Geomagnetic research in the 19th century: a case study of the German contribution

Abstract

Even before the discovery of electromagnetism by Oersted, and before the work of Ampère, who attributed all magnetism to the flux of electrical currents, A.v. Humboldt and Hansteen had turned to geomagnetism. Through the “Göttinger Magnetischer Verein”, a worldwide cooperation under the leadership of Gauss came into existence. Even today, Gauss's theory of geomagnetism is one of the pillars of geomagnetic research. Thereafter, J.v. Lamont, in Munich, took over the leadership in Germany. In England, the Magnetic Crusade was started by the initiative of John Herschel and E. Sabine. At the beginning of the 1840s, James Clarke Ross advanced to the vicinity of the southern magnetic pole on the Antarctic Continent, which was then quite unknown. Ten years later, Sabine was able to demonstrate solar–terrestrial relations from the data of the colonial observatories. In the 1980s, Arthur Schuster, following Balfour Stewart's ideas, succeeded in interpreting the daily variations of the electrical process in the high atmosphere. Geomagnetic research work in Germany was given a fresh impetus by the programme of the First Polar Year 1882–1883. Georg Neumayer, director of the “Deutsche Seewarte” in Hamburg, was one of the initiators of the Polar Year. He forged a close cooperation with the newly founded “Kaiserliches Marineobservatorium” in Wilhelmshaven, and also managed to gain the collaboration of the “Gauss-Observatorium für Erdmagnetismus” in Göttingen under E. Schering. In the Polar Year, the first automatic recording magnetometers (Kew-Model) were used in the German observatory at Wilhelmshaven. Here, M. Eschenhagen, who later became director of the geomagnetic section in the new Meteorological Magnetic Observatory in Potsdam, deserves special credit. Early hypotheses of geomagnetism and pioneering palaeomagnetic experiments are briefly reviewed. The essential seismological investigations at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century are also briefly described as they underpin the modern theory of the Eartdynamo.