1906

Nobel Prize in Physics

The Atom Turned Out to Have Insides

J.J. Thomson

For two millennia, the atom had held the philosophical line: indivisible, fundamental, the last word in matter. J.J. Thomson ended that in 1897 by bending cathode rays with electric fields and measuring the charge-to-mass ratio of whatever was carrying the current — a particle some two thousand times lighter than the lightest atom anyone knew. He called them corpuscles; everyone else eventually settled on electrons. The Nobel committee framed his 1906 prize carefully around conduction of electricity through gases, which was technically accurate but rather like honouring someone for interesting flute-playing while glossing over that they had invented music. What Thomson had actually demonstrated was that the atom, the supposed terminus of all matter, had insides — and that those insides could be pried out with nothing more exotic than a glass tube and a magnet. Without that realisation, there is no semiconductor, no transistor, no circuit board: the entire material substrate of the modern world sits downstream of one man noticing that his cathode rays bent the wrong way.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Cold Enough to Cage a Killer Gas

Henri Moissan

Chemists had known fluorine was lurking inside compounds like fluorspar since the late eighteenth century; getting it out was the problem, and the problem had a body count. Humphry Davy tried and nearly died. George Knox and his brother tried and were both poisoned. Jérôme Nicklès tried, was poisoned, died. The element's position at the extreme corner of the periodic table — most electronegative, most reactive, implacably hostile to containment — meant it would attack the experimenter, the apparatus, and the air itself in roughly equal measure. Henri Moissan finally succeeded in 1886 by working at −50°C, using a platinum-and-iridium cell whose walls were among the few things fluorine was too chilly to eat through, and electrolyzing a mixture of potassium fluoride in liquid hydrogen fluoride. The Nobel came twenty years later, partly for the fluorine and partly for the electric furnace he built that could reach 3,500°C — which, as consolation prizes for nearly being dissolved alive go, is a fairly good one. He died two months after accepting the award, which at least spared him any more of the laboratory.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Two Men, One Stain, Opposite Conclusions

Camillo Golgi · Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Camillo Golgi spent years developing a silver-staining technique that could, for the first time, render individual nerve cells visible against the tangle of the brain, and he used it to conclude that the nervous system was one continuous reticulum — a single, fused network of living tissue. Santiago Ramón y Cajal then took Golgi's own staining method, refined it, applied it with almost monastic patience to hundreds of tissue sections, and accumulated such a weight of evidence for discrete individual neurons connected at gaps — what we now call synapses — that the question seemed settled to nearly everyone except Golgi himself. The Nobel committee, in what may be the most diplomatically awkward prize in the award's history, gave the medal to both of them in 1906. They used their lectures in Stockholm to disagree with each other in public. Cajal was right, the neuron doctrine prevailed, and the staining method that made his case possible still bears the name of the man who drew the opposite conclusion from it — a small but satisfying irony that the field has never quite got over.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Too Weak to Attend His Own Triumph

Giosuè Carducci

Giosuè Carducci spent his long career doing two things simultaneously: forcing Italian poetry into classical Greek and Latin metres that it had largely abandoned, and offending as many people as possible in the process. He wrote an ode in praise of Satan as a young professor — not from genuine Satanism but from a desire to needle the Church, which he managed admirably — and spent decades provoking both the clergy and his more conservative academic colleagues with equal enthusiasm. The Swedish Academy honoured him as Italy's national poet, the first Italian to receive the Literature prize, and praised the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force of his work. He was 71 by then, ill with the effects of a stroke, and unable to travel to Stockholm to collect the medal. There is something faintly characteristic about a man who spent his life in vigorous combat with every institution he encountered finally receiving the world's most distinguished honour while confined to bed, too weak to attend the ceremony.

Nobel Peace Prize

A Peace Prize Given for Results

Theodore Roosevelt

In the summer of 1905, the Russo-Japanese War had ground through eighteen months of catastrophic losses on both sides, and neither belligerent had quite enough left to deliver a knockout blow — a condition that historically produces either armistice or massacre. Theodore Roosevelt inserted himself into the situation with the confident energy he brought to most things, hosting peace negotiations at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and cajoling both delegations toward terms that neither found entirely satisfactory, which is often the sign of a workable settlement. The Treaty of Portsmouth held, and Roosevelt became the first American to receive a Nobel Prize of any kind — a distinction he met with characteristic vigour by donating the prize money not to himself but to a foundation for promoting industrial peace between capital and labour, the next war he was already thinking about. The Peace Prize has occasionally been given in hope; this one was given for results.

