Some manuscript material for the Müller–Pouillet Lehrbuch was beginning to come in, mostly from Ficker on meteorology, but there was little to do there as Ficker was extremely competent and meticulous and needed no guidance in determining what were the important problems to discuss; this had all been laid out before Lummer’s death. Wegener had spent some time finding authors to handle the chapter on glaciers and the chapter on oceans. He was extremely pleased that Hans Heß (1864–1940) accepted his invitation to write the chapter on the physics of glaciers. Wegener had admired Heß’s work Die Gletscher (1904) so much that he had carried it with him to Greenland in 1912–1913. For the chapter on physics of the oceans, he turned to Hermann Thorade (1881–1945), an expert on ocean currents and a colleague at the German Naval Observatory in Hamburg. He hoped that he would be able to get Thorade to incorporate material from the Meteor Expedition, due back in 1927, before the book went to press.
He had given little thought during all this time to either climates of the past or displacements; at least if he gave such thought, it left little trace. From 1924 through early 1927 he made not a single entry in his notebook dedicated to the next edition of the book on continents and oceans. Since the autumn of 1924 he had published nothing on these topics, with the exception of a single (paid) article for a geography encyclopedia.64 He had taught extensively and exclusively on meteorological topics for two full years, and all his publications (apart from two brief book reviews) for 1925 and 1926 dealt with the optics, acoustics, and thermodynamics of the atmosphere.
All this changed suddenly and unexpectedly in the summer of 1926. Wegener had entered into a correspondence with George Clarke Simpson (1878–1965), then the head of the British Meteorological Office; had Wegener succeeded Hellmann at Berlin, they would have been official counterparts. Simpson had defended Wegener’s ideas at the 1923 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Like Frank Debenham and Charles Wright (both of whom had defended Wegener at the meeting of the Geographical Society of London in 1923), Simpson had also been on Scott’s Antarctic Expedition. His career was an interesting parallel to Wegener’s in this regard; Simpson had handled the temperature and wind observations, sent up balloons, and made electrical and magnetic observations at Cape Evans, only a few years after Wegener had filled that role on the Danmark Expedition in Greenland. When Wegener had been in the German Army Weather Service for the Balkans, Simpson had been his opposite number for the British Army in Mesopotamia.
Wegener had written to Simpson in July 1926. There was no summer vacation away from Graz that year for the Wegener family; Alfred and Else had scraped together enough money to make a major and much-needed addition to their house, including several upstairs rooms over a new breezeway entrance to their garden, and wanted to be there during the construction to supervise the work.65 Wegener had wanted to know (from Simpson) the exact location of the astronomical observatories in Australia, at Adelaide and Sydney. These were part of the observation net for a planned major global experiment to fix the longitude of astronomical observatories by the exchange of radio time signals.66
The longitude program that prompted Wegener’s letter to Simpson was the brainchild of a French general, Gustave Auguste Ferrié (1868–1932), who was himself a radio pioneer and now deeply involved in the establishment of an international network of radio stations at astronomical observatories, to coordinate their work and fix their longitudes with great exactness. Ferrié was the head of the International Commission on Longitudes by Radio, president of the French National Commission on Geodesy and Geophysics, and member of several other major organizations. The idea for his radio network had undergone initial planning at a meeting in Rome in 1922, had been ratified in Madrid in 1924 (Wegener had known of this work), and had been planned in detail after the International Astronomical Union meeting in Cambridge in July 1925.67 The actual experiment to intensively measure longitudes at a global network of stations (thirteen in all) was to begin in October 1926 and last for two months.68
Wegener had thought that these observations might serve the subsidiary purpose of testing his theory of continental displacements, though the proceedings of the Cambridge meeting in 1925, like those of the Madrid meeting in 1924, do not mention continental displacements. He wanted to be able to compare the longitudes of these Australian stations in 1926 with longitudes measured by exchange of telegraphic time signals (before the First World War) between Australia, Hawaii, and Canada. Simpson was very forthcoming and sent Wegener a good deal of data. It was a conspicuous sign of thawing of relations between Britain and Austria (if not Germany) that they should be in correspondence at all.
