Kurt’s reference to Alfred “suddenly becoming a professor” may sound odd, with Alfred barely having enough money to live on and even considering leaving academia altogether to go to work in Hamburg on the Carnegie project with his future father-in-law. It turns out that Alfred had been on the short list of nominees, in the summer of 1911, for the newly created professorship of geophysics being established in Leipzig.39 This prestigious post had gone instead to Vilhelm Bjerknes (those working at Leipzig already had a strong preference for his highly mathematical style of work), but that Alfred was nominated for the job is an indication of the extent to which he was considered a rising star in the meteorological community at this point in his career.40 Indeed, the great Russian climatologist Aleksandr Voeikov (1842–1916) had used those exact words—“a rising star”—in his review of Wegener’s thermodynamics in Russia, an assessment that he passed along to Köppen in a letter.41
Kurt’s assessment was that it would take at least a year for the damage done by Exner to fade and for Alfred’s thermodynamics to be seen in the context of other published work. Kurt was persuaded that the work on continental displacement would by itself make Wegener famous and, in the context of his work in atmospheric physics, would certainly propel him into the front rank of the profession.
Alfred had himself told his parents, on 6 February, that he had promised Koch that he would make the trip, including both the overwintering and the crossing, but only if it could happen in the year 1912–1913. He told them that he and Else were going to go forward with their marriage plans and had set the date for 1 November 1913. He also told them that all his scientific and professional work would be completed and delivered before the expedition began, especially the work on the continents. In addition, he assured them (and he was proud of this) that his doctoral student at Marburg, Walther Brand, was completing the last remaining part of the Danmark Expedition work.42
These statements were all true, but they were not as persuasive as Kurt’s announcement that the review by Exner had for the time being dashed Alfred’s hopes for immediate professional advancement and a professorship. Kurt’s letter also played on Anna Wegener’s feeling that her children had to get out in the countryside because they were so “pale and listless,” an opinion expressed in anguish after Käte Wegener’s death so many years before in Berlin.
Alfred, of course, saw Exner’s review when it appeared and had discussed it at length in a letter to Köppen on 17 January 1912. “Exner’s review is actually only his opinion,” Wegener wrote, “not an objective review, and I think the tone of the whole thing was a misstep. The advertisement of the publisher, which appears in the same issue as the review, provides a fitting complement to it, since the things that Exner made an especial point to say were not covered in the book, can at least be found in the advertisement among the titles of the chapters.”43 Wegener also told Köppen that the definition of thermodynamics, given by Exner in the review, was fundamentally mistaken and confused: “And what’s with the reference to the steam engine? The atmosphere is not a steam engine, quite the contrary. If you look, for example, at Planck’s Thermodynamics, you will look in vain to find a steam engine.”44
It was certainly generous of Wegener to stick to the intellectual substance of the review, especially since Exner, rather than characterizing it as his own opinions and then disagreeing with Wegener’s standpoint, had instead intimated that Wegener was a careless autodidact who did not understand the subject he was writing about. “Reading this book,” Exner wrote, “gave me the impression that this could only have been written just now and not published a year from now … it is a collection of his work up to now … the selection of topics and the way they are treated is very uneven … what the author has studied in the literature and published in the last few years is here, often not very accurately presented or clearly brought together.”45
