13
The Soldier
MARBURG AND “THE FIELD,” 1913–1915
I don’t have anything to do with science now, and have hung it up until the war is over. A man can’t serve two masters and if I’m going to have to be a soldier, I will do my best, and do it wholeheartedly.
WEGENER TO KÖPPEN, September 1914
Wegener’s ship from Greenland docked in Copenhagen on 18 October 1913, and Else was there to meet him. They were thrilled to see one another, but there was bad news: three weeks earlier, while Wegener was at sea, his mother had suffered a stroke; she could now not speak and was paralyzed on one side. Wegener wanted to leave immediately but had to remain until at least the following day, when he and Koch were to be knighted by the king of Denmark.1 There was to be a formal dinner afterward to honor the expedition, but Wegener begged off, and he and Else left for Zechlinerhütte immediately after the official ceremony.2 Traveling via Hamburg, they arrived to find his mother still in poor condition, and they decided to stay on until their wedding, scheduled for the middle of the following month. To pass the time, they walked each day in the autumn woods, where Alfred found the colors delightful after the monochrome world of the ice cap.
During the waiting period at Zechlinerhütte, Alfred made a trip to Berlin to obtain further information about the progress of the appeal for a better appointment at Marburg. Here also, the news was not good. He wrote to Köppen that even though his dean had personally traveled to Berlin to talk to the ministry, the application was likely to be refused. Under the circumstances, he and Else would still marry as planned, return to Marburg, and accept the current stipend, while waiting for another round of applications. Between his stipend and the continuation of his expedition salary while he worked up his scientific results, they could, with care and economy, last a couple of years: by then he would know either that he had a position or that it was time to “take off.”3 Wegener’s reluctance to give up an academic career and move to Hamburg was as strong as ever, and it is clear that Köppen’s desire to bring him there was still intact as well.
In late October, the couple visited the marriage license bureau. In Hamburg they had been startled by the requirement that Alfred produce (from the Greenland government) an attestation that he had not married while there; Else was asked to provide a similar document from the Norwegian government in Oslo. Of course, this late in the year, there was no chance that such a document could be procured from Greenland even if one could have been obtained from Norway, and it appeared that their marriage would thus have to be postponed another year. Fortunately for them, things were less formal in rural Rheinsberg than in Hamburg, and the marriage registrar, a local farmer, decided to waive this requirement, announcing to the couple, “I know that you have been in Greenland, Herr Dr., because I read about you in the newspapers, and I can’t believe that you would have married an Eskimo girl when your bride was here waiting for you.”4
Their wedding was a modest affair, in Hamburg in mid-November. From Alfred’s side there was only Kurt, already in Hamburg at the Marine Observatory with Köppen; Anna Wegener was improving but too ill to travel, and sister Tony was needed in Zechlinerhütte as caretaker to Anna and Richard both. Alfred had written to Marburg asking that his winter term lectures be put off until 1 December, and the newlywed couple spent the next two weeks packing and shipping household goods and furniture—the crates of linens, chairs, and dishes a humorous contrast to the boxes they had packed in Copenhagen in the spring of 1912.
Arriving in Marburg, the couple moved into their newlywed lodgings, a spacious floor-through apartment, in a corner building on the Biegenstraße. This was a brand new commercial and residential district that had, in the past few years, sprung up between the old town and the train station. When the city fathers had decided to restrict the train station to a spot some kilometers out of town and across the river Lahn, they had no concept of the urban sprawl they would engender, as businesses and residents alike chose easy access to modern transport, via the construction of a new neighborhood that brought the city to the train station.
Else agreed with the local opinion that these faux Bavarian buildings along the Biegenstraße, with their obviously fake external timbering and their decorative onion domes, were “hideous” and spoiled the view of the river from the Oberstadt. On the other hand, the new apartment was large and airy and provided a good view, from the rear windows, of the palace, the university, and the observatory. From the street-side windows they could see the river and the wooded hills beyond. If they needed additional money (which they might), they had extra rooms to let to students. Else found the old town enchanting, and she would bypass the markets in her neighborhood to walk a mile and climb the many stairs to the vegetable stalls in the old market square near the town hall, where the mechanical rooster in the clock tower crowed the hours. For Else, Marburg was rural, rustic, authentic. The food and air were fresh; she was thrilled by her new life.
There was a sense of ritual commencement in the way that Alfred and Else set up their apartment. The greater part of their attention went to Alfred’s workroom: arranging the desk with good light over his left shoulder from the large windows facing the street, unrolling the polar bear rug from his first trip to Greenland. They would “work together.” Else had learned to weave while in Norway, and she set up her small loom in the workroom to keep him company as he wrote. If she had not done so, she might never have seen him; she knew enough of his habits to know that unless she established herself early, this would certainly be the case. She set about as well to build a card index of his hundreds of offprints of scholarly articles. Alfred instructed her, “When you dust around here don’t even think of moving anything on the desk.”5 Visions of early twentieth-century bourgeois life notwithstanding, they had no servants: she would cook and clean, and laundry would be sent out. Else later wrote, “But that was part of my upbringing, I had learned long before from my mother how to take care of a writing table overflowing with papers without moving anything out of order.”6 The unpacking and reordering of books, boxes, and papers, the beginnings of domestic routine, gave an external order to their life, as did the resumption of university lectures.
