Sophus Tromholt

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Sophus Tromholt
Sophus Tromholt as a photographer (self-portrait 1882/83)
Anna Aslaksdatter Gaup and Anna Jonsdatter Somby, photographed by Tromholt 1882/83
Lars Jacobsen Haetta, photographed by Tromholt 1882/83

Sophus Tromholt (born June 2, 1851 in Husum , † April 14, 1896 in Blankenhain ) was a Danish teacher, northern lights researcher and amateur photographer . At the end of the 1870s he organized a whole Scandinavian observation network for northern lights and recorded the daily, seasonal and solar cycle-related fluctuations in the frequency of the occurrence of auroras at high latitudes. He is better known today for his collection of ethnographic photographs taken in Lapland in 1882/83 , which is in the library of the University of Bergen . In 2013 it was approved by the UNESCO in the list of world cultural heritage entered.

Life

Sophus Tromholt was born in Schleswig, then Denmark, in 1851 as the son of the customs officer Johan Peter Tromholt and his wife Ane Cæcilie. The father was interested in science. A correspondence from him to the weekly journal for astronomy, meteorology and geography about noises he observed during the appearance of the northern lights from 1860 is known. In 1863 the family, which now also included Sophus' three younger sisters, moved to Randers in Jutland . From 1868 to 1871 Tromholt attended the Blaagaard seminar in Copenhagen , where he was trained as a teacher. He practiced his profession for a few years in Jutland and in 1875 became a teacher of science and mathematics at Den Tankske Skole in Bergen , where he stayed until 1882. The move to Bergen was triggered by his growing interest in the phenomenon of the northern lights, which he had observed in Copenhagen during the winters of 1870 to 1872. During his time in Bergen, he wrote several widely recognized textbooks for mathematics, geography and astronomy. Geografiske Talstørrelser i Billeder (German: "Pictorial representations of geographic sizes") was awarded a bronze medal at the Paris World Exhibition of 1878 .

In the winter of 1878/79 he organized northern lights observations at around 100 locations across Scandinavia. He compared the data with his own observations in Bergen and the results published in 1880. Next, he analyzed at the request of Niels Hoffmeyer , director of the Danish Meteorological Institute , series of Northern Lights observations in Stykkishólmur on Iceland and in different places Greenland collected had been. Most of them came from Samuel Kleinschmidt in Godthåb (now Nuuk ).

Aurora observations formed a focus of the scientific work in the First International Polar Year 1882/83. Equipped with a five-year grant from the Norwegian state and financially supported by Jacob Christian Jacobsen in Copenhagen, Tromholt ran a one-man Northern Lights observatory in Kautokeino to make synchronous observations with the main stations in Bossekop near Alta and in Sodankylä in Finland . His stay lasted from the fall of 1882 to the spring of 1883. In addition to his northern lights observations, Tromholt made a contribution to the documentation of the Sami society Kautokeinos. He took hundreds of photographs of extraordinary quality, showing landscapes, buildings, but above all the residents. In the following winter Tromholt worked in Iceland, later as part of his scholarship at the Meteorolisches Institut in Kristiania, today's Oslo .

As an autodidact , Tromholt was not really accepted by the Scandinavian academic society despite his successful academic work. He was never offered a permanent position. He was unable to publish his observations in Kautokeino and Iceland because the funds requested for them were not approved. After his death, a catalog of early Northern Lights observations was published in 1902 by Jens Fredrik Schroeter (1857–1927) and traced back to Tromholt, financed by the Scientific Society in Kristiania and the Fridtjof Nansen Fund.

In 1887 Tromholt moved to Germany, where he worked as a visiting lecturer and non-fiction author. His book Streichholzspiele with 285 puzzles appeared between 1889 and 1915 in a total of seventeen editions. He also invented a tangram- like placement game made of twelve stones called the Nutcracker or Yum-Yum . On November 27, 1887, he married Maria (Mary) Jess (1866–1948) in Flensburg , who had her debut as an opera singer at the Rostock City Theater in 1890 after attending the Leipzig Conservatory and private vocal training in Paris and Berlin . Tromholt died in the lung sanatorium in Blankenhain in 1896 .

Create

Sophus Tromholt is considered a pioneer of northern lights research. He was the first to go beyond a local view of the phenomenon and organize correlated Northern Lights observations that covered a geographic area as large as Scandinavia. Tromholt hoped to gain knowledge about the combined temporal and geographical development of the northern lights, about the distribution of their occurrence and about their altitude in the atmosphere . He wrote to pastors, lighthouse keepers and captains throughout Norway and asked them to describe observations of all northern lights up to the winter of 1878/79 on the enclosed forms. Of the 600 forms sent, almost 100 were returned filled out. In addition, Tromholt turned to the directors of the Scandinavian meteorological institutes, who made further observations of their employees available to him, so that Tromholt finally had 839 reports on northern lights from September 1878 to April 1879. He analyzed this wealth of heterogeneous data with great care and examined the dependence of the occurrence of the northern lights on weather phenomena, moon phases , sunspots and changes in the earth's magnetic field . Tromholt found that northern lights can be seen almost every night in the northernmost latitudes of Scandinavia, but came to the wrong conclusion that they mostly occur locally and at low altitudes.