This sort of personal attack was characteristic of Exner’s manner of reviewing works of broad scope and theoretical ambition, especially those that might challenge his own theoretical commitments and orientations. Some years later, when Lewis Fry Richardson published his epochal Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), today recognized as the foundation of all weather and climate modeling, Exner dismissed Richardson’s work as unlikely to bear fruit and too burdened with detail.46 He was even more ill disposed toward Vilhelm Bjerknes, and Bjerknes’s biographer, Robert Marc Friedman, has described Exner’s response to Bjerknes as “troublesome” and even “ugly.”47
Exner’s personal nastiness aside, however, there were real scientific issues being discussed here. Wegener took thermodynamics to be what we now call “physical meteorology,” largely concerned with temperature distributions in the vertical and their effect on rising and descending parcels of air, as well as the formation of clouds and precipitation. He thought, as written in his book, that the empirical determination of the layering of the atmosphere and its temperature regime was a necessary precondition to a dynamic theory of cyclonic storms. Exner, on the other hand, associated atmospheric thermodynamics entirely with the theory of cyclonic storms—a heritage of the nineteenth-century “thermal theory of cyclones.” He criticized Wegener sharply for not taking up the questions posed by cyclonic motions or discussing Margules’s solutions to them.48
Wegener disagreed with this whole approach and had written so to Köppen in January, in the letter quoted just above. The things that so excited Exner in Margules’s work on the energy of storms were not about thermodynamics, Wegener wrote, but “belong to mechanics.” He reiterated his position that thermodynamics was about the distribution of temperatures in the vertical. As for Margules himself, Wegener went on at length about the enormous theoretical difficulties left unsolved by Margules. Not the least of these, from Wegener’s standpoint, was that Margules’s combination of thermodynamics and hydrodynamics (the same problem that Bjerknes was working on) had not solved most of the major problems of this synthesis, especially since work on hydrodynamics dealt with an incompressible fluid (water), while the work on the atmosphere dealt with a compressible fluid (air). Finally, Wegener thought that Exner had a too exalted view of the role of theory, a view that Wegener found illusory. “The foundations of a science are not constructed through such theoretical works, but through individual, empirical investigations. That’s my view anyway.”49
The vision of atmospheric thermodynamics as independent of atmospheric dynamics, rather than as the handmaid of the latter, pitted the institutional and theoretical aims of the group at Berlin and their students distributed throughout Germany against the group in Vienna and their network throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Moreover, the Viennese, and Austrians in general, were committed to mountain meteorology, while the Berlin group argued vociferously that mountain meteorology had to give way to aerology. This was also a source of friction between them.
When we see what Exner and Margules were doing in Vienna, we see that Exner’s review of Wegener’s book could hardly have been otherwise. The Viennese work was highly theoretical and highly mathematical. Wegener’s disinclination for abstract mathematical formulations, especially in an elementary textbook, led Exner and indeed others to believe that Wegener was not capable of frontline work. One should say, parenthetically, that the reason that Margules’s fundamental work became recognized only decades later was precisely because it was so theoretically difficult and so mathematically dense.
Even though meteorologists have come around to accepting Wegener’s view of the appropriate scope for the subject matter of the thermodynamics of the atmosphere, in 1911–1912 almost all the intellectual energy in meteorology was being thrown into dynamics. Köppen’s plan for his collaboration with Wegener, under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution, emphasized dynamic meteorology and weather prediction as proximate goals. Wegener had objected to this strenuously in their correspondence in November 1911, especially to the notion that the atmosphere could be referred to, without further qualification, as
that portion of the atmosphere below the tropopause, the “zone of weather.” Wegener understood the financial and intellectual pressures at work, but he did what he could to counteract them, in the service of understanding the behavior of the entire atmosphere.
