The researcher who disappeared
He was born as a child of the civil service, made his way to Siberia in the early 1800s, but is today best known for being our editor for the almanac. Now it is time to look at Christopher Hansteen (1784-1873) with new eyes, Vidar Enebakk believes. He recently went out of his way to order «Christopher Hansteen. Cultivator of science and polar explorer».
– If you first see how important Hansteen was, it’s nice to know how little he is today. And to the extent that he is remembered, it is as an astronomer. But what it was internationally known for was the study of the earth’s magnetism.
Got a trip to Copenhagen
The story of Christopher Hansteen obviously also had a beginning. He was born not far from the fortress of Akershus in then-Christiania, into a prosperous family. The father was a consumption inspector. Konsumpsjon was a consumption tax on goods such as grain, meat, fish and beer, and the inspectors were civil servants. But the father died when Christopher was only seven years old, and then it was a different financial situation for the family. Fortunately for the boy, it was his uncle who was the principal of the cathedral school in the city. Young Christopher got a place there, and the uncle became a kind of father figure.
It was the Age of Enlightenment, it was educational reform, and no one could ein ta artium in Norway. Good news for Christopher Hansteen. In 1802 he had top grades in several subjects with him when he traveled to Copenhagen to study. And it was in Denmark that he saw a globe for the first time.
Hansteen was supposed to study law, but was not very interested in it. But he became part of an environment around, among others, the national poet Adam Oehlenschläger and the naturalist Hans Christian Ørsted, whose themes included magnetism and electricity.
Several important things happened in Denmark: Hansteen met Andrea Borch, who became his wife. She was a professor’s daughter. He got a position in Frederiksborg, north of Copenhagen, before in 1813 he was recruited to the new university in Christiania; Royal Frederiks University. He became a lecturer in applied mathematics in 1814 and a professor just two years later.
The list of what Hansteen did to benefit the new nation is long: In 1815 he was editor of the official Norwegian almanac, he ran the university’s astronomical observatory, was in charge of what is today the Kartverket from 1817, and he led . in Norway got the same time.
But why is he so little known today?
Was Abel his teacher
– There is little room for natural vitamins in the Norwegian public sector, says Vidar Enebakk.
The historian of ideas has been appointed as head of the secretariat for the National Research Ethics Committee for Social Sciences and Humanities (NESH), and has written a book about Hansteen in his spare time. The starting point was research he did from 2009 to 2012, when he was supervised as a researcher at the Forum for university history.
– I thought I was going to write about Hansteen and the observatory, but then I came across these magnetic things after a while, laughs Enebakk.
More on magnetane in a bit.
But it is the case that if someone asks you to come up with the name of a great mathematician from the early 1800s, there is a good chance that it will be another Norwegian name: Niels Henrik Abel. He was none other than eleven to Hansteen, and according to Store norske lexikon, both Hansteen and his wife were important to the somewhat younger Abel.
– Hansteen was interested in applied mathematics. What he did was probably more relevant today, but it was the theoretical Abel who was idealized, says Enebakk.
With work with both the almanac, the observatory and many other things, many contemporaries knew who Hansteen was. He was a communicator who wrote in both newspapers and weekly magazines, and he wrote textbooks – in addition to scientific articles.
– It can be difficult to understand today how much time went into raising money. One had to have money for construction and one had to be able to travel. The idea that the state should finance long-term and fundamental research was far-fetched at the time, so the governing authorities had to overextend themselves, says Enebakk.
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A race
Hansteen closes with conviction. In 1819 he published the work “Untersuchungen über den Magnetismus der Erde”. This work was supported by King Karl Johan himself. In the same year, Hansteen traveled to London to promote his book, and there he also started making measurements with a new instrument: Hansteen’s magnetometer. This was to become important in the years to come.
Enebakk describes that Hansteen saw probably one hundred and eighteen years in time, to the British naturalist Edmond Halley. He had a theory that the earth had four magnetic poles. Hansteen accepted this theory: Was it so that there could be a magnetic pole in Siberia?
For Hansteen, it was simple: He had to go to Siberia and find this out. With the support of both the king and the Storting, he then traveled through Russia from 1828 to 1830.
– There were many who had their sights set on Siberia, but no precise measurements had been made. Now there were more who had an ambition to travel there, says Enebakk.
In 1829, the well-known German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt also traveled through Russia to map the earth’s magnetism.
– Simply a scientific race?
– Yes, one can say that. And Hansteen was the underdog. But he found his magnetic pole in Siberia.
Met resistance
So Hansteen was in Siberia for two years, made measurements, and then wrote a popular science fiction work before Ibsen’s works were the most read Norwegian book abroad.
But Hansteen met an opponent. The German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss rejected the idea that it could be four magnetic poles. And his vision gradually became the prevailing one. But that does not mean that Hansteen was wrong, says Enebakk.
– It is a myth that Hansteen himself thought he had not found anything. This is not true. And in Great Britain in the 1830s, Hansteen’s theories were embraced. Only from the 1840s did the theories of Gauss become dominant.
Why did this happen?
In the book, Enebakk describes how, in the early 19th century, a form of romantic science arose, in the tradition of the German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In this tradition, both Humboldt and Hansteen pass the inn, writes Enebakk. Romanticism was metaphysical in both a religious and scientific sense: the romantic and religious impulses can be found in Hansteen’s view of both nature and science. The whole notion of nature as veiled and wisdom as disclosure is based on a certain conception of God”, writes Enebakk.
-Hansteen and Gauss therefore had different views on science itself: Hansteen worked as a physicist and asked the question “what is the cause”, while the mathematician asked the question “how can we describe the phenomenon”. Gradually, the approach to Gauss gained ground, and Hansteen was labeled as old-fashioned, says Enebakk.
… men maybe Hansteen was right?
Hansteen and his family move into the new Observatory on Solli in 1833. How important he was to the university was evident in several ways: A medal was made to honor him when he had his 50th anniversary as a civil servant in 1856. The students collected a bust of him, which was set up in the Observatory. When Hansteen died in 1873, Bjørstjerne Bjørnson wrote “The students’ song at Professor Hansteen’s bier”, and it was the university that paid for the funeral.
Although Hansteen had somehow lost to Gauss thirty years earlier, he was still convinced that he was the one who was right. It wasn’t actually a matter of disagreement, he thought, but of different approaches. “When it has been said that I have made a mistake by attributing four magnetic poles to the earth, since it only has two, then it is a completely empty argument, as we are talking about completely different things”, wrote Hansteen himself.
Now the researchers look back to Hansteen. In 2019, Aftenposten wrote that the magnetic pole moves 55 kilometers a year. It is much faster than before, and the researchers are unsure why.
It was the Briton James Ross who managed to place the magnetic north pole, it happened in 1833. And speaking of racing, it was Roald Amundsen who was the first to clearly find it, and he also showed that the pole point was in motion.
Now researchers have started to take an interest in the historical measurement data from Hansteen, says Enebakk.
– Does what is happening now mean that Hansteen may have been right?
– No, but maybe he wasn’t completely wrong after all? Now international researchers point to “a guy in Norway who did research on a magnetic pole in Siberia two hundred years ago”, laughs Enebakk.