Wegener had learned a year earlier of a full-page article in the New York Times entitled “Scientists to Test ‘Drift’ of Continents.”69 The article was by William Bowie (1872–1940) of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, who had, with John Hayford (1868–1925), done more than anyone else to establish the principle of isostasy, and on whose work Wegener had depended since 1912. In the New York Times article, Bowie represented Ferrié’s international longitude network as an explicit attempt to measure not just continental drift but Wegener’s theory of continental drift. (This was not actually the case at all, by the way.) The article was illustrated with Wegener’s maps of the Carboniferous and the Quaternary, employing again the Hammer projections he had used in 1924. Wegener was identified in the article as “Professor Wegener of Austria,” which was (strictly and recently) true, as well as much more politically acceptable in the United States in 1925 than “Professor Wegener of Germany.”
In the article, Bowie gave a fair and clear summary of the outlines of Wegener’s theory, stressing its dependence on the theory of isostasy (Bowie’s “own” theory). Because, Bowie wrote, Wegener’s theory predicts continual motions of the continents and because the radio measurements should be longitudinally accurate within about 10 feet (after two months of continuous measuring), it should be easy “after five, ten or some other number of years to make new determinations of longitude in exactly the same places.… If the new longitude for any place is found to differ more than twenty or twenty-five feet from the first determination, one would suspect that the change had been caused by earth movements rather than merely the unavoidable errors of observation.”70
Wegener was “highly elated” to hear that such a test was to take place, but he was sorry to discover that almost all the stations would be either in midlatitudes or in the Southern Hemisphere. His theory supposed that most of the drift was currently happening farther north—Canada, Labrador, Greenland, Scotland. The tests as described in the New York Times by Bowie would not yield any results within a few years and would probably take “a century or more, before an appreciable change can be firmly established.”71 Of course, Wegener had no way of knowing that the International Commission on Longitudes by Radio had not planned this network to test his theory; that was Bowie’s invention.
The “sudden development” in the summer of 1926 came from a different quarter: a letter from Willem A. J. M. van Waterschoot van der Gracht (1873–1943), a Dutch mining engineer and economic geologist who had worked in the Netherlands as well as in southern Europe, South and East Africa, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, and the Dutch East Indies. He was interested in everything of economic value: oil, coal, and mineral ores. He had made his reputation early, using German maps of gas wells drilled inside Germany to extrapolate to the Netherlands where and how deeply one should drill to find natural gas. This method resulted in a major discovery in 1906 and made him well known.72
In March 1915 he had accepted a commission from Royal Dutch Shell to look into the oil and coal resources of the Mid-Continent Region of the United States. He spent two years in the United States and then returned to the Netherlands, but in 1923 he came back to the United States, and by 1926 he was a vice president (in charge of exploration) for the Marland Oil Company, of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Marland at that time was one of the largest oil companies in the United Sta
tes. Exploration geophysics was secretive work, and he published little, but he was extremely active and known for his desire to employ general theory to find new deposits.73
Van der Gracht told Wegener that he had organized a symposium to take place in New York City in November 1926 under the auspices of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, on Wegener’s theory of displacements. Van der Gracht described Wegener’s as a “theory of the origin and movement of landmasses, both intercontinental and intra-continental.”74 By this he meant both the displacement of continents and the great compressive eras of mountain building, stressing the homology between Wegener’s theory and that proposed by Argand to explain the Alps. Wegener could not attend the symposium, of course, not least because the United States and Germany had not yet resolved their differences over scientific cooperation. Nevertheless, Wegener could send a contribution updating his views as of the fall of 1926. Wegener accepted the invitation to participate (remotely) and sent along two notes to be read at the meeting. Before we go into their content, it is interesting to see why and how the symposium was organized.