In any event, his involvement with the theory of continental displacements was so deep and so all-consuming that thinking about the atmosphere seemed almost like a relic of a former life. When he wrote to Köppen on 29 January, after a brief discussion of the kind of observational network that would be required for the Carnegie project, he turned immediately to a long discussion of Earth’s pole of rotation. “It seems to me ridiculous,” he wrote, “that it should be so easy to come up with an explanation [of the cause of the displacement of Earth’s pole] which those who are actually specialists in this area have been unable to find so far despite their most astute mathematical analysis.” Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “Lately I’ve had a few letters about the Thermodynamics from Trabert, Aßmann and—Exner. You would find Aßmann’s letter interesting.… What should I do with Exner, answer him?”50
Along with his obsession with continental displacements, there was another consuming occupation able to replace atmospheric physics in his mind: raising enough money to finance his part of the expedition. Along with the letter congratulating him on the publication of his Thermodynamics, Aßmann had sent a check in the amount of 500 marks to support Alfred’s expedition to Greenland. Additionally, Wegener had received a large donation made privately by the chemist and historian of science Ludwig Darmstädter (1846–1927), a gift arranged by the meteorologist Gustav Hellmann (1854–1939), Bezold’s successor at Berlin.51 Wegener needed 15,000 marks and was writing many letters of appeal for funds each day. He was able, in February and March of 1912, to obtain a large grant from the Prussian Interior Ministry, one from the Prussian Ministry of Culture, and another from the Berlin Academy of Sciences, totaling more than 10,000 marks.52 With this money in hand and confident that he could obtain the remainder, he wrote in early April to the (new) dean of the philosophical faculty at Marburg, Ernst Elstner (1860–1940), asking to be excused from his summer semester lectures, already announced, and additionally to be granted leave until the fall semester of 1913.53
Whatever the career troubles for Wegener that Exner had generated with his review, they were not echoing loudly in Marburg, where Wegener was currently something of a celebrity. Not only did the dean immediately grant the requested leave, a request that was accompanied by a strong endorsement from Richarz, but also the faculty obtained from the Ministry of Education permission to continue his stipend during his absence on the expedition. The faculty also passed a resolution endorsing the scientific importance of his Greenland expedition.54 Richarz himself provided “very opulent terms” for Wegener’s continuation on the faculty of Marburg. He told Wegener that he was taking steps, beginning with the vote of the faculty, to have the Ministry of Education create a more secure place for him at Marburg, perhaps an extraordinary professorship (the equivalent of an American associate professor position, something short of the creation of a new Lehrstuhl, or full professorship). Wegener was very touched by this outpouring of support and wrote about it excitedly to Köppen.55
In the midst of this, he also had a personal life, albeit one confined to letters. He and his fiancée, Else, were in near-constant communication. He had invited her to come to Marburg when her teaching year ended in April. She would stay with his student Walther Brand and his wife, allowing them time together, appropriately chaperoned. There was to be an annular eclipse of the Sun on 17 April, which they would view from Marburg. After that would be the big surprise: he had arranged a balloon flight for her, to replace the one canceled the previous year. They would travel by train together to Göttingen, where they would meet Kurt and Tony, and the four would make the flight together.56 Else had told him that making this flight was “her dearest wish.”57
Even before their reunion in April, Alfred and Else had come up with an interesting plan. Wegener wrote to Köppen in February, “Together with Else, I have had a stupendous idea, but won’t know for sure about it until tomorrow evening; I won’t say anything about it now.”58 Here was the idea. Else had been deeply disappointed by the postponement of their wedding plans and felt in limbo in her parents’ house in Hamburg. Wegener had broached the idea with Vilhelm Bjerknes that while he, Wegener, was in Greenland, Else would travel to Oslo and live with the Bjerknes family for a year, more or less as a daughter of the house. While Bjerknes had taken up the Leipzig professorship in 1912, he was not quite ready to move his family. The Bjerkneses had four sons, the oldest of whom, Jacob, was 15. The plan was that Else would teach the boys German in preparation for their Gymnasium course in Germany in 1913, while simultaneously attending classes at the university in Oslo, where she would learn Norwegian and Danish. While Wegener and Bjerknes differed in age (Bjerknes was twenty years older), they were made comrades by Exner’s hostility to both of them, by their Berlin connection, and by their mutual knowledge that they had been competitors for the same professorial chair in Leipzig.
It was a poignant time for Alfred and Else. Though their marriage would be postponed a year, Alfred was doing everything he could to create an aura of honeymoon and married life for Else before he departed for Greenland. In this spirit, her trip to Marburg in April was a resounding success. Alfred was relaxed and happy, he had the money in hand, the last of his manuscripts had been sent out, his doctoral students were set to defend in June, and he was confident that they would finish successfully.59 It really was a vacation. Else was thrilled to be treated as an adult woman. Here she was with her fiancé, having a picnic with the Brands; Walther was Alfred’s student, but they were both thirty-one years old, two couples at a garden party with a solar eclipse as entertainment.
