Published: September 2001 by: Traveller

In The Northern Lights, Lucy Jago traces the true story of the Norwegian Kristian Birkeland's scientific obsession with explaining the Lights. On the first page, set in October 1899, this small, balding, insomniac, intensely intellectual 32-year-old, who hates physical activity, is gripped in an Arc- tic storm with his delicate scientific instru- ments and books strapped to a reindeer- pulled sledge in fierce, unrelenting 80-mile-an-hour winds. Fully seven pages later, we then share his sense of wonder: 'Birkeland understood for the first time why the Lights had defied neat explana- tion, they seemed not to belong to Earth but to space... they reached straight into the souls of those who witnessed them.

Birkeland was an unusual figure. Not possessing a diary, he managed to double- book himself to give a scientific lecture on the morning of his wedding day. In his lab- oratory, he chose to work in a fez and slippers, and told his assistants to keep one hand in their pockets for safety from elec- tric shocks to the heart. He moved to Egypt and Sudan in order to study the equator's Zodiacal Lights.

He had a revolutionary theory to explain not only the Lights at the Poles, but also the Zodiacal Lights, comet tails and Saturn's Rings, profoundly influencing modern science's understanding of the universe. He experimented with making a hearing aid, a new telephone, space propulsion and mar- garine. He also invented an electric can- non-cum-torpedo, and a means of creating agricultural fertiliser from the air - powerful weapons in international warfare and business. Bizarrely, he was found dead in a Japanese hotel in 1917.

Northern Lights, a book as fascinating as the Lights themselves, is a combination of biography, readable science, history, inter- national politics, travel and intrigue, all focussed around what we should perhaps more properly call 'Birkeland's Lights'.