friends at his home. Köppen invited his old colleagues Aßmann and Hergesell, of course, but also went out of his way to include a number of the younger meteorologists. Köppen had a serious demeanor at official functions, but he liked to let his hair down at home and to meet with the younger scientists as equals. He listened to their concerns and gave them advice. He fed them and drank with them, and he treated them, after dinner, to a concert of Meteorologenlieder—popular song melodies he had adapted with meteorological lyrics—the sort of corny clowning that only academics truly love.
After dinner and singing that Sunday evening, Köppen invited Wegener to sit down for a chat that, as it turned out, lasted far into the night. August Schmauß (1877–1954), who was then an assistant at the Central Meteorological Station in Munich, was there that evening, and he recalled their conversation:
Anyone who met Köppen carried for the rest of his life the memory of having come upon one of the most interesting personalities in our meteorological world. I had that good fortune, and an important lesson, at the Köppen home after the meeting of the German Meteorological Society in Hamburg in September 1908. It so happened that A. Wegener was also there. I found these two men, who were completely consumed by their scientific work, in the midst of the most animated discussion of problems in aerology, and debating global climatology. It was very important to Wegener to be able to express his ideas in the presence of this insightful critic, while Köppen, though a mature and famous scientist, was visibly inspired to hear and to take in what his younger colleague had to say.16
For Wegener, the Hamburg meeting was pleasant, auspicious, and productive. In a single stroke, he had made his mark and had tied his work to the frontline problems of the day. Yet it was clear to him, on his return trip to Berlin, that he still had to solve pressing and immediate problems. Where, for instance, would he live? How would he make a living while working up his Danmark results? He could not camp forever with his parents; already he found Berlin crowded, noisy, oppressive, and, in no small measure, absurd—as the bourgeois world often appears to those who have lived for a time free of its constrictions and conventions. Wegener had to make up his mind what to do. Brother Kurt had moved ahead decisively. He had become, in Alfred’s absence, one of Germany’s best-known aeronauts, with more than fifty balloon flights under his belt. Further, he had been picked to head the Observatory in German Samoa and would leave almost immediately; the Reich Treasury had voted this tropical observatory the princely stipend of 25,000 marks per year for the period 1905–1910. Kurt would direct construction and superintend meteorology, seismology, and magnetic studies.17
Everyone else in the family also seemed to have found a footing and a place. His sister Tony, living year-round at die Hütte, was making a reasonable living and a solid reputation as a painter. His parents were enjoying their retirement immensely, shuttling between Berlin and Zechlinerhütte, and father Richard had just won a major drama prize for his book on Shakespearean theater.18 This book had a practical as well as scholarly significance: Alfred’s cousin, Paul Wegener (1874–1948), on his way to becoming the greatest actor of his generation, was employing the concepts chronicled in Richard’s book for a series of triumphant performances on the Berlin stage as Richard III, Othello, and Macbeth. All of this was a source of pride and pleasure to Alfred, but it also increased pressure to find a place for himself.
Die Arbeit
The immediate problem, however, ever squarely before Wegener and dominating his mind, was how best to work up the mountain of scientific data he had accumulated in Greenland. He had begun to organize it, but he had no clear sense of how large a task this would be, nor how long it would take. He therefore accepted Reinhard Süring’s invitation, proffered in Hamburg, and took a selection of data to him at the Meteorological Institute in early October. Süring studied the data and talked with Wegener about the Danmark Committee’s plans for the publication of the expedition’s science. Süring estimated that, given the volume of material, if he (Wegener) did no other scientific work at all, took no job, and worked at it full-time, he would require a minimum of two years to get just the meteorological material into publishable form; he would need four years if he worked on other projects and took a government or academic position.19 This estimate of time did not include the electrical, magnetic, geological, or glaciological material, just the meteorology.
Wegener seems to have been disconcerted and even shocked by Süring’s estimate of the time to complete the work. On 12 October he wrote to Professor Johannes Warming (1841–1924), the great Danish botanist and plant ecologist, who was the lead scientist on the committee of the Danmark Expedition. Warming had himself been on long expeditions to Greenland, Brazil, and elsewhere and might be able to help him with his dilemma. Wegener told Warming of Süring’s estimates of time and of the number and complexity of the tables and illustrations required for the work. He then gave vent to his anxiety, adding, “While the rapid publication [of this work] is my deepest wish, I would hate to be obliged to go two full years without a job, and without pursuing any other scientific work. The best possible outcome, from my point of view, would be to have the question resolved thus: I will immediately begin devoting all my time to this work, with the stipulation that later on I may be permitted either to pursue other scientific work, or to accept a position.”20
This suggestion seems to have been met with generosity on Warming’s part, and Wegener’s negotiations with the expedition committee went smoothly and well. Moreover, by the end of October, he had succeeded in off-loading part of his burden: Georg Lüdeling (1863–1960), a meteorologist at the Institute in Berlin, agreed to work up the electrical measurements, to be completed by spring 1909. Wegener then had his electrical instruments and barometer shipped from Copenhagen to Berlin to be calibrated against the instruments at the Meteorological Institute, and he attended, in the next few weeks, to the dozens of small details surrounding the project, such as formatting instructions for the tabular data and similar matters.
