14 Facts About Kristian Birkeland

Kristian Birkeland is best remembered for his theories of atmospheric electric currents that elucidated the nature of the aurora borealis.

Kristian Birkeland was born in Christiania to Reinart Kristian Birkeland and Ingeborg and wrote his first scientific paper at the age of 18.

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

The discovery of X-rays inspired Kristian Birkeland to develop vacuum chambers to study the influence of magnets on cathode rays.

Kristian Birkeland noticed that an electron beam directed toward a terrella, a model of the Earth consisting of a spherical magnet, was guided toward the magnetic poles and produced rings of light around the poles and concluded that the aurora could be produced in a similar way.

Kristian Birkeland developed a theory in which energetic electrons were ejected from sunspots on the solar surface, directed to the Earth, and guided to the Earth's polar regions by the geomagnetic field where they produced the visible aurora.

Kristian Birkeland provided a diagram of field-aligned currents in the book, and this diagram was reproduced on the back of the Norwegian 200 kroner 7th series banknote in the lower right corner, and his terrella experiment is shown on the front at the left with a portrait of Birkeland on the right.

Kristian Birkeland's theory was disputed and ridiculed at the time as a fringe theory by mainstream scientists, most notoriously by the eminent British geophysicist and mathematician Sydney Chapman who argued the mainstream view that currents could not cross the vacuum of space and therefore the currents had to be generated by the Earth.

At a dinner party only one week later, Eyde told Kristian Birkeland that there was an industrial need for the biggest flash of lightning that can be brought down to Earth in order to make artificial fertilizer.

The resulting company, Norsk Hydro, hugely enriched Norway, and Kristian Birkeland then enjoyed adequate funding for research, his only real interest.

In 1913, Kristian Birkeland may have been the first to predict that plasma was ubiquitous in space.

In 1916, Kristian 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".

Kristian Birkeland's face appears a second time in a watermark in the blank space above the drawing of the terrella, and his rudimentary magnetosphere appears on the back, but is only visible under ultraviolet light.

The ring encircling the magnetic pole depicted on the back of the bank note is similar to the patterns predicted by Kristian Birkeland and shown more recently by satellites.