The Weatherman
from The Slow Machine
In April 1906, two brothers went up in a hydrogen balloon over northern Germany and stayed aloft for fifty-two and a half hours, longer than anyone ever had. The younger one was Alfred Wegener. Six years later he told the German geological establishment that the continents move. Episode 4 of The Slow Machine is about the weatherman, who was a good deal more than that: an astronomer who walked into the newest science there was and spent his twenties studying a fluid. A torn newspaper, and the lines of print that run across the tear. His father-in-law's climate map, built to sort the world as it is, turned backwards until it found ice in the tropics and a lost South Pole. And why the idea lost — not small men shouting down a visionary, but a British geophysicist who did the arithmetic and was right. The Slow Machine is a nine-part series on how we found out that the continents move, and why almost every clue came from an instrument built for something else entirely. Next time: Episode 5, "Listening to the Inside" — what an earthquake tells you if you know how to hear it, and an English geologist who worked out how the engine works and admitted he could not prove a word of it. — Guest voices: Alex John (Alfred Wegener) and Tom H (Rollin T. Chamberlin), both found on Fiverr. Every quotation is listed with its source on this episode's page at theslowmachine.com. Written and narrated by Michael Goddard. Music composed with Suno. Sound effects from freesound.org, all Creative Commons 0. Every voice in this series is human.
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