Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  With the book sent to the press, Wegener was again somewhat at loose ends. He had started a paper on the “outer zone of audibility” but found he had not enough data, so he confined himself to theoretical speculations.46 Already in early August he was impatient, having little scientific work of his own to do.47 He thought about working up the weather observations at his field weather station for publication, especially the pilot balloon observations, which he thought consistent and interesting, and he wrote to his commanding officer to see if this would be possible.48

  It was characteristic of Wegener, when he had no scientific work available, to become both nervous and impatient. In mid-August he wrote to Köppen and complained of Vieweg’s glacial pace in the production of proofs: “If they continue the dawdling tempo of the last few weeks the book will not be ready for Christmas.”49 He hoped that he would have leave at Christmas, but as both of them knew, Wegener had planned to finish the book to present it to Köppen on 25 September 1916, his seventieth birthday. Of course, Vieweg was not moving slowly because he wanted to, but because a scarcity of workers and a shortage of paper were slowing the entire intellectual apparatus of this great scientific civilization to a crawl. Wegener was not immediately aware of this at the front, but at home shortages of all kinds were becoming routine, and frustrations and delays at every level in every activity were the order of the day.

  One suspects, in his complaining and fretting, his fear of a recurrent bout with one of his transient, recurrent depressions. On 21 August he sent a brief note to Köppen apologizing for not answering anyone’s letters, noting that he was depending on Else to transmit news both to the Köppen household in Hamburg and to his own family at Zechlinerhütte.50

  In any case, in September he received permission for a brief trip to Hamburg to celebrate his father-in-law’s seventieth birthday with the whole family. Returning to Mülhausen, he found a completely unexpected present of his own: an official letter from his dean and a copy of the “Patent as Professor,” a citation from the Ministry of Education announcing that “in recognition of his scientific achievements Dr. Alfred Wegener is awarded the title: Professor.”51 This was not, to be sure, the permanent chair in cosmic physics he had hoped for, but rather appointment as an “Extraordinary Professor” (Extraordinarius), something akin to an associate professor: salary, title, but no tenure. Wegener’s superiors had finally achieved a part of their aim, at least temporarily, and moved a step closer to finding Wegener a permanent academic home at Marburg.

  Wegener was delighted with news of this appointment and immediately wrote to Hamburg to tell Else that “he had a late birthday present” and that she “was now a Frau Professor.”52 All of this put him in an expansive mood. He remarked that the “Patent as Professor” was so pompous in its wording that it could have provided a good theme for a Christian Morgenstern poem. “If only these happy events [his salary as a captain and the title of Professor] could outlast the war.”53 And title was most of what it was. It was a ghost professorship, even though it came with a title and a stipend. At Marburg, as the catalogs for each new semester were published, his lectures were regularly announced and just as regularly canceled on account of his war service.54

  Beginning in October 1916, and for many months thereafter, Wegener’s scientific correspondence was very scant. He had no major project under way. Such involvements had always meant steady correspondence with Köppen, but in the period from October 1916 to May 1917 Wegener wrote to his father-in-law only three times. Else Wegener, in her memoir of Alfred’s life, skips over the entire period from October 1916 to June 1917. We know that in the fall of 1916 Wegener was still negotiating to try to raise money to support publication of Else’s translation of Koch’s book about the 1912–1913 expedition, that he was still working on his ever-lengthening account of the Treysa meteorite and its context, and that he continued to receive interested communications concerning his work on tornadoes from colleagues in Germany, Austria, and even Turkey.55

  Forecast Meteorology

  The one area in which Wegener could “keep going” as a scientist was forecast meteorology. He had not been able to get permission to publish the results of his field weather station’s aerology—a naïve hope at best, as such information would certainly have been classified. Still, he was thinking more about weather forecasting (and doing more of it) than at any previous time in his life. His career to this point had been that of an atmospheric physicist. He had used the tools of meteorology but had never before used them in order to find out the weather the next day or the next week. He had used daily weather the way he used meteors: as a means to find out about the structure of the atmosphere. Now, for the first time, he began to pursue synoptic meteorology as a regimen and as a scientific interest.

