Earth magnetism research in the 19th century

Even before the discovery of the electromagnetism by Oersted, and before Ampère, who attributed all magnetism to the flux of electrical currents, A. v. Humboldt and Hansteen had turned to geomagnetism. With the help of the "Göttinger Magnetische Verein", a worldwide cooperation under the leadership of Gauss game into existence. Even today, Gauss' theory of the geomagnetism is one of the pillars for geomagnetical research work. Thereafter, J. v. Lamont, Prof. in Munich, took over the leadership in Germany. In England, the Magnetic Crusade was started by the initiative of John Herschel and E. Sabine. At the beginning of the forties, James Clarke Ross advanced to the Antarctic Continent, which was then quite unknown. Ten years later, Sabine was able to gather solar-terrestrial relations from the data of the colonical observatories. In the eighties, Arthur Schuster, following Balfour Stewart's ideas, succeeded in interpreting the daily variations of the electrical process in the high atmosphere. The geomagnetic research work in Germany was given a fresh impetus by the First Polar Year 1882-1883. Georg Neumayer, director of the "Deutsche Seewarte" in Hamburg, had been one of the initiators of the Polar Year. He had a close cooperation with the newly founded "Kaiserliches Marineobservatorium" in Wilhelmshaven, and he also managed to gain the collaboration of the "Gauss-Observatorium für Erdmagnetismus" in Göttingen under E. Schering. In the Polar Year, the first automatic recording magnetometers (Kew-Model) were used in a German observatory in Wilhelmshaven. Here M. Eschenhagen, who later became director of the geomagnetic section in the new Meterological-Magnetic Observatory in Potsdam, gained special merit. The treatise considers preceding hypotheses of geomagnetism as well as the palaeomagnetic studies. The essential seismological investigations at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century are briefly treated. They represent one of the keystones for the modern theory of the Earthdynamo.n