1901

Nobel Prize in Physics

The Day We Saw Through Ourselves

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

In November 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen was fiddling with a cathode-ray tube in a darkened Würzburg laboratory when a screen coated in barium platinocyanide began glowing across the room — glowing even when he slid cardboard, then wood, then his own hand between tube and screen. He barely left the laboratory for seven weeks, refusing to publish until he was certain he was not fooling himself, and eventually photographed the bones of his wife Anna's hand through her flesh; she is said to have remarked, 'I have seen my death.' He named the unknown rays 'X' precisely because he had no idea what they were, and pointedly declined to patent them so medicine could use them freely. The first Nobel Prize in Physics went, fittingly, to the man who had made the invisible visible — and we have been grateful at every broken wrist since. A world without his accident is one where the only way to see inside a living body is to open it.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Why Water Moves Toward Salt

Jacobus H. van 't Hoff

Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff was not the sort of chemist who blew things up or produced dramatic colours; he was the sort who sat with thermometers and semipermeable membranes and worked out why water moves. His laws governing chemical equilibria, reaction rates, and osmotic pressure — the tendency of a solvent to migrate across a membrane toward whatever is dissolved on the other side — were published in the 1880s and were, at the time, treated with some suspicion by more classically minded colleagues. They turned out to be exactly right, and they gave physical chemistry the mathematical backbone it needed to become a serious discipline rather than a collection of empirical curiosities. Van 't Hoff was the first person ever handed a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which is a distinction he shares with no one. Without osmosis properly understood, there is no IV drip, no kidney dialysis, no rational account of why plants drink from soil — small consequences from unglamorous foundations.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Borrowed Immunity, Made Medicine

Emil von Behring

Diphtheria killed children with particular efficiency: a bacterial toxin caused a grey membrane to form in the throat, suffocation followed, and in the nineteenth century there was little to do but watch. Emil von Behring, working in Robert Koch's Berlin laboratory in the early 1890s, discovered that an animal which had survived a diphtheria infection carried something in its blood serum that could protect another animal from the disease — what we would now call antibodies, though the word did not yet exist. He developed a diphtheria antitoxin, which by the late 1890s was already being manufactured and administered to sick children in European cities, with measurable results on mortality tables. The first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to a man who had demonstrated that the immune response was, in a sense, lendable: you could borrow another creature's hard-won defence and make it your own. Childhood diphtheria is now so rare in vaccinated populations that most doctors have never seen a case.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Chiefly Remembered for Who Lost

Sully Prudhomme

René François Armand Prudhomme — who wrote under the name Sully Prudhomme — was a French poet of philosophical ambition and considerable technical refinement, drawn to meditations on science, grief, and the cosmos. The Swedish Academy honoured him in 1901 for what they described as his lofty idealism and the rare union of the qualities of both heart and intellect. The decision to open the Nobel literature canon with Prudhomme rather than, say, Leo Tolstoy — who was alive, prolific, and widely regarded as the greatest novelist then living — struck many contemporaries as a choice requiring remarkable self-assurance. Tolstoy himself reportedly thought the whole affair beneath comment. Prudhomme's reputation has aged quietly; Tolstoy's has not. The first Nobel Prize in Literature is chiefly memorable now for whom it did not go to.

Nobel Peace Prize

Two Ways to Stand Against War

Henry Dunant · Frédéric Passy

Henry Dunant had arrived by accident at the Battle of Solferino in 1859 and found forty thousand wounded men lying in the fields with no one attending to them; he organised local civilians to help, then spent the following decades turning that improvised mercy into the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Geneva Conventions. He had, in the process, gone bankrupt and spent years in obscurity and near-poverty before being rediscovered in a Swiss village in 1895. Frédéric Passy, by contrast, had never witnessed a battle — he had spent four decades lobbying governments toward arbitration and founding the first French peace society. The first Nobel Peace Prize split, with fine symmetry, between a man who devoted himself to limiting the damage war inflicts and one who devoted himself to preventing war altogether. Both are positions worth holding; both men held them with considerable stubbornness and at considerable personal cost.

Marconi achieves first transatlantic radio transmission

Three Dots Across an Ocean

On 12 December 1901, Guglielmo Marconi sat in a draughty converted barracks on Signal Hill in St John's, Newfoundland, holding one end of an aerial aloft with a kite, and listened through a telephone receiver for the signal his team in Poldhu, Cornwall — some 3,500 kilometres away — was transmitting at prearranged intervals. He heard, faintly but repeatedly, three dots: the letter S in Morse code. The scientific establishment greeted the claim with measured scepticism, since the prevailing understanding of electromagnetic waves suggested they should travel in straight lines and sail off into space over the curve of the earth rather than follow it. Marconi, with the cheerful indifference to received opinion that characterises the best experimenters, maintained that he had heard what he heard. It turned out that the ionosphere — whose existence was not yet understood — was reflecting his signals back down. The ocean had been the great separator of continents for all of human history; it took Marconi's kite and a fortuitously placed layer of charged atmosphere to make it merely a body of water.

Landsteiner discovers blood groups

Not All Blood Is Alike

Karl Landsteiner, working at the Vienna Pathological-Anatomical Institute in 1901, performed a deceptively simple experiment: he mixed blood samples from his colleagues with one another's serum and noted which combinations clotted and which remained fluid. The pattern was not random. He identified three groups — A, B, and O — with a fourth, AB, described by colleagues the following year, and he proposed that each group carried specific antigens that caused the body to attack foreign blood as if it were an infection. The practical implication was devastating in retrospect: the many patients who had died during nineteenth-century blood transfusion attempts had not been unlucky or constitutionally frail; they had simply been given blood their immune systems correctly identified as alien. Safe transfusion medicine became possible almost immediately, though it took another decade to reach routine clinical use. Landsteiner received his Nobel Prize for this work in 1930, which seems a long wait for a discovery that had by then already saved a very large number of people.

Ramón y Cajal and Golgi share first Physiology or Medicine Prize insights

A Net, or Separate Threads?

The central question of late-nineteenth-century neuroscience was structural: was the nervous system a single continuous network, like a net, or was it composed of discrete individual cells that merely touched? Santiago Ramón y Cajal, using a silver-staining technique developed by his rival Camillo Golgi, had produced extraordinarily detailed drawings of neural tissue throughout the 1880s and 1890s that strongly supported the neuron doctrine — the view that the nervous system is built from separate cells with gaps between them. The irony that Cajal's most powerful evidence came from Golgi's own method, while Golgi himself remained convinced the reticular theory was correct, gave the scientific community a preview of the awkward joint Nobel Prize they would share in 1906. That ceremony, in which two men who disagreed fundamentally about the thing they were being rewarded for both had to be polite about it, remains one of the more entertaining spectacles in the history of the prize. The neuron doctrine was correct; modern neuroscience proceeds from it entirely.