Alfred Wegener

Alfred Wegener proposed "continental drift" theory in 1912 and developed it extensively for nearly twenty years. His book on the subject, "The Origin of Continents and Oceans", went through four editions and was the focus of an international controversy in his lifetime and for some years after his death. Wegener's basic idea was that many problems and puzzles of the earth's history could be solved if one supposed that the continents moved laterally rather than supposing that they remained fixed in place. Wegener worked over many years to show how such continental movements were plausible and how they worked, using evidence and results from geology, geodesy, geophysics, paleontology, climatology and paleogeography.

Although he was the author of a "geological theory", he was not a geologist. He was trained as an astronomer and pursued a career in atmospheric physics. When he proposed the theory of continental displacements (1912), he was 31 years old and an instructor of physics and astronomy at the University of Marburg, Germany. In 1906, he and his brother had set a world record for time aloft in a free balloon : fifty-two hours. Between 1906 - 1908 he had taken part in a highly publicized expedition to explore the coast of northeast Greenland. He was also known to the circle of meteorologists and atmospheric physicists in Germany as the author of a textbook, "Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere" (1911). He also wrote a number scientific papers on atmospheric layering.

Early life

Born in 1843, Richard Wegener was ninth of the eleven children of Friedrich Wilhelm Wegener, an owner of a military uniform factory in Wittstock, in the northwest corner of Brandenburg, about 90 kilometers from Berlin. Richard realized his father's ambition to study theology and become an evangelican clergymen. After his seminary study and ordination in 1868, he spent a year as an assistant pastor to parish in Kolmar, Posen -- the Prussian province centered on the historic Polish city of Poznan. Carefully saving his annual salary and his Christmas bonus, he returned to Wittstock and asked Anna Schwarz to marry him. Anna was herself an orphan, born in the tiny hamlet of Zechlinerhutte and raised by relatives in nearby Wittstock. She and Richard had met as students.

Richard studied Greek, Latin and Hebrew and earned a PhD from the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin in 1873. In that same year, Richard and Anna took over the Schindler Orphanage. Richard began his parallel career teaching Greek and Latin at the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster, the illustrious secondary school that the older orphans attended along with the children of Berlin's cultural elite. Richard also fed his other interest and commitments by teaching German literature at a nearby Mädchenschule (girl's school) and holding a chaplaincy at the criminal court in the nearby neighborhood of Moabit.

Later, Alfred Lothar Wegener was born in Berlin, 1 November 1880. Alfred was the fifth and youngest child of Richard Wegener and Anna Schwarz. His birthplace was a converted Austrian embassy at 57 Friedrichsgracht, a scant few blocks from the Imperial Palace, facing the Spree Canal, on the southeastern side of the island. This structure was home to Schindler Orphanage. The spacious interior of the building was more than adequate to house the Wegener family, the thirty or so orphans in their charge, Richard Wegener's assistants in the teaching and daily supervision of the orphans, and the resident domestics under the direction of Anna Wegener.

By the time Alfred was born, Tony (seven) and Willi (six) were already in school. Alfred spent the day with Kurt and his sister Käte, supervised by Anna and the resident domestics. In 1884, when Alfred Wegener was not quite four years old, his sister Käte died quite suddenly after a brief illness. Alfred's mother said that it was likely the close spacing of her last three children (1878, 1879, 1880) that had rendered them less vigorous than the older Tony and Willi, born earlier in the marriage. Moreover, the metropolitan air had left the younger ones "pale and listless". Industrial growth in the last few decades of the 19th century brought great chemical works, paper mills, machine shops, textile and carpet factories to Berlin and its burgeoning suburbs. Much of this development occured just to the north and east of the Museum Insel and these factories were largely fueled by lignite, a poor-quality coal that produced huge quantities of fly ash.

