1903

Nobel Prize in Physics

Antoine Henri Becquerel · Pierre Curie · Marie Curie

Becquerel had discovered radioactivity in 1896 almost accidentally — uranium fogged a photographic plate through a drawer. The Curies then spent years in a leaking shed, processing tonnes of pitchblende to isolate the new elements polonium and radium. Half the prize to Becquerel for the observation; half to the Curies for working out what it meant. Marie Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Svante Arrhenius

When Arrhenius proposed, as a doctoral student, that dissolved salts split into charged ions in solution, his examiners gave his thesis the lowest passing grade. Twenty years later, his theory of electrolytic dissociation was so thoroughly vindicated that it earned a Nobel Prize. His original examiners are not remembered.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Niels Ryberg Finsen

Finsen used concentrated ultraviolet light to treat lupus vulgaris, a tuberculosis infection of the skin that had disfigured patients for centuries. The treatment worked, and the principle — that specific wavelengths of light could have specific medical effects — opened a new branch of medicine. Finsen was himself ill with Niemann-Pick disease when he received the prize and died the following year.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

Norwegian playwright, poet, and novelist Bjørnson had by this point been Norway's leading literary figure for forty years, writing everything from peasant tales to political drama. He was also the author of the Norwegian national anthem, which gives him a claim to longevity that most Nobel laureates cannot match.

Nobel Peace Prize

Randal Cremer

Cremer, an English carpenter who became a Member of Parliament, devoted his political life to international arbitration — the idea that disputes between nations could be settled by argument rather than cannon. He helped found the Inter-Parliamentary Union and spent forty years at it. He was knighted the same year he won the prize, which must have been a satisfying week.

Marie Curie isolates pure radium

To isolate one gram of radium, the Curies processed approximately ten tonnes of pitchblende — the ore left over after uranium had been extracted, which everyone had assumed was waste. Marie determined radium's atomic weight and confirmed its position in the periodic table. The process left her with radiation damage she would carry for the rest of her life.

Rutherford identifies alpha and beta radiation

Ernest Rutherford found that the radiation from uranium was not all the same: one type could be stopped by a sheet of paper (alpha), another required thicker shielding (beta). The two behaved differently in magnetic fields, which meant they were physically different things. Working out what they were would take another few years, but the sorting had begun.