Keeping Track - continued...

3. Track

"The visitors were flocking to the summit in crowds and on their way up they were delighted in the strange figures which, decorated with a shiny headdress rotating in the wind, carrying on the back a mysterious instrument, were marching off the railway track in casual tourist clothing." [ZUNTZ 1906, 133, transl. P.F.]

What Zuntz describes here from a tourist angle is a key experiment of his physiological Alp research: the "mounting trial". [see BÜRGI 1900] It combines a physical effort - climbing in thin mountain air - with two separate measuring devices (not to talk of the helmetlike Anemometer or wind measuring apparatus): the respiration apparatus on the back collects the expired air, allows to analyse its amount and components, and thus makes it possible to determine the physiological energy consumption or metabolism. The second measuring device owes itself to the "extraordinary kindness, with which the Rothornbahn's management and its chief engineer supported our work" [ZUNTZ 1906, 107, transl. P.F.] - i.e. the mountain railway track:

"The establishment of the other quantities necessary to determine the performance [...] was made rather easy for us in Brienz. The railway track we used has an extraordinary marking. In its whole extension it is marked with details on length of way, degree of gradient, height above sea-level. The gradient is throughout steady and amounts to 25 %. [...] The space between two sleepers is always 90 cm." [ZUNTZ 1906, 168, transl. P.F., picture 3)

In the alpine landscape and its "unsteady, accidental, and unstructured" topology mountain railway tracks are indispensable to guarantee measurable performances in mounting experiments - even "footpaths could not be used due to their inconstant gradient conditions". [SIMMEL 1997, 297; BÜRGI 1900, 519]
The alpine physiological experiment is in fact based on an uninterrupted rail network: from Berlin to Bern and Brienz to transport the scientists and their delicate instruments safely into the mountains; from Brienz to the Rothorn's summit to send up the experimentees - the strange figures on foot and a complementary control group by train. "A final examination of mountain sickness will not be possible until the railway onto the Jungfrau will be opened in some years", writes Mosso on the limits a related research topic faces for lack of tracks. [MOSSO 1899, 225]