Published: April 2001 by: NA

The Norwegian scien- tist Kristian Birkeland was found dead in a Tokyo hotel in 1917. Plagued all his life by insomnia and fonder of whisky than was prudent, he had taken ten grams of veronal twenty times the recommended dose. His body was cremated and the ashes were collected by three Japanese professors

"In the unusually large cranium," one of them recorded, "there were still remains of unburnt brain, which looked like asphalt. Professor Nagaoka lifted it up with a bamboo stick and said: 'In this there have been many great ideas.' " :

There had indeed - together with some bizarre ones. The brilliant if eccentrie Birkeland had invented the first commer- cially viable furnace to proouce fertiliser; the 59 patents held by him included one fora mechani- cal hearing aid and another for a gun operated by electricity. But the scientific quest which domi- nated his life - and contributed to his death - was the search for the cause of the aurora borealis.

 The phenomenon of the Northern Lights constituted one of the last mysteries of the natural world. "Some think it is Heaven's Sword," wrote a Chinese scribe 200 years before Christ, "but others think it is a defP hole, with a large blazing fire in the sky." The Vikings thought the Lights were Valkyries, marking out those who would be killed in battle. In Iceland they were feared as the spirits of those unhappy to be dead; villagers believed they would sweep down and cut off the heads of their children to use for ball games.

Jago's biography of Birkeland is written briskly, although it would have been a kindness on the part of her copy-editor to bar the occasional descent into cliche. His unusually long fingers looked like those of a pianist rather than those of a hardy Arctic researcher'?

"What Lucy Jago does so well," assert her publishers, "is to apply the skills of a novelist within a work of non-fiction." That is a curious thing to say of a first book. It would be more accurate to talk of the skills of a television documentary maker, because that is her background, and it has influenced her approach to such matters as narrative sequence and descriptive colour: "Schibsted was in his early fifties with a very fine handlebar moustache that reached beyond the dimples in his cheeks,"

It would also account for the foolish decision to keep references to a minimum and do away with footnotes -"to prevent the book becoming an academic text or a standard biography". That strikes me as confused and perverse; it erodes the authority of her impressive research and denies a service to other toilers in the same vineyard.

Biirkelafid might have been invented by his compatriot Henrik Ibsen. He once thought of becoming an African explorer. He had suffered since student days from what he called "nervous freezing attacks". He became so absorbed in his work that his wife sometimes had to telephone to remind him to come home. In the laboratory he wore a fez - a protection, he explained. against I the harmful rays emitted by his experiments. He took to working with one hand .in his pocket; that way an electric shock would travel down the body rather than across the heart. When the street lights of Omdurrnan ruined his observations, he asked the assist- ant governor of Khartoum to arrange for them to be switched off at 3 o'clock each morning.

Birkeland received only patchy recognition in his lifetime. but 40 years ago space satellites began to turn up evidence supporting his ideas of a flow of electric particles from the sun. In 1966, a US Navy navigation satellite observed magnetic disturbances on nearly every pass made over the polar regions.

Today it is recognised that Birkeland's explanation of the aurora borealis was essentially correct; astrophysicists also now accept his wider cosmogonic theory' that electromagnetic forces played as important a role as gravity in more distant regions of space. A crater on the moon is named after him and his face appears on Norwegian 200 kroner banknotes.