1907

Nobel Prize in Physics

Albert A. Michelson

Michelson spent his career measuring the speed of light with increasing precision, and in doing so built optical instruments — interferometers, diffraction gratings, echelons — of extraordinary delicacy. His 1887 experiment with Morley, attempting to detect the Earth's motion through the ether and finding nothing, had quietly demolished a central assumption of classical physics. The prize was for the instruments. The implications of the null result were still being absorbed.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Eduard Buchner

For centuries, fermentation was thought to require living yeast cells — life itself was the catalyst. Buchner ground up yeast, pressed out the juice, filtered it to remove all cells, and found it could still turn sugar into alcohol. The active ingredient was an enzyme, not a vital spark. The border between chemistry and biology shifted noticeably.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Alphonse Laveran

Laveran had identified the malaria parasite in 1880 while working as an army physician in Algeria — the first time a protozoan had been identified as the cause of a human disease. He spent his prize money establishing a laboratory for tropical disease research, which is perhaps the most appropriate use of prize money in the history of the Nobel.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Rudyard Kipling

Kipling was 41 and became the youngest recipient of the Literature Nobel to that point — the record he held for many decades. The committee praised his originality and power of observation. He had published The Jungle Book, Kim, and the Just So Stories. His later reputation, tangled as it became with imperial politics, is a different matter from the prose, which remained extraordinary.

Nobel Peace Prize

Ernesto Teodoro Moneta · Louis Renault

Moneta, an Italian journalist and editor, had devoted his newspaper to the cause of international peace for decades. Renault was a French jurist who had helped draft the conventions at The Hague and Geneva that were trying, with modest success, to write rules for how wars should be conducted. Half the prize for trying to prevent wars; half for making them marginally less dreadful.

Einstein's quantum theory of specific heat of solids

Albert Einstein

Classical physics predicted that a solid's capacity to absorb heat should remain roughly constant as it cools. At very low temperatures, experiments showed, it drops steeply toward zero. Einstein applied Planck's quantum idea — that energy comes in fixed packets — to the vibrations of atoms in a solid, and the curve it predicted matched the experiments precisely. It was the first successful application of quantum theory outside of light itself.

Ross Harrison develops first in vitro tissue culture

Ross Harrison

Harrison took fragments