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. Later, 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 (Schindlersches Waisenhaus), a privately endowed orphanage for sons of clergy, teachers, civil servants, landowners and merchants. Richard also began his parallel career teaching Greek and Latin at the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster, 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 that housed 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.

Cöllnische Gymnasium

In 1890, at the age of ten, Alfred entered the Cöllnische Gymnasium. 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.

Education

Royal Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin

The Royal Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin -- located on Unter den Linden, between the State Library and the Royal Arsenal across the way from the Palace of Wilhelm I -- was, at the time Alfred enrolled in it, one of the largest universities in the world. It had a student body of almost 7,000 and a faculty of 450 professors, 227 of them in the Faculty of Philosophy -- what we would now call the School of Arts and Sciences -- and the remained were in law, medicine and theology.

The true size of the teaching faculty was larger, since the German system usually specified only one salaried full professor and one associate professor for each subject, while the rest of the faculty was composed mostly of Dozenten (assistant professors and the instructors). The professors were giants of international reputation. Their appointments were for life. When they died or retired, there were no applicants for their jobs. The ministry of education formed a committee to rank the three current leaders in a given field. Based on this ranking, a "call" went out to a specific person, named as the successor.

Alfred's first-year academic program was analytic geometry, calculus, physics and chemistry. To these fundamental preparatory studies, Alfred also added a course in "practical astronomy". This is the program he would pursue from October 1899 until the following April (the end of the winter semester).

Adolf Marcuse's "Practical Astronomy" course for the 1899 - 1900 year had three segments. The very first part was "Theory and Use of Astronomical Instruments, Especially for Geographical Position Finding." Marcuse took Alfred and the other students on field trips and taught them to level and orient the transits, telescopes, alt-azimuths and other instrument. He taught them how to calculate instrument errors and how to correct observations for temperature -- expansion and contraction of the instrument itself -- and for the relative humidity -- since the amount of water vapor in the air changed the way the light was refracted, causing a measurable and correctable angular displacement. He also regaled them with stories of expedition science, both from his work in Hawaii and his more recent trip to German Samoa. Alfred had landed not just in an astronomy course in which he could do astronomy, but in one that implied that doing astronomy sometimes involved expeditions to distant places.

In the second wing of the course, Marcuse took the students through a general survey of the fundamental ideas and achievements of modern astronomy. The lectures were illustrated with lantern slides. Marcuse was a prolific photographer. He taught every course using slides and believed that all subjects benefited from profuse illustration.

Finally, in the third wing of the course, the first-year astronomy students accompanied Marcuse to the Royal Observatory, where they watched him and the other staff astronomers demonstrate the photographic methods used to document their observations. The students were put to work with practical exercises of observation, photography -- including the preparation of photographic plates and darkroom work --, and measurements of the shifts in the plates thus produced.

The summer semester of the year 1900 was coming soon and with it a chance to alter Alfred's academic program. It was typical at that time for Berlin students to leave for the summer term, from May to August, especially during their first years. Students headed generally for smaller and rural universities. Meanwhile, for his own first semester away, Alfred settled on the university in Heidelberg. The freedom to move about in this way was built into the German university system. In Germany, admission to any university at all was admission to all the universities in the system. This sytem allowed students to move on to whatever university offered the concentration of disciplines most useful and congenial to them, no matter where they had begun their study. It allowed them to study the subject with different teachers in different locations.

Ruprecht-Karls University, Heidelberg

Heidelberg was far to the west and south of Berlin. Other than Munich and Passau, there were no German universities father away. Heidelberg lay among hills of forest and vineyard on the south bank of the River Neckar -- a tributary of the Rhine --, and about 100 kilometers south of Frankfurt-am-Main. Heidelberg had acquired considerable fame as a scientific and medical university in the middle of the 19th century. It was here in Heidelberg that Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff made the fundamental advances in spectroscopy which allowed the analysis of the composition of stars by study of their absorption spectra.

The university also maintained a new astronomical observatory on the Königstuhl, 335 meters above the town. Wegener signed up for the course on calculus given by Leo Königsberger, experimental physics by Georg Hermann Quincke, general astronomy by Wilhelm Valentiner and meteorology by Max Wolf. Both Wolf and Valentiner were pioneers in astronomical photography. They also had made extensive studies of near-earth objects such as comets and asteroids, though much of their later fame came from studies of double-star systems and nebulae.

Astronomy and meteorology were then parts of the same subject. One had to consider atmospheric conditions in every astronomical observation, and especially carefully in positional astronomy, where one was trying to determine where something was as much as what it was. These atmospheric influences meant that would-be astronomers had to learn how to measure and record temperature and humidity to correct for their effects. Moreover, weather prediction and prognostication was also useful to an astronomer. A falling barometer, high cirrus clouds at noon, and a wind backing from the south to the northwest were strong indications in Heidelberg that an evening planned for astronomical observation might well be spent instead working in the darkroom.