A photo taken of Alfred in Copenhagen a day after the ship had docked from Greenland had shown him serene and happy—so much so that Achton Friis decided to use it as the basis for his portrait sketch of Wegener in Koch’s account of the trip. But even as Alfred set to work, he felt an interior sense of dislocation and disquiet. He had difficulty concentrating. The inessential and the essential were, uncharacteristically, all mixed together in his mind. He fretted about the cost of their move from Hamburg to Marburg, which had used up almost 10 percent of his annual stipend. He could not find the latest issues of journals published just before he had departed from Greenland, and this worried him. He had tried to buy a copy of Krümmel’s Ozeanographie in Berlin, but he had not been able to obtain one. He began, just before Christmas, an article on the motion of vortices (Wirbelbewegung) but suddenly found that he could make no progress.7
The situation was very different from his return from Greenland in 1908. Then he had a rich harvest of his own data and two years of station records to work up, material that he was sure held the signature of important developments. There was none of that in 1913. He had come back full of ideas but bereft of data. Greenland had once again fired his speculative imagination: the fracture and flow of the Inland Ice, the layering in the firn atop the ice cap, the speed of the Jacobshavn Glacier, the behavior of the aurora, and his photographs of ice crystals and of complex layered inversions a few meters above the ground all suggested lines of advance. Yet none of these allowed him to expand or extend his principal line of work: the theory of the overall structure of the atmosphere.
Else could sense the problem. Her year in Norway had been very instructive for her, not least scientifically. Living with the Bjerknes family, she was in a scientific milieu she understood: the paterfamilias made
an effort to explain his work, as clearly as he could, to his family. This was just as it had been at the Köppen household. But Bjerknes’s work was new to her. It was purely theoretical, and Bjerknes measured the progress of meteorology in his ability to translate atmospheric motions into the differential equations of theoretical physics; he had scarcely any need to come into direct contact with nature. Very much in contrast, her father had devoted his life to building a network of meteorological stations in North Germany, and his scientific work consisted in attempting to extract statistical regularities from this mass of data and to turn these regularities into the laws of meteorology and climatology. Alfred’s method of work differed from both of these, as Else saw it, and sprang from the necessity that Alfred felt to work in direct and unmediated contact with nature, whether in his balloon flights or through his life on Greenland’s ice cap. She saw the wellspring of his invention in his emotional connection with—his love for—the natural objects he studied.8 Where Bjerknes generated no data himself and Köppen worked with summaries of data collected by others, Wegener depended for his inspiration on having his own data. Generally speaking, he preferred data of a kind not before collected by anyone, or otherwise scanty, scattered, or new.
Back in Marburg, but without a harvest of novel data generated in “the midst of nature,” Wegener found himself forestalled. Trying to focus his mind on work, he did everything he could to minimize distraction. He reduced his lectures in astronomy from two hours a week to one. He went to the university only for his lectures, for meetings of the physics colloquium, and for the sessions of the Marburg Natural Science Society. The rest of the time he spent at his desk. He had, of course, plenty of work to do. He had several popular manuscripts to finish, retailing his Greenland adventures, and he had voluminous expedition correspondence. He could proceed (using his photographic evidence) to think about questions of polarization; moving on from atmospheric thermodynamics to optics had always been part of his general plan for a full physics of the atmosphere. He had still to transcribe and edit his Greenland diaries, and he had a moneymaking project to begin, organized by Köppen. Curt Thesing, a well-known popular author and producer of scientific works in encyclopedic format, had solicited an encyclopedia of the atmosphere from Köppen, who had agreed to take it on, with the notion that he would farm out the work, as well as the proceeds from it, to both Kurt and Alfred. It was the sort of systematic and synthetic work at which Alfred excelled, but there seemed to be nothing new in it; it was bread labor.
In the midst of this scientific impasse, Alfred tried to turn back to the study of vortex motions in the atmosphere. In the summer of 1912 he had made a number of observations of “dust devils” on the volcanic landscape of Iceland, while preparing for Greenland. It was clear to him, as it had been to most meteorologists (it had been published long since in Hann’s Handbook of Meteorology), that these were thermally driven and not the same sort of phenomena as tornadoes.9 He was far from the only meteorologist in 1912 to be interested in vortex motion: his sharpest critic, Exner, had performed a number of experiments with rotating tubs, using colored dye to chart the development of turbulent eddies.