In late October Wegener signed a memorandum of understanding with the Danmark Committee, including a pledge not to publish the results before they should appear in Meddelelser om Grønland. Here, however, he made an important stipulation: that he should be allowed to publish, in the scientific literature in Germany, articles on his kite launching and on the climate at Cape Bismarck, so long as he did not publish the data in extenso. “In the case of these brief articles,” he wrote to the committee, “I do not consider myself bound to see that they appear after the larger work, as their whole point is to stimulate interest for the larger work, and if they were to appear after it they would be essentially worthless.”21
Wegener’s was an interesting balancing act, of two kinds of science and two ages of science in the world. If one looks at the history of exploring expedition reports, one sees that these sometimes appear not just years but even decades after the expedition ends. The material overwhelmingly consists of description of things encountered in some particular place
and detailed mathematical-cartographic work establishing exactly where the place is. The descriptive dimension here trumps the explanatory: in extending the map of the world, of its geology, of animal and plant species, and generally in documenting the natural history of the planet, it is deemed more important to get it right than to get it written. Wegener’s scientific work belonged to this classical tradition, but only in part. His documentation of the climate at Cape Bismarck was as real and durable as the documentation of the fossils, the birds, the plankton, or the Inuit ruins. But Wegener also belonged to a much faster moving enterprise—modern physics, where publication delay of months or even weeks could mean that someone else claimed a discovery that was, in some sense, one’s own. His urgency to pursue these traditions simultaneously lent a feverish intensity to his activity in the next few months.
Such external circumstances explain his situation, pulled in two directions, but not his drive to go in both directions at the same time. Wegener felt his obligation to the expedition—the need to find a place, to make a mark—but he appears to have been more powerfully driven from within by the structure of his own imagination, an imagination readily inflamed and yet also sustained by his intuitive talent for making connections. Wegener’s work in late 1908 and early 1909 clearly shows the interplay between his processing of a large volume of raw data and then the extraction of a manifold of interesting phenomena and subsequent relentless pursuit of these in parallel lines of attack, based on intuition, but requiring subsequent confirmatory research.
In mid-October 1908 he had moved out of his parents’ home and taken rooms down the street at 15 Georg Wilhelmstraße. There, as in each subsequent residence he would inhabit, he set up a large worktable and rolled out the polar bear rug he had brought back from Greenland—the most prized of his few possessions. He had moved out of his parents’ home because he needed the solitude to work and think, because he kept long hours disruptive of domestic routine, but above all because of his need to smoke incessantly as he worked, sometimes as many as ten cigars a day, with the smoke eventually forming a blue stratus layer in the room, hovering just above his head.22
The task at hand for Wegener in these months was the interpretation of the kite and balloon aerology of the expedition. This was his best chance for significant results; he had publicly, at the Hamburg meeting in September 1908, hinted at the possibilities latent in his records. Now he had to produce them. The raw data consisted of the station records for the Danmarkshavn meteorological instruments, the monthly “24-hour measurements” (from the shore, deck, and crow’s nest of the Danmark), and the 125 flight records taken by his kite and balloon meteorographs. The flight records he had interpreted to some extent in Greenland.
He knew what he was looking for: layers and layering in the first 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) of the atmosphere. It was there, of course, in the form of complex suites of inversion layers revealed by the mirage photos, mostly within the “friction layer.” Wegener was looking for something else, though: for stable layering higher up, layering as consistent as the “inversion” layer discovered by Teisserenc de Bort (who had just proposed a new name for it: the “tropopause”). The latter discontinuity, the tropopause, separating the “troposphere” below from the “stratosphere” above, everywhere marked by a temperature inversion, had now been detected in all latitudes from the equator to 70° north and 75° south and was clearly a global phenomenon. At the equator it was higher, and in polar latitudes somewhat lower, than in temperate midlatitudes, but it was a real and physically significant boundary layer, defining the structure of the atmosphere.
Wilhelm von Bezold had insisted years before, in Wegener’s first meteorology seminar in Berlin, that there were additional boundary layers in the atmosphere just as real and persistent as the major inversion discovered at 10–12 kilometers (6–7 miles). Bezold believed that these other layers often coincided with the lower or upper surface of clouds, but that they would be discovered at the same altitudes in clear air, if conditions were not right for condensation.
Wegener was looking for these “other” layers in the Greenland data. The signatures of novel conditions and phenomena (these layers included) in these records would be miniscule, certainly depending on meticulous graphical interpretation and careful numerical reduction of the data. Results of significance would be uncovered, just as at Lindenberg three years before, in the form of small but characteristic blips or nicks in the pen tracings, indicating unusual modulations and reversals of conditions at some altitude, amounting only to fractions of a degree of temperature, or fractions of a meter per second of wind speed. Wegener was aware that Richard Aßmann’s failure to believe his own instrument readings had cost him credit for the discovery of the stratosphere, and he did not want to fall victim to such a mistake, if his own data were to contain such treasure.
