Alfred Lothar Wegener was a German interdisciplinary scientist, who became famous for his theory of continental drift arguing that the continents on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were drifting apart.

In 1912, he noticed that the shapes of continents on either side of the Atlantic Ocean seem to fit together (for example, Africa and South America). Francis Bacon, Antonio Snider-Pellegrini, Benjamin Franklin, and others had noted much the same thing earlier. The similarity of southern continent fossil faunae and some geological formations had led a relatively small number of Southern hemisphere geologists to conjecture as early as 1900 that all the continents had once been joined into a supercontinent known as Pangaea. The concept was initially ridiculed by most geologists, who felt that an explanation of how a continent drifted was a prerequisite and that the lack of one made the idea of drifting continents wholly unreasonable. The theory received support through the controversial years from South African geologist Alexander Du Toit as well as from Arthur Holmes. The idea of continental drift did not become widely accepted as theory until the 1950s in Europe. By the 1960s, geological research conducted by Rovert S. Dietz, Bruce Heezen, and Harry Hess along with a rekindling of the theory including a mechanism by J. Tuzo Wilson led to acceptance among North American geologists. The hypothesis of continental drift became part of the larger theory of plate tectonics. This article deals mainly with the historical development of the continental drift hypothesis before 1950.