1901

Nobel Prize in Physics

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

Six years earlier, Röntgen had noticed that a barium-coated screen across the room glowed when his cathode tube was running — even with cardboard in the way. The bones of his wife's hand, photographed through her skin, appeared in a German newspaper within weeks of his paper. The first Physics prize went, fittingly, to a man who had made the invisible visible.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Jacobus H. van 't Hoff

Van 't Hoff worked out the laws governing chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions — the tendency of water to move across a membrane toward dissolved things. It was unglamorous, foundational work, and it established physical chemistry as a discipline worth taking seriously.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Emil von Behring

Diphtheria killed children with particular efficiency: a membrane formed in the throat, and suffocation followed. Behring found that serum from an animal that had survived the infection could protect another animal from it — the immune response, it turned out, was something you could borrow. His antitoxin was already saving children's lives by the time the prize arrived.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Sully Prudhomme

The Swedish Academy chose Prudhomme for his lofty idealism and the rare combination of intellect and feeling in his verse — passing over Tolstoy, which struck many observers as a decision requiring considerable confidence.

Nobel Peace Prize

Henry Dunant · Frédéric Passy

Dunant had watched the Battle of Solferino in 1859 and organized local civilians to care for the wounded on the spot, then spent the rest of his life turning that improvisation into the Red Cross. Passy had spent forty years lobbying governments toward arbitration instead of battle. The first Peace Prize split between a man who treated war's consequences and one who spent his life trying to prevent them.

Marconi achieves first transatlantic radio transmission

On 12 December, Guglielmo Marconi sat in a draughty hut in Newfoundland and received the letter S — three dots — transmitted in Morse code from a station in Cornwall, 3,500 kilometres away. The signal was faint enough that some physicists doubted him. It did not matter; the principle was proved, and the ocean was no longer the barrier it had been.

Landsteiner discovers blood groups

Karl Landsteiner noticed that mixing blood from different people sometimes clotted and sometimes did not. He identified three blood groups — A, B, and O — with AB described the following year, and explained in a stroke why so many transfusion patients had died: they had been given blood the body treated as an invader. Safe transfusion medicine became, at last, possible.

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

The neuron doctrine — the idea that the nervous system is made of discrete individual cells rather than a continuous web — continued to gain ground this year from Ramón y Cajal's meticulous drawings of neural tissue. He and Golgi would share a prize in 1906, despite the fact that they disagreed with each other about the very thing they were being rewarded for.