  One aspect of this pursuit of forecast meteorology was his review of E. Neuhaus’s Die Wolken in Form, Färbung und Lage als locale Wetterprognose (1914).56 Book reviewing was never a mainstay of his scientific work by any means; in a career stretching back to 1906, he had written only five book reviews. For Wegener to review the books of others almost always indicated an interest in pursuing a line of investigation which touched the subject of the book in question. Neuhaus’s book was a slender volume (forty-eight pages) prepared as a handbook for local weather forecasting in the Swiss Alps. It gave instruction on how to use the form, color, and altitude of cloud layers to forecast local weather, an aim furthered by beautiful cloud photography of the kind that Wegener much admired and had practiced. In the review, he compared Neuhaus’s work with that of Ernst Mylius (1846–1929), a pharmaceutical chemist and talented watercolorist specializing in paintings of clouds. In 1914 Mylius had written a charming and useful book, Wetterkunde für den Wassersport; Neuhaus was doing for mountain weather what Mylius had done for clouds over the ocean. Wegener’s review was genial and supportive of both efforts.57

  Wegener had written to Köppen in August 1916 and noted in passing that the Swiss meteorologist Alfred de Quervain (his contemporary in both meteorology and Greenland exploration) was planning a new cloud atlas. Köppen had himself coauthored a major cloud atlas in 1890 with Hugo Hildebransson and Georg Neumayer, and since then, there had been an international cloud atlas that had standardized the representation of cloud forms.

  Somewhere around this time (August–October 1916) Wegener began to consider producing a cloud atlas of his own. He was a strongly visual thinker, as we have already noted; photography has always been a major part of his approach to science. Between the Danmark Expedition and his traverse of the ice cap in 1912–1913, he had produced thousands of photographs; their value as documents in the history of exploration has far outlasted the scientific results of either of these undertakings. His Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere illustrated everything from snow crystals to cloud forms, using his own (and others’) photographs. His work on mirages depended crucially on photographic evidence.

  Yet whatever the value of photographic documentation, it had its limitations. Color photography was still in its infancy, and cloud colors are an important part of the information clouds provide about weather. The thirty-one color plates of the International Cloud Atlas had employed both color photographs and paintings. While a marvel of technology at the time it was published (in the 1890s), this atlas’s color photographs had an important drawback: a photograph can capture only those features of a natural object available at an instant. Wegener was therefore attracted to the idea of a cloud atlas that would rely on colored paintings of clouds, in preference to photographs. That possible project lay somewhere in the future.

  There is every indication that Wegener sank—in the autumn and winter of 1916–1917—into one of the winter depressions that had afflicted him in both Greenland trips. When he finally reestablished contact with Köppen on 20 January 1917, his letter contained much news, but it was for the most part flat and listless. Köppen had inquired earlier in the month about whether meteorological stations in Germany should be equipped with “masts�
� containing meteorological instruments. Wegener replied that he didn’t know and couldn’t think of what they might be used for, or whether it would be worth it, or what the cost would be. Köppen had asked him to visit Hamburg on his next leave, but he declined. He said he had to stay at the weather station in the interest of Kameradschaft, having skipped the Christmas festivities. The latter admission is another indication of his depression; he had found such celebrations unbearable in Greenland. Now he had to put in an appearance at the kaiser’s birthday celebration at the headquarters of the Field Weather Service and then write his monthly report.58

  There were numerous reasons for his depression. He was far from his family and had only spent a few months with his only child, who was now three and was growing up without him. His mother was no better (if no worse) after her stroke and still paralyzed. With food rationing and scarcity, Else and Hilde had gone to stay at die Hütte, where the garden and orchard provided plentiful food, much more than Anna, Richard, and Tony required. While Alfred’s wife and child enjoyed the bucolic scenes of his childhood, he superintended increasingly rancorous daily disputes between his officers and the cook at the weather station. Moreover, after his appointment in September as “extraordinary” professor, there had been no more news from Marburg, thus indicating that the Marburgers had had no success in making such an appointment permanent. This also depressed him. He had now been a Privatdozent for eight years, and many colleagues junior to him had already found professorial appointments.