Wegener had worked on turbulent motion in the atmosphere at the very beginning of his career, back in 1906. He had written on “Helmholtz waves” at the boundary between two atmospheric layers of different density, as well as about the formation of cumulus mammatus. His interest in these topics had been reawakened at the Munich meeting of the German Meteorological Association in November of 1911. Köppen had given a paper discussing the interaction of “circulation layers” and “boundary layers” in the atmosphere, and it occurred to Wegener in the course of the discussion of Köppen’s paper that this provided a new way to understand vertical convection in the atmosphere, particularly the way in which it brings about the fall of temperature with altitude. If one considered, Wegener had speculated, that parcels of air in a circulation layer were cut off from interaction with the surface of Earth by the action of a boundary layer, then thermal convection via the contact of the air with the (warmed) surface of Earth could not be the cause for the vertical convection, which would have to be explained, on the contrary, as a mechanically forced mixing, which was above all a product of the velocity of the flow, in combination with the internal friction of the air mass.10
His reflections on atmospheric turbulence, published in early 1912, contained two generalizations that, taken together, constitute one of his more notable contributions to meteorology. The first of these was the general principle that “the troposphere is the zone of turbulent, the stratosphere of laminar motion.” The isothermy of the stratosphere was, in fact, a consequence of its laminar motion, while the troposphere was a zone of constant or nearly constant turbulence. He declared, “I believe, that this new or at least heretofore unremarked difference of the two principal layers of our atmosphere will be of the utmost importance in the future; for through no other principle will one be able in such a simple manner to explain the sudden sharp boundary between temperature lapse and isothermy, between the constancy of potential and the constancy of actual temperature, and between constant entropy and constant energy.”11
The succeeding generalization contained, in a single sentence, the theoretical shift from the thermal theory of cyclonic motion to the mechanical: “If the above representations of the situation are correct, then the strongest vertical circulation should be expected not at the time of maximum heating, but at the time of the strongest winds. It is very interesting that, in fact, we [all] came to this conclusion some time ago, but without being able to provide a useful explanation of it.”12
Whatever progress was being made in the theory of storm systems, empirical work had demonstrated that while storms were not thermally driven, and therefore theoretically outside the province of thermodynamics, on the other hand the theoretical understanding of the mechanical basis of these (turbulent) phenomena still lay well in the future. The barriers to theoretical understanding, Wegener indicated, were well laid out in encyclopedic textbook treatments by A. E. H. Love (1863–1940), Wien, Horace Lamb (1839–1934), and Rudzki, if anyone cared to pursue them.13 This direction forward for meteorology—resolving the problems of using hydrodynamic models, problems outlined in Wegener’s paper with regard to the study of the movement of the atmosphere as a whole—proved indeed to be the main line of advance in the next two decades, especially in the work of Bjerknes, Tor Bergeron (1891–1977), Wilhelm Schmidt (1883–1936), Harald Sverdrup (1888–1957), and, above all, Lewis Fry Richardson (1881–1953).14
Wegener’s qualitative grasp of this problem back in the autumn of 1911 had appeared in his use of homely analogies. The difference between laminar and turbulent motion in the vertical could be seen, he indicated, in the smoke rising from a cigar, which turns from a smooth flow to a turbulent billow within the first few centimeters. The same phenomenon might be seen in the difference between a cleanly burning and a flickering candle, or in the blackening of the chimney of a kerosene lamp.15 On a larger scale, and in the horizontal dimension, Wegener sketched the smoke from a factory chimney in the early morning in the presence of a temperature inversion. Smoke from the chimney makes a smooth line: laminar flow (a thin, straight, condensed horizontal plume) under the influence of light prevailing winds, as the inversion capped the vertical ascent of the air. Within a few hours, however, one saw turbulence with a widening amplitude, with the smooth plume of smoke from the factory turning into a widening billow. This argument was typical of Wegener: the qualitative evidence for the phenomenon was all around but had not been aggregated into a single picture or properly quantified.16
At the beginning of 1914, Wegener still had an inclination to pursue the study of turbulence, but during his absence in the preceding year the character and content of such work had become ever more mathematical. He saw this as a serious problem: in his view, a good deal of this mathematical work was just plain wrong. He wrote to Köppen in January 1914, “The mathematical
work is simply scandalous! Nine out of ten people think that when they calculate with a formula according to some rule they memorized, that they have discovered something, while completely missing the nonsense in their arguments.… Most of them either don’t know or refuse to acknowledge that in mathematics, the formula is either exactly correct, or it is wrong, and so they blithely wade into deeper and deeper waters, having accepted the first [formula] they came across, without any reasoned examination.”17 He then went on to point out an error in a recent issue of Meteorologische Zeitschrift (a dropped exponent in a differential equation) that made nonsense of the entire working formula presented: “Pity the poor reader!”18
Given this state of affairs, Wegener was at a loss in early 1914 on how to proceed with his atmospheric work. He had nothing new to say about thermodynamics on a large scale. His attempt to do something with atmospheric motion led him to attempt to write about the mechanics of vortices, but he found himself here with neither sufficient new empirical (numerical) material nor any adequate conceptual treatment to apply to it. He thus abandoned this work on vortex motions and its connection to atmospheric turbulence in February 1914, almost as soon he had picked it up. His work in atmospheric optics was in its beginning stages, nowhere near ready for publication, and his “bread labor,” the encyclopedic project for Thesing, took him over familiar ground. He was mentally “stuck.” With this encyclopedia project facing him (as had been the case with the proposed 1912 work for Carnegie), working on something for which he had no appetite had caused his imaginative resources to desert him.
Alfred Wegener Page 59
