On 6 January 1912, Alfred Wegener presented his first ideas about continental drift in public. His main work, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, appeared in 1915. The criticism from the profession was mostly devastating. Critics objected again and again that he could not explain what caused the drift. In 1924 Harold Jeffreys showed that the forces Wegener proposed were far too weak. Research on the ocean floor in the 1950s and 1960s led to plate tectonics, which has been generally accepted since the 1970s.
Wegener was right about the continents. He could not show how they moved, and for decades that was what counted.