Christensen

Christen is Christian worn down for daily use, and Christensen is son of Christen: son, at one remove, of the follower of Christ. When Adolf VIII, Count of Holstein, was offered the Danish crown in 1448 and refused it, the throne went to his nephew instead, who took it as Christian I. From then on the name a Jutland household answered to was the royal name in another shape.

The Danish government outlawed the patronymic practice in 1856, and every household then answering to Christensen kept it for good. What froze was already a crowded name, sixth most common in Denmark and carried by about 2 per cent of the population. The same given name had built a surname twice over: in Scotland, Christie formed as a patronymic meaning son of Christian or son of Christopher, ran at nearly forty-four times the British average in Kincardineshire at the 1881 census, and its bearers are counted a sept of Clan Farquharson.

Andrine Christensen was born at Aker on 9 February 1814 to Hans Nicolay Johansen and Ellen Christensen, and carried her mother's surname rather than her father's. She was a pupil at Johan Peter Strömberg's theatre in Christiania from the day it opened, 30 January 1827, and she was on the stage that night: at twelve she danced a ballet with Henriette Hansen and took solo parts in the dance divertissement, and the performance was well received.

Her acting debut followed on 21 March 1827, as Jacob in Drengene fra Auvergne, and when Strömberg had to let the building to the newly established Christiania Public Theatre in 1828 he wrote into the lease that Christensen and Hansen were to go on performing for a fee of 100 speciedaler a year.

Carl Christian Anton Christensen, born in Copenhagen in 1831, studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and then took a turn that cut him off from the Danish art world entirely. On 26 September 1850 he was baptised into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by George P. Dykes and served as a missionary at home, then in Norway from the autumn of 1853. He was the first Mormon missionary to preach in Christiania, taught the future Utah artist Danquart Anthon Weggeland there, and was twice imprisoned for the preaching.

In 1857 he set out for Utah Territory. He had met Elsie Scheel Haarby while in Norway, and the two married in Liverpool on the way, church leaders holding that engaged couples would find the crossing easier married. They sailed on the Westmoreland, took the railroad to Iowa City where the line ended, and covered the rest with the Christian Christiansen handcart company. In Utah he found so little call for a painter that he farmed and worked as a housepainter.

The first large commission came in 1871, when Dimick B. Huntington paid him to make a 22-foot panorama of scenes from the Bible and the Book of Mormon, worked up with Dan Weggeland. Out of that work came the Mormon Panorama, twenty-three large paintings of the church's history, and from 1878 Christensen took it on the road, hauling 175 feet of canvas around Utah, Idaho and Wyoming in the winters when the farm could spare him and lecturing as each scene was unrolled.

The panorama was then rolled up and stored for generations. It came back because a seminary committee chaired by Boyd K. Packer heard from one Trevor Christensen that a large canvas roll lay in Sanpete County, and Packer described the day they unrolled it in a 1976 speech at Brigham Young University. The paintings were eventually hung at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and his Handcart Pioneers of 1900 is the most widely published painting of the Mormon pioneer experience made by a pioneer.

Niels Anton Christensen was born on a farm in Tørring-Uldum on 16 August 1865, apprenticed to a machinist at Vejle, went on to the Technical Institute of Copenhagen, and emigrated to the United States in 1891. As a leading draftsman at Fraser and Chalmers in Chicago he watched an accident on a new electric railway in which a conductor could not stop his cars in time with the mechanical brake and two people were killed, and he set himself to build a power brake instead.

The Christensen air brake tested successfully on Detroit's streetcar system, but an economic decline killed his chance to manufacture it. He moved to the E. P. Allis Company in Milwaukee, took patents on his valve mechanism, and in early 1897 founded the Christensen Engineering Company in the Menomonee Valley. In December 1906 George Westinghouse sued him for infringement; Christensen countersued, and the fight reached the United States Supreme Court three times.

The thing he is remembered for came out of his own basement in 1933, found by trial and error: a ring of rubber seated in a groove one and a half times as long as the minor radius of the ring made a tight, reliable seal on a piston sliding in a cylinder. That is the O-ring. After Pearl Harbor the American government bought up war-related patents and made them free to manufacturers, paying him $75,000; by the time the rights came back the patent had four years to run, and further litigation won his heirs $100,000 in 1971.

Sophie Adolfine Christensen, known as Sophy, was born at Holbæk on 10 January 1867, eldest of the five children of the sea captain Frederik Adolph Christensen. When she was thirteen her father was badly injured in a shipwreck and could not work again. The family moved to Copenhagen, her mother took whatever jobs she could find, and Sophy was sent to Jutland into service as a housemaid. Her mother died three years later and she came back to look after her younger brothers and sisters.

In 1888 she was working for a woman who ran an embroidery business and earning very little. Her younger brother suggested carpentry might pay better, so she took a three-month course at Aksel Mikkelsen's school. Through Mikkelsen she reached the Danish Women's Society, where the activist Emmy Kramp found her money and encouragement, and in 1890 she began a formal apprenticeship as a cabinet maker at a time when women did not do that work. She completed it in 1893.

In 1895 she opened a furniture workshop in Copenhagen, the first woman to do so. She headed the Industrial Design School for Women from 1907 to 1916, then returned to her own business and ran it for the rest of her working life, publishing her account of it, Jeg vilde frem!, in 1928.

Jens Christian Christensen, born on 21 November 1856 into a West Jutland peasant family, started work as a herd boy, and was educated as a teacher. He sat with the Danish Liberal Party until he founded the Venstre Reform Party in 1895, then led the opposition that broke the last Right cabinets and produced the victory of parliamentarianism in 1901. As Minister of Cultus in J. H. Deuntzer's first Left cabinet he was the strongman of the government and reformed the village school system.

From 1905 to 1908 he was Council President of Denmark at the head of two cabinets of his own. He introduced female suffrage in local politics, and in April 1907 carried a law authorising state contributions towards unemployment relief. The Alberti scandal of 1908 brought his government down, but he remained his party's leader, served in the second Zahle cabinet from 1916 to 1918 and held office again from 1920 to 1922.

Hjalmar Christensen (1869-1925) was raised on a farm at Førde in Sunnfjord, went through Bergen Cathedral School and took a legal degree at the Royal Frederick University in 1892. He instructed at the Christiania Theater from 1893 to 1898, lost the vacant chair in literary history in 1898 to Gerhard Gran, and took his doctorate in 1902. He wrote thirty-two books and became a prominent literary critic; the most noted, Fogedgården (1911), describes the parish he was raised in. His brother Ingolf Elster Christensen sat in the Storting.

The rest of the roll is Danish learning and Norwegian salt water. Arthur Christensen (1875-1945) was an orientalist and historian, Carl Christensen (1872-1942) a botanist, Inger Christensen (1935-2009) a writer, and Lars Christensen (1884-1965) a shipowner and whaling magnate. The name went where the Danes went: Mads Christensen (1856-1929) served as a Lutheran pastor in New Zealand, and Ward Christensen (1945-2024) founded the first online bulletin board system.