  He was beginning to give up the possibility of a permanent professorial post at Marburg and starting to look elsewhere. It appears that he and Kurt had discussed a plan that they would both relocate (after the war) to the Meteorological Institute at the University of Straßburg. Otto Stoll (1885–1923) was already there. Stoll had replaced Kurt at the Spitsbergen Observatory in 1913 and was working with Kurt during the war; Kurt had an appointment at Straßburg, and it seemed to all of them that the Central Meteorological Institute at Straßburg would be both the center of meteorological research in Germany and the center for polar exploration, with which they were all deeply involved. It also seemed about to become a major center for geophysics: Beno Gutenberg (1889–1960), a student of Wiechert at Göttingen, was a Privatdozent there, and in the Army Weather Service as well. Alfred went into great detail about the range of scientific facilities and its suitability for Else. The institute where he would work was outside the city, and Else wanted no more of city life than she had to have. This was, of course, partly because of Alfred Wegener himself; he did very poorly in large and loud urban areas.

  “Sixty-Seven Topics”

  In a letter of 20 January 1917 to Köppen, outlining plans for Straßburg, Wegener closed with an interesting comment: “My Meteor is now finished and sent off, and I’m looking around for new work, so I’ll spend a few days thinking about which of my 67 [i.e., numerous] topics I will work on now. Probably it will be [the question of] Color Change of Meteors (once again, this time with expanded material).”59 The choice of this topic is not surprising, and indeed he did proceed with it. It is the comment about the “67 topics” that draws one’s attention. It is an indication that his depression was lifting: he was once again scientifically engaged. Wegener picked up new topics with enthusiasm, almost by chance, and then held these in reserve until something else pushed him in the direction of one or another of them. At any one time there were more things he wanted to work on than he had time or resources to pursue.

  We should also be aware, though, that however many topics Wegener pursued, they were always in the service of the same scientific problem. Since receiving his PhD in 1906, Wegener had investigated and published on the following topics: Helmholtz waves, mirages, atmospheric polarization, the ice phase of water vapor in the atmosphere, sun dogs [Nebensonnen], noctilucent clouds, twilight layers, color changes in meteors, blue lines in glacier ice, temperature changes in snow layers, atmospheric inversions, atmospheric layering (generally considered), föhn winds, atmospheric zones of intermittent audibility, atmospheric turbulence, squall lines and surfaces of convergence and divergence, tornadoes and waterspouts, and, finally—in his hypothesis of continental displacements—the physical properties of the solid Earth. Every one of these “sixty-seven” topics is about the same physical problem: sharp surfaces of discontinuity in otherwise continuous media, leading to dynamic changes in behavior, usually the result of a jump in temperature, pressure, density, or chemical composition. Wegener was aware of this tendency in his thought and had remarked on it as early as 1909.

  In this instance, the push he needed to move him to more work on meteors was not long in coming. In early March 1917, Wegener received an electrifying telegram from Richarz in Marburg: “We have it! Pure iron!”60 They had found the Treysa meteorite—that is, it had been discovered in the woods outside of Treysa by a hunter (who gladly claimed the reward of 300 marks offered by Richarz). The site of the impact was not quite 730 meters (2,395 feet) from Wegener’s predicted point. The discovery of this meteorite created quite a stir, as well as creating something of a problem for Wegener, as his booklet on the meteor was already in page proof. Should he put something about the discovery in the book? He decided merely to insert a note after the title page saying that the meteor had been discovered while this publication was in press. Wegener added that it “seemed more interesting to leave the text completely unaltered, especially in those portions which were not confirmed by the manner and circumstances in which the meteorite was discovered.”61 In other words, he wanted to show how right he had been, by showing those (few) places in which he had been wrong.