The accompanying figure shows a kite-meteorograph record from one of Wegener’s flights in Greenland. The recording instruments, like those used by Teisserenc de Bort, depended on the expansion and contraction of various substances. The temperature was measured with a bimetallic strip thermometer capable of very great accuracy. In this thermometer a strip of brass is bonded to a strip of Invar, an alloy of nickel with an extremely small thermal expansion coefficient.23 Expansion and contraction with temperature forced the strip to curve and allowed it to drive a scribing apparatus and record temperature changes directly. The meteorograph barometer operated on a similar principle: it was a “Bourdon tube,” a thin curved tube of elliptical cross section filled with liquid. As the air pressure increased or decreased, the tube would contract or expand: this movement drove (directly or indirectly) the scribing apparatus. The measurement of the atmospheric pressure, corrected for surface station pressure, could be read off as the altitude directly. Relative humidity was measured by a “hair hygrometer,” an apparatus that magnified and recorded the contraction and expansion of a length of human hair. Finally, there was some sort of a device for registering the wind speed, either a rotating or a “pressure-tube” anemometer.24
Wegener should thus have had access to four direct streams of data: temperature, air pressure, humidity, and wind speed. The reality of his Greenland data was, instead, rather more meager. In winter (i.e., a third of the time) the hair hygrometer froze and could not record. Almost as bad was the status of the wind data: of his six meteorographs, only one (“Hergesell 104”) had a working anemometer, and that instrument lasted only five flights in summer 1907 before it was lost when a cable parted; it functioned principally to help him calibrate his procedure for estimating wind velocity aloft without an anemograph.25 This meant that for 120 of 125 flights, wind direction and speed had to be estimated from the ground by observing the motion of the kite as it swung on its tether (direction) and using cable tension and the angle of flight as proxies for wind speed. Alfred had worked with his brother Kurt at Lindenberg to produce a very useful tabular system of estimating wind speed by this method, but it was some distance from such estimates to actual recorded data.26
Kite meteorograph from Wegener’s work in Greenland. The four records from top to bottom record the wind speed, the temperature, the barometric pressure (a proxy for the altitude), and the relative humidity. The recording represents a flight of just under four hours.
Working up the kite and balloon data for publication took six weeks of strenuous work, from mid-October to the end of November, and more than 400 cigars. Wegener’s exceptional capacity for disciplined work served him well here. He had kept good station records, but he also needed to review the actual meteorographs and check his instrument readings against the interpretations he had made of them in Greenland, in the cold and the dark and (sometimes) in the grip of his winter depression. The accompanying figure gives the narrative summary of the first three of his Greenland kite flights, as published in Meddelelser om Grønland in 1909.27 The hardest work, clearly, was the determination of the altitude from the air pressure records. Comparisons for theoretical purpo
ses relied absolutely on accurate measurements of the altitudes; this accuracy is reflected here in the instrument records, with pressure readings to the tenth of a millimeter of mercury.
Wegener’s obsessive attention to detail while in Greenland had produced a mountain of data. Each flight record included readings for time, altitude, pressure, temperature, humidity, wind direction, and wind speed. He had tabulated these instrumental data (reduced from graphic to numerical form) for altitudes of 5 meters (16 feet), 200 meters (656 feet), 500 meters (1,640 feet), and then 500-meter intervals thereafter, up to the maximum altitude, which was recorded to the nearest 10 meters (33 feet). Each flight record was accompanied by remarks about sky conditions and any unusual phenomena—mirages, inversions, surprising wind shifts. Taken together, it made an attractive and informative publication of a useful set of data. But what did it amount to?
Wegener reduced to numerical form his principal finding from two years of aerological work in Greenland. His table contains four columns of data. Reading from left to right, these are as follows: the fall of temperature per 100 meters (328 feet) of ascent, the increase (or decrease) in wind speed, the rotation of the wind relative to the direction at the ground, and finally the increase (or decrease) of the relative humidity. The numbers given are mean values for these quantities at six different levels of altitude: all the intervals are 500 meters except the lowest, which Wegener broke into two components of 5–200 meters and 200–500 meters. The latter was clearly a way to separate out the extreme anomalies he recorded in the first tens of meters above the ground: the procedure here was the same as that in his descriptive summary of the flights noted above.28
Data from Wegener’s first three kite flights in Greenland in September 1906. All the numerical data are reduced from meteorograph records like that above. Right column: Bemerkungen (Remarks) includes information on cloud types and altitudes, precipitation, presence of inversions, changes in wind direction, and so on. From Alfred Wegener, “Drachen- und Fesselballonaufsteige ausgeführt auf der Danmark-Expedition 1906–1908,” Meddelelser om Grønland 42, no. 1 (1909): 7.
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