Alfred Wegener was born in Berlin on November 1, 1880, the son of a clergyman who ran an orphanage in the city, and he studied at the university there and then at Heidelberg and Innsbruck, taking a doctorate in astronomy in 1905. He did not stay in astronomy. He turned to meteorology, and he went to Greenland with an expedition in 1906 and again in 1912, and he learned to fly balloons and to send up kites to measure the upper air. He kept careful notes. The cold taught him patience.
The idea for which he is remembered came from maps. He saw that the coastlines of South America and Africa fit together, and that the same fossils and the same rock layers appear on both sides of the Atlantic, and that the same kinds of plants turn up in places whose climates are now very different. He put the case in lectures and papers in 1912, and in 1915 he published a book called The Origin of Continents and Oceans. The book grew with each edition. He argued that a single land mass he named Pangaea had broken up and that the pieces had moved apart over hundreds of millions of years.
Most geologists turned the idea down. He had no convincing answer to the question of what force could push a continent through the rock of the ocean floor, and his figures for the speed of the movement were far too high, and a leading school of American geologists dismissed him. He was mocked in print. The opposition was not only about evidence, for he was a meteorologist writing about the deep earth and he stood outside the group that controlled the field, and the argument grew bitter. He died before the answer arrived.
Wegener died in 1930 on the ice of Greenland during his last expedition, at the age of fifty. In the 1950s and 1960s, studies of the magnetism of rocks and of the ocean floor showed that the sea floor spreads and that the continents do move, and his name was restored. The proof came late. The movement of plates is now the base of the earth sciences, and the man who first argued for it is remembered for a case that took forty years to win.