Father, Son, and the Entrepreneurial Spirit: Otto Pettersson, Hans Pettersson, and the Early Twentieth-Century Inheritance of Oceanography

Abstract

Like many other scientists before and after him, the Swedish oceanog-rapher and physicist Hans Pettersson (1888–1966) was exposed to scientific activity from an early age. He grew up surrounded by scientific and cultural interests, in a household where ‘the elite from the scientific world gathered’.¹ Later, he recreated the ‘atmosphere’ of his upbringing in his own home, with assistance from his wife Dagmar (née Wendel, 1888–1978).² In 1914, Pettersson received a PhD in physics. After doing radioactivity research at the Radium Institute in Vienna for a period in the 1920s — work for which he is best known — he returned to Sweden. In 1930 he was appointed the nation’s first Professor of Oceanography. Since the 1890s, his father Otto Pettersson (1848–1941) had exercised an increasingly international influence over oceanography. Growing up with a ‘renowned oceanographer’ as a father, and with a laboratory on the family estate, Hans Pettersson inherited science as a product of family relations.³