He corrected his estimate of the minimum height of the northern lights after his observations in the polar year 1882/83. Aurors simultaneously targeted by Tromholt in Kautokeino and Aksel Steen in Bossekop, 100 km away, had an estimated minimum altitude in the range of 76 to 164 km. The average was a realistic value of 113 km. Tromholt's results, both in terms of the height of the northern lights and their daily and long-term fluctuations, were sharply criticized by Adam Paulsen , who headed the Danish station in Godthåb during the polar year and became director of the Danish Meteorological Institute after Hoffmeyer's death in 1884. He had estimated significantly lower aurora heights between 0.6 and 68 km and considered the aurora to be a side effect of electrical discharge processes in the atmosphere.

During his stay in Kautokeino, Tromholt tried to photograph the northern lights. His photographic material was not sensitive enough for this task, even if he chose exposure times of several minutes. However, he used his photographic equipment to take around 300 pictures of landscapes, villages and cultural customs in Finnmark . He also sent travel reports to the Morgenbladet newspaper , in which he wrote about Kautokeino and the people living there, as well as his research. These articles were published in two volumes in London in 1885 under the title Under the Rays of the Aurora Borealis . The book, which received international attention, contained more than 150 illustrations, of which more than 110 were photographic reproductions. It was also published in Norwegian that year.

Tromholt's photos include numerous portraits of the local Norwegians, Sami and Kveni , who are unique for the 19th century in their individualistic and humanistic approach to the indigenous population . Contrary to what was customary at the time, he did not see any exotic species in the seeds. His photos show self-confident individuals. Each photo has the full name of the person portrayed on it.

Tromholt's photographs are important cultural, historical and political documents that were placed on the UNESCO World Document Heritage List in 2003.

Works (selection)

Scientific works

  • Iagttagelser over Nordlys anstillede i Norge, Sverige og Danmark , Christiania Vid. Selsk. Forhandlinger, No. 6, 1880 ( digitized ).
  • Sur les periodes de l'aurore boreale . Meteorologisk Aarbog 1880. Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut, Copenhagen, 1882.
  • Under the Rays of the Aurora Borealis: In the Land of the Laps and Kvæns . Houghton, Mifflin & Co., London 1885 ( Volume 1 , Volume 2 ).
  • Catalog of the Northern Lights observed in Norway up to June 1878 . Edited posthumously by J. Fr. Schroeter, 1898–1902, doi: 10.7557 / 16.3732 .

school books

  • 200 rain gowns. Til brug for Middelskolens øverste Klasser . C. Floor, Bergen 1878.
  • Geografiske Talstørrelser i Billeder . PT Malling, Christiania 1878.
  • Lærebog i Geometri for Middelskoler . Steensballe, Christiania 1879.

Non-fiction

  • Matchstick games: brain teasers and amusement . Spamer, Leipzig 1889.
  • Hundreds of whistling whistles: stimulating and easy conversations for young and old without any preliminary exercise or cumbersome equipment . Verlag des Universum, Dresden 1890.
  • A journey through space . Verlag des Universum, Dresden 1890.

See also

Sophus Tromholt Collection

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ JP Tromholt: Correspondence message concerning the noise of the northern lights. In: weekly for astronomy, meteorology and geography . Volume 3, 1860, p. 237 f.
  2. ^ Solveig Greve: Sophus Tromholt . In: Norsk biografisk leksikon .
  3. ^ A b c K. Moss, P. Stauning: Sophus Peter Tromholt: an outstanding pioneer in auroral research .
  4. ↑ Klaus Irler: The polar explorer and art . In: The daily newspaper on April 9, 2009, accessed on July 7, 2020.
  5. ↑ Thomas Benesch: Mathematics in everyday life . Oldenbourg, Munich and Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-58390-8 , pp. 64 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  6. ^ Wilhelm Kosch , Ingrid Bigler-Marschall (ed.): German Theater Lexicon . tape 4 . Saur, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-907820-30-4 , p. 2659 f . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  7. ↑ Susan Barr: Sophus Tromholt . In: Susan Barr, Cornelia Lüdecke (Ed.): The History of the International Polar Years (IPYs) . Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg 2010, ISBN 978-3-642-12401-3 , pp. 74–76 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-642-12402-0 (English, limited preview in Google book search).
  8. ↑ Sophus Tromholt Collection on the World Document Heritage List, accessed on June 22, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Tromholt, Sophus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Danish teacher, polar light researcher and amateur photographer
DATE OF BIRTH June 2, 1851
PLACE OF BIRTH Husum , Copenhagen
DATE OF DEATH April 14, 1896
Place of death Blankenhain