Nernst heat theorem / third law of thermodynamics

Absolute Zero, Forever Just Out of Reach

Walther Nernst

By 1906, thermodynamics had its first two laws — energy is conserved; entropy in a closed system always increases — and had been building much of physical science on top of them for half a century. Walther Nernst, working on the problem of predicting whether chemical reactions would actually proceed spontaneously, proposed what became the third: as a system approaches absolute zero, the entropy change for any reversible process also approaches zero, and the entropy of a perfect crystalline substance at absolute zero is exactly zero. The implication was that absolute zero is not a temperature you can reach but only approach asymptotically, no matter how good your refrigerator is. Nernst won his Nobel Prize for it in 1920, a fourteen-year delay that suggests the committee was being careful, or possibly cooling the idea down slowly. The theorem is now indispensable for calculating the energy balances of chemical reactions, which is to say it underlies every industrial chemical process run with any precision — which is most of them.

Alois Alzheimer's first description of Alzheimer's disease

Tangles in a 51-Year-Old's Brain

Alois Alzheimer

Auguste Deter had been admitted to a Frankfurt asylum in 1901 at the age of 51, unusually young, with a cluster of symptoms her attending physician found puzzling: severe memory loss, disorientation, paranoia, an inability to find words. When she died in April 1906, Alois Alzheimer examined her brain under a microscope and found two things no one had systematically described before: dense deposits of protein between the neurons — amyloid plaques — and twisted fibres of another protein tangled inside them, the neurofibrillary tangles. He presented the case to a meeting of German psychiatrists in Tübingen that November. The audience asked almost no questions. His colleague Emil Kraepelin named the condition after him in a 1910 textbook, which is the sort of posterity one would prefer to arrive differently. Alzheimer himself died in 1915, largely unaware of the scale of what he had found. The disease now affects roughly 55 million people worldwide, and the plaques and tangles he first described remain, more than a century later, the defining pathological features and the target of every treatment attempt.

Lee de Forest invents the triode (Audion) vacuum tube

A Third Wire Taught Current to Shout

Lee de Forest

The two-electrode vacuum tube — Fleming's valve, patented two years earlier — could detect radio waves by rectifying them, turning alternating current into something a headphone could follow. Useful, but passive: it could only receive what was already there. Lee de Forest added a third element, a metal grid, between the cathode and the anode, and found that tiny voltages applied to the grid could control much larger currents flowing through the tube — which is to say the device could amplify. This was not a refinement. It was a different category of thing. The Audion, as de Forest called it, made it possible to take a weak signal and make it strong, to push a voice across an ocean of static, to build cascades of amplification that could do work no previous electrical component could manage. Every piece of electronic equipment built between 1906 and the commercial introduction of the transistor in the early 1950s depended on this principle; for four decades, amplification was what electronics meant, and electronics was what de Forest's grid made possible.

Mikhail Tsvet develops and names chromatography

Colour Sorted Itself Down a Glass Tube

Mikhail Tsvet

Mikhail Tsvet was a botanist in Warsaw trying to understand plant pigments — specifically to separate the chlorophylls from each other and from the yellow xanthophylls that hid behind their green — and he was doing it by an insight so simple it seems obvious in retrospect, which is the hallmark of a genuine idea. He dissolved his plant extracts in petroleum ether and poured the mixture through a glass column packed with powdered calcium carbonate; as the liquid migrated downward, different compounds stuck to the calcium carbonate with different affinities and therefore travelled at different speeds, separating themselves into distinct coloured bands along the column. He named the technique chromatography, from the Greek for colour and writing. Tsvet's own career was obscured by language barriers and an early death in 1919, and chromatography was largely reinvented in Germany before his priority was recognised. The method is now among the most widely used analytical techniques in existence — the reason a forensic scientist can identify a toxin in a blood sample, a pharmaceutical chemist can confirm a compound's purity, and a biochemist can isolate a single protein from a soup of thousands.