Van der Gracht was at this time working on a major study of North American geology, eventually published in the Netherlands in 1931 under the title “The Permo-Carboniferous Orogeny in the South Central United States.”75 He was aware of the controversy that had been going on in Europe for some years concerning Wegener’s hypothesis. He was also aware that almost no public attention had been paid to Wegener in the United States. One might, as an instance of this, point to the difference between the reviews of Wegener’s third edition offered by the British publication Nature and the American publication Science in 1925. The Nature review, extensive, respectful, and reflective, was the work of John Walter Gregory (1864–1929), a full professor at the University of Glasgow, a fellow of the Royal Society, and a distinguished field geologist who had worked on the East African rift valleys and in Australia.76 On the other hand, the review in Science was by Frank A. Melton (1896–1985), a junior instructor at Columbia one year out of graduate school; his review was a single page in length and noted that only three North American authors had contributed to the debate: two Canadians and the U.S. mineralogist H. S. Washington (1867–1934), who had a PhD from Leipzig (1893).77
Since U.S. geologists, in their professional publications—the Journal of Geology, the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, and the American Journal of Science—seemed determined to ignore both Wegener’s theory and his entire approach to earth science, van der Gracht had organized the symposium to force the issue, inviting a panel of well-known geologists—opposed to, neutral on, and supportive of displacement—to speak. His purpose was pragmatic, and although he was sympathetic to Wegener, his interest in the theory was chiefly its economic utility:
We petroleum geologists should feel a lively interest in this controversy. We realize that exploration for petroleum becomes ever more difficult, and that we are now looking for petroleum deposits of which there is very little, if any, indication at the surface. The days of mere hunting for structure are past, certainly for this country, although we feel convinced there exist many hidden pools which await our drill. Unless we leave their discovery to chance, we have to approach the problem of exploration ever more from a viewpoint of scientific research into the fundamentals of regional structural geology and resultant sedimentation. This is why the problem, which deals with the question of whether or not there has occurred and still occurs considerable drift in the outer shell of the earth, is of practical interest to us. If true, it must have affected sedimentation and deformation of the strata. But drift theory is very closely connected with the determination of the climate which various parts of the earth may have had in geological periods … [and] must have seriously influenced the character of the sediments and their value as source beds or reservoirs for petroleum. Such considerations should be taken seriously into account when planning explorations in more or less virgin territory. It is of particular interest for the study of foreign oil fields and of possibilities in remote, little-known regions of our globe.78
Wegener sent his contribution to the planned symposium to van der Gracht to translate. Wegener titled it “Two Notes Concerning My Theory of Continental Displacements,” though van der Gracht translated this as “Continental Drift.”79 Wegener addressed two very specific matters. The first of these was the question of the so-called Squantum Tillite. This apparently glacial deposit of pebbles, boulders, and clay—poorly sorted, and even with some apparent “varve” deposits, indicating periglacial lakes—occurred in beds 610 meters (2,000 feet) thick and was part of a larger deposit called the Roxbury Conglomerate, which had been mapped south from Massachusetts and west through the Appalachian Region. It seemed to correlate with other apparent glacial deposits of the same age in Kansas and Oklahoma. The problem for Wegener was that these deposits were dated from the Carboniferous and occurred almost exactly on the position of the equator which he had reconstructed for that period. He had raised this difficulty himself (in detail) in Klimate der geologischen Vorzeit.80
Wegener’s own conviction was that these were pseudoglacial, and geological opinion today is that he was correct, that they represent marine landslide deposits, and in any case that they are hundreds of millions of years older than the Carboniferous period. However, in 1926 it was the most outstanding climatological anomaly of all the evidence he collected, and he took it to be a direct challenge to his theory. As he wrote, “if any of these conglomerates are truly glacial, they would be in flagrant contradiction to my conception.… Either one or the other of the previous conclusions must be wrong: either these conglomerates are only pseudo-glacial, or the geographic latitude of these areas was not 10 to 30°, but at least 60° in the Permo-Carboniferous.”81 He wanted this to be resolved and hoped that it could be done without reference to continental displacements. He said that it should be decided independently and impartially, and that this could only be done in America, disregarding all assumptions about other parts of the world.82