If the Marburg visit was a success, they had even better luck with the balloon flight. The eighteenth of April dawned clear with light wind. They lifted off without incident, and Else marveled at the silence and the smoothness of the flight. “No shaking, no sound of a motor disturbed us. Now and then the barking of a dog in a village below would break our silence.”60 They traveled for hours to the northwest, finally settling down—Kurt made a flawlessly smooth landing—in an open field near the train station in Leer, near Bremen, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) from their start.61 After a festive dinner, with the balloon packed up and shipped back to Göttingen, Else traveled to Hamburg, while Alfred, with Kurt and Tony, went to die Hütte, so that Alfred might take leave of his parents.
Departure of the expedition for Iceland and then Greenland was drawing close, but there was still much to do. After leaving his parents, Alfred traveled to Hamburg and spent several days at the Köppen household in Großborstel. Then, at the beginning of May, he and Else traveled to Copenhagen. Once again, Else thrilled to have a taste of adult life with her husband-to-be. They were guests of Koch and his wife, and Else had a chance to take part in the preparations. Alfred wanted her to have a sense of where he was going and what he was doing. As they packed the crates with the 20,000 kilograms of equipment and supplies, she made lists of the contents. An experienced meteorological assistant in spite of her age, she was able to help calibrate and pack the meteorological instruments for shipment.62
The most interesting part of the preparations in Copenhagen was perhaps the assembly and then disassembly of the prefabricated house in which they would overwinter. It had been built to specification for Koch by the Danish military. It consisted of a series of bolted-together panels of plywood, fabricated such that there was an air space between two layers of plywood in each panel. The central Stube for sleeping and work, with bunks, worktables, a stove, and a photographic darkroom, was flanked to the outside by parallel rooms, one a store room and the other the stalls for the Icelandic ponies. Measuring 6.6 meters (21.7 feet) × 5 meters (16.4 feet), the interior area of the building was 33 square meters (356 square feet). While not palatial—though Frau Koch c
hristened it “Borg” (the Castle)—neither was it claustrophobic, and it was certainly as well designed and comfortable as anything taken into polar regions by an Arctic expedition to that date.63 The panels were much smaller than those for the prefabricated “Villaen” that Koch, Wegener, Lundager, and Bertelsen had occupied in the winters of 1906 and 1907. The larger panels of that building, lashed down on the deck of the “Danmark,” had warped in transit and had to be completely disassembled before the building could be raised. The panels of this newer design were small enough that each Icelandic pony could carry two at a time strapped to the packsaddles; their smaller area also lessened the chance that they would warp in transit.
Balloon flight arranged for Else Köppen in April 1912 by Wegener. Left to right: Alfred Wegener, Kurt Wegener, Else Köppen, and Tony Wegener. Photo courtesy of the Heimatmuseum, Neuruppin.
Koch, Wegener, and Lundager numbered the panels sequentially as they assembled them. They bestowed similar care on the crating and labeling of their supplies. Everything was designed either to be carried on an Icelandic pony packsaddle or to sit flush to the rails of one of the horse-drawn sleds. The boxes had to be strong enough to withstand battering but light enough that a man could lift them onto a horse pack and down a number of times each day.
The expedition was scheduled to depart around 1 June and to travel to Iceland. Here they would meet up with Vigfus Sigurdsson and his Icelandic ponies. Koch had worked with the horses before, but Wegener and Lundager had not. Koch had done considerable cartographic work in Iceland, including the Vatnajøkul ice cap, which he proposed to use as a training ground in the management of the Icelandic ponies in snow and ice, for the benefit of Wegener and Lundager. They would practice riding, leading pack trains of horses, loading and unloading the packsaddles, feeding and grooming, and learning to be comfortable with and earning the trust of the horses. There were a number of experiments to try. Each man was to have an impressive array of footwear: leather climbing boots, Eskimo kamiks, finnesko (reindeer-skin boots stuffed with soft grass), gum boots, wooden clogs embedded with ice spikes, and woven hemp slippers, all for different tasks in different weather conditions, each of which had to be tried out.
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