  Just one month later, in early April 1917, Wegener got another uplifting and stimulating communication, this time from his old companion in Greenland, Andreas Lundager. Wegener had sent a copy of his 1915 book on continents and oceans to Lundager but had heard nothing for two years. Wegener now learned that Lundager had taken upon himself to write a long review in Geographisk Tidskrift (Copenhagen). He included a synopsis in the letter: it was quite positive and contained the judgment that “to this day we still work with the old contraction theory. Its days, however, seem numbered. It must be assumed that Dr. Alfred Wegener’s displacement theory will take its place.”62

  With this letter from Lundager, Wegener now knew he had exactly two supporters: Lundager and Edgar Dacqué. The latter had devoted considerable space in his Grundlagen und Methoden der Paläographie (Principles and methods of paleogeography, 1915) to explaining and promoting Wegener’s theory. It was therefore a pleasant surprise and an interesting coincidence that almost exactly a month after Lundager’s letter (early May 1917) Wegener received a letter from Dacqué asking him if he had seen the most recent “anti-continental displacement publications (Soergel, Diener, Semper)” and asking if he planned to respond to these or had already done so. In any case, he wanted to discuss them with Wegener.63

  Dacqué, also in “the field” in the German army, was trying to keep his scientific work alive and to defend (against detractors) positions he had taken “at home.” This was a significant problem for younger scientists throughout the war, a problem rarely addressed by historians though amply documented: the extent to which ongoing debates in all the sciences were disproportionately influenced by the writings of senior scientists too old for military service, still teaching in their university positions and training yet another generation of undergraduates without the “balance” that might have been provided by access to younger instructors, most of whom were in uniform. The slow pace of publication, paper rationing, and the difficulty of getting scientific periodicals at the front also slowed down scientific discussion and debate, especially after 1916–1917, extending into the early and middle 1920s. By 1918 the pace of publication had slowed to about half of what it was before the war; it would not regain its normal expansion until 1926.64

  Wegener had not seen any of these “anti-continental displacement” publications, let alone replied to them. Character
istically, Wegener did not respond directly to criticisms of his work, except by revision of a successive scientific publication on the same topic when he found that the criticism merited it. We do not know what he responded to Dacqué, but he did not undertake to obtain and read any of these criticisms.

  In any case, his mind was elsewhere. He had spent the spring reviewing his “67 topics” and come to something of an impasse. He had thought again about turbulence in the atmosphere and had come to the conclusion that he should take the issue off his list.65 He was now trying to decide between the idea of the cloud atlas with (the artist) Ernst Mylius and his work on meteors. He was very enthusiastic about the latter but was coming to realize that his scientific interests were falling into cracks between disciplines and not attracting the audience that he wanted. He was a cosmic physicist, but there were no journals of cosmic physics, and there was no university discipline of cosmic physics. His problem was captured beautifully by his desire to work on meteors. He imagined a series of three publications: one on color change in meteors (already complete), another on the direction of travel and speed of meteors, and a third on the propagation of sound from meteor detonations. There was a problem, though, as seen in his plaintive note to Köppen:

  But where could I publish it? Meteorologists should be very interested in these questions, but astronomers seem to have a monopoly on the study of meteors, and they naturally ignore the atmosphere. All of these are part of the “investigation of the outermost layers of the atmosphere,” but I think we need now a new word for this, something that will allow us to reorganize the phenomena.… I’m not going to bury them [his new publications] in the Proceedings of the Marburg Natural History Society, and the MZ [Meteorologische Zeitschrift] doesn’t see enough interest for a 22 page article [the manuscript on color change in meteors], as they, in the manner of [Felix] Exner, understand meteorology as limited to the study of the weather.66