Wegener’s second note concerned the question of measurement. He referenced his discovery of the plan by the International Astronomical Union, “of which I became aware through an article of W. Bowie in the New York Times.”83 He repeated his disappointment that no high-latitude stations were involved in this network, as well as his hope that stations could be established both in Greenland and in Madagascar, locations in which much greater shifts could be expected in a short period of time. “In any case,” he wrote, “it is to be expected that if we concentrate on such regions as would be particularly susceptible to change under the drift theory, it would be possible much sooner to obtain positive results, and here, as everywhere else, the results of greater value are positive rather than negative.”84 What he meant here was that a positive result would be evidence of displacement, whereas a negative result would not show displacement but would also not rule it out; therefore, it was a choice, in the short term, between a confirmation and a longer wait. Then as now, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
The symposium was held as planned on 15 November 1926 in New York. Most of the speakers opposed Wegener both in substance and in method. Notable among these were the Yale stratigrapher Charles Schuchert (1858–1942), William Bowie the geodesist, and Chester Longwell (1887–1975), another Yale geologist. This symposium, as well as the fate of Wegener’s theory in North America in its aftermath, has a complicated history. It has been analyzed in greatest detail by historian Naomi Oreskes in her book The Rejection of Continental Drift (1999). The standard story in the United States, for some decades, was that North American geologists rejected continental drift in the 1920s (and thereafter) based on the sound and substantive geological objections to Wegener’s ideas presented during this symposium. Oreskes argues that this is quite wrong.
Much more important than the issues raised in the symposium—the supposed lack of a suitable “mechanism” for drift, or a host of individual factual “
mistakes” by Wegener—was a methodological stance, an American insistence on an interpretation of “multiple working hypotheses” that ruled out any compact presentation of any theory and its supporting evidence (and thus all displacement theory) as “unscientific” advocacy. The Americans blended this insistence (which they preached but rarely practiced) with an interpretation of “uniformitarianism” (a uniform pace and mode of geological change) which effectively ruled out any theory but the permanence of continents and oceans.
Oreskes shows that the North Americans repeated these heuristic and methodological principles—multiple hypotheses and uniformitarianism—as if they were a theory of Earth with empirical warrant, while treating their own picture of Earth (permanence of continents and oceans, with small land bridges appearing and disappearing) not as a theory but as a body of empirical fact. This rendered the community impervious to criticism and immobile in the face of changing methods and results in geology through the middle of the twentieth century. This sort of attitude is exactly the description that Emile Argand applied to proponents of continental permanence, which he called not so much a theory but an attitude toward theory, or rather a refusal to take a theoretical stance.
This sort of intransigence has also been emphasized by Robert P. Newman, who has pointed out that the “symposium,” as discussed by most geologists in their publications, never took place. The only actual speakers were van der Gracht, Schuchert, Bowie, Longwell, Charles Berkey (1884–1955), and Andrew C. Lawson (1861–1952). The last two never submitted manuscripts for the published volume, which contained notes and papers by (nonattending) Stanford University geologist Bailey Willis (1857–1949); Chicago structural geologist Rollin T. Chamberlin (1881–1948), the son of T. C. Chamberlin; Edward W. Berry (1875–1945), a Baltimore paleobotanist; Joseph Singewald (1884–1963), a structural geologist from Johns Hopkins University; David White (1862–1935), an expert on coal and former chief geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey; and Frank Bursley Taylor (1860–1938), who had proposed drift independently of Wegener in 1910. Van der Gracht solicited manuscripts from Europe to complete the volume and published contributions by, in addition to Wegener, G. A. F. Molengraff (1860–1942), who had worked in South Africa and the East Indies; the British geologist J. W. Gregory; and the Irish geologist John Joly (1857–1933), an expert on radioactivity, who had his own theory of Earth, modeled on Wegener’s approach, but with a different idea about the mechanism.85
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