Kristian Birkeland

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Kristian Olaf Bernhard Birkeland (born 13 December 1867 – 15 June 1917) was a

Birkeland was born in Christiania (Oslo today) to Reinart Birkeland and Ingeborg (née Ege)^[3] and wrote his first scientific paper at the age of 18. Birkeland married Ida Charlotte Hammer in May 1905. They had no children and, due to Birkeland's preoccupation with his work, they divorced in 1911.^[4]

Suffering from severe paranoia due to his use of barbital as a sleeping aid, he died under mysterious circumstances in his room in the Hotel Seiyoken in Tokyo while visiting colleagues at the University of Tokyo. A post-mortem revealed that Birkeland had taken 10 g of barbital the night he died, instead of the 0.5 g recommended. The time of death was estimated at 3am on 15 June 1917.^[1] Some authors have claimed that he committed suicide.^[5] "On the nightstand lay a revolver".^[6]

Research

Birkeland organized several expeditions to Norway's high-latitude regions where he established a network of observatories under the auroral regions to collect

Birkeland proposed in 1908 in his book The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition 1902–1903

Proof of Birkeland's theory of the aurora only came in 1967 after a probe was sent into space. The crucial results were obtained from U.S. Navy satellite 1963-38C, launched in 1963 and carrying a magnetometer above the ionosphere.^[11] Magnetic disturbances were observed on nearly every pass over the high-latitude regions of the Earth. These were originally interpreted as hydromagnetic waves, but on later analysis it was realized that they were due to field-aligned or Birkeland currents.

The scale of Birkeland's research enterprises was such that funding became an overwhelming obstacle. Recognizing that technological invention could bring wealth, he developed an electromagnetic cannon and, with some investors, formed a firearms company. The coil-gun worked, except the high muzzle velocities he predicted (600 m/s) were not produced. The most he could get from his largest machine was 100 m/s, corresponding to a disappointing projectile range of only 1 km. So he renamed the device an aerial torpedo and arranged a demonstration with the express aim of selling the company. At the demonstration, one of the coils shorted and produced a sensational inductive arc complete with noise, flame, and smoke. This was the first failure of any of the launchers that Birkeland had built. It could easily have been repaired and another demonstration organized.

However, fate intervened in the form of an engineer named

The Birkeland–Eyde process is relatively inefficient in terms of energy consumption. Therefore, in the 1910s and 1920s, it was gradually replaced in Norway by a combination of the Haber process and the Ostwald process.

In 1913, Birkeland may have been the first to predict that plasma was ubiquitous in space. He wrote: "It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. We have assumed that each stellar system in evolutions throws off electric corpuscles into space. It does not seem unreasonable therefore to think that the greater part of the material masses in the universe is found, not in the solar systems or nebulae, but in 'empty' space."^[7]

In 1916, Birkeland was probably the first person to successfully predict that the solar wind behaves as do all charged particles in an electric field: "From a physical point of view it is most probable that solar rays are neither exclusively negative nor positive rays, but of both kinds".^[12][13] In other words, the solar wind consists of both negative electrons and positive ions.

The first complete map of the statistical location of Birkeland currents in the Earth's polar region was developed in 1974 by A.J. Zmuda and J.C. Armstrong and refined in 1976 by T. Iijima^[14] and T.A. Potemra^[15][16][17]

As a scholar with wide interests, Birkeland joined the control commission of NSFPS (Norwegian Society For Psychic Research). The 299 members of the society included, by 1922, people like

In 2017, Yara International ordered the Yara Birkeland, which will be the world's first autonomous ship and is named after Birkeland. It will enter service in 2018 and be fully autonomous by 2020.^[21]

Quotes

It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. — Kristian Birkeland 1913^[7]: 720

A very few lonely pioneers make their way to high places never before visited . . . they create the living conditions of mankind and the majority are living on their work. — Kristian Birkeland^[1]: 285

References

Further reading

Books

• Full text of The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition 1902–1903 (158 MB)
• Kristian Birkeland, The First Space Scientist(2005)
  ISBN 1-4020-3293-5
  by Egeland, Alv, Burke, William J.
• Lucy Jago (2002). The Northern Lights. London: Penguin Books.
  ISBN 9780140290158

Articles

• More articles from the NASA Astrophysics Data System
• Egeland, A.; Leer, E. (1986). "Professor Kr. Birkeland: His Life and Work". IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science. 14 (6): 666–677.
  S2CID 24859758
  .

External links

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