Ejnar Hertzsprung distinguishes giant and dwarf stars

Same Colour, Wildly Different Biographies

Ejnar Hertzsprung

Two stars can appear to be the same colour — and colour, in stellar physics, means the same surface temperature — yet one may outshine the other by a factor of hundreds or thousands. Ejnar Hertzsprung, a Danish astronomer working from the systematic catalogues of stellar spectra that were then being assembled, recognised what this meant: that colour and luminosity were independent properties, and that the same spectral type harboured two completely different populations of star, which he called giants and dwarfs. It was not just a taxonomic observation. It implied that stars had different evolutionary histories, different internal structures, different fates — that the night sky, which had seemed to contain simply stars, contained characters with biographies. The diagram that eventually bore both his name and Henry Norris Russell's, plotting luminosity against surface temperature for large numbers of stars simultaneously, would show that most stars occupied a narrow diagonal band and that the giants and supergiants sat conspicuously above it: a picture so diagnostic that astronomers can read a star's life stage from its position as readily as a doctor reads an X-ray.

Reginald Fessenden transmits first human voice over wireless

A Violin Broke Through the Morse Code

On the evening of Christmas Eve 1906, ships' radio operators working the waters off the New England coast were listening, as usual, for Morse code — the dots and dashes that were the only language wireless telegraphy spoke — when something entirely different came through their headphones: a human voice, reading from the Gospel of Luke, and then a violin solo. Reginald Fessenden was broadcasting from his station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, using amplitude modulation, a technique in which the amplitude of a continuous carrier wave is varied in step with the audio signal rather than simply switched on and off. Every radio broadcast since — every concert, speech, emergency announcement, and late-night programme — uses some version of this principle, though by the time Fessenden died in 1932 he was engaged in so many patent disputes that the elegance of what he had done on that particular Christmas Eve had been somewhat buried under litigation.

Frederick Hopkins begins experimental work on accessory food factors

Pure Food, and the Rats Still Died

The nutritional science of 1906 held that food was, in essence, protein, carbohydrate, fat, and water — the macronutrients — and that an animal supplied with adequate quantities of each had all it needed. Frederick Gowland Hopkins, at Cambridge, ran a careful series of experiments that disproved this with the purest of methods: he built a diet of chemically pure casein, starch, cane sugar, lard, and mineral salts — everything the textbooks said was required — fed it to young rats, and watched them stop growing and then sicken and die. Tiny additions of fresh milk restored them. Something present in natural food at very low concentrations was, evidently, as essential as any macronutrient. Hopkins called these substances accessory food factors, a deliberately cautious name for things he hadn't yet isolated. Within a decade they would be called vitamins, and their absence would have names too: scurvy, rickets, beriberi, pellagra — diseases that had killed sailors, children, and entire communities, now reinterpreted as the consequence of missing something rather than encountering something. Hopkins received the Nobel Prize for this work in 1929, which he shared with Christiaan Eijkman, a waiting period of twenty-three years that is difficult to explain except as evidence that the committee had missed breakfast.

San Francisco earthquake scientific monitoring

Twenty-Eight Feet of Ground, Measured Afterward

At 5:12 in the morning of 18 April 1906, a rupture along the northern section of the San Andreas Fault released energy equivalent to roughly two million times the force of the atomic bomb later dropped on Hiroshima, and San Francisco shook for approximately a minute. The fires that followed burned for three days and killed an estimated three thousand people; four square miles of the city were destroyed. The mayor's office, more concerned with insurance claims than seismology, initially attributed the disaster to the fires rather than the earthquake. But the United States Geological Survey sent teams to map the fault displacement — up to twenty-eight feet of horizontal slip in some places — and the resulting State Earthquake Investigation Commission report, published two years later, became the foundational document of American seismology. The earthquake forced the discipline out of the cabinet of curiosities and into civil engineering, building codes, and public policy; every California structure built with shear walls and moment frames since owes something to four terrifying minutes on an April morning.

Death of Pierre Curie

Struck Down by a Wagon, Not the Radium

Pierre Curie

Pierre Curie died on 19 April 1906, not in the laboratory but on the Rue Dauphine in Paris, caught in the rain, slipping on the wet cobblestones, and falling under the wheels of a horse-drawn wagon. He was 46, in the middle of research on radioactivity that he and Marie had been conducting for nearly a decade, and the manner of his death — so ordinary, so entirely unrelated to the extraordinary work he was in the middle of — carried its own blunt absurdity. The scientific community was subdued. Marie Curie, who had already shared a Nobel Prize with him and who would go on to win a second Nobel on her own, was given his professorship at the Sorbonne, becoming the first woman to hold such a position in France. She continued their research alone for another twenty-eight years. Pierre Curie is perhaps the rarest kind of scientific figure: one whose legacy is substantially defined not by absence but by what the person left standing managed to accomplish after he was gone.