Zechlinerhütte

The Wegeners had by now been in Berlin for sixteen years and had directed the orphanage for eleven of those years. Now they were successful Berliners, in their forties and with a family. They had a grand residence and access to the parks and immense cultural resources of a great capital city. But when all was said and done, they lived in an institution. The Wegener family needed a true home.

Richard and Anna back to rural Brandenburg, to the hamlet of Zechlinerhütte, where Anna had been born. It took them to a plain but spacious house with extensive grounds, fronted by Linden trees and facing a lake. The Wegeners purchased the house, the barn and some adjacent fields for 20,000 marks. The money was provided by Richard's brother Paul, who had taken over the family's uniform factory in Wittstock, as he was pleased to have his brother closer to home again. Built of oak logs and chinked with masonry, the house had been the manager's house of a crystal glass foundry. An undertaking attracted there in the early 18th century by the plentiful fuelwood from the surrounding forests. But the enterprise eventually failed altogether, no longer able to compete with the industrial-scale economies of burgeoning Berlin, leaving the town to eke out a marginal existence concocted by subsistence farming, woodcutting, fishing and catering to the wants of vacationing urbanites and their seasonal homes.

This place, "die Hütte" as Alfred and the other children called it ,was the family home ever after. It was their vacation and summer residence until about 1910 and afterward the year-round retirement home of the parents. When the Wegeners set out for "die Hütte", they traveled out of Berlin by train through industrial suburbs with their smoke-belching stacks and furnaces, out into the surrounding farmlands as far as Gransee, 60 kilometers north of Berlin. From Gransee, the parents proceeded through country lanes with the baggage wagon, while the children hiked the final 20 kilometers from the Gransee Station to Zechlinerhütte through the Menzer Forest, passing only scattered farms and lakes and the minuscule hamlet of Menz on the way.

The children loved the succession of stages in the journey. To leave the bustling train station in Berlin with a mountain of luggage and provisions, to disembark two hours later at the village already "at the end of the line" and from there just to walk away out of the town, and keep walking until the road diminished into a sandy cart track with a grassy median and disappeared into the depth of the Menzer Forest. This great wooded tract, completely cut over in the 18th century to feed the glassworks, had sprung back with the dense character of second-growth evergreen forest.

Cöllnische Gymnasium

In 1890, at the age of ten, Alfred entered the Cöllnische Gymnasium, located a ten-minute walk from home across a bridge over the Spree. The Cöllnische Gymnasium's curriculum was, like all truly classical Gymnasien in Prussia, centered on languages and literature, with a pivotal place given to Greek and Latin. Among the modern languages, in addition to German language and literature, there was instruction in French and English. Students also were taught history, religion, geography and mathematics.

German schoolboys of this era devoted an overwhelming proportion of their study time to Greek and Latin. When Crown Prince Wilhelm took the throne in June 1888 to become Kaiser Wilhelm II, the situation changed rapidly. Wilhelm was sympathetic to modern scientific education, an education suitable for an industrial state that also wised to be a great empire, and was interested in the question of educational reform. By 1892, he had successfully ordered a reduction in the number of hours devoted to Latin. In 1897, the minister in charge of Prussia's universities, Friedrich Althoff, let it be known that he intended to alter secondary school curricula to link mathematics instruction to real instruction in physics, allowing physics to become a secondary school subject in its own right.

It appears that Alfred's physics teacher, who was interested in astronomy and had a refracting telescope, recognized Alfred's talent and interest. He invited Alfred to take up the study by joining him in making observations. For the next year and a half, until his graduation, Alfred pursued astronomy whenever time and weather permitted. Walking back to the Gymnasium in the evenings and observing the heavens with his teacher, from the roof of the school.

Later, Alfred was leaning toward entering the University of Berlin to study astronomy. In the winter of 1899, Alfred passed his Abitur, the final and comprehensive examination that guaranteed automatic admission to the university system. The coming transition to the university was exciting for Alfred largely because it meant the freedom to choose his course and to study henceforth nothing but science and mathematics. Meanwhile, he would still be at home, since the university was not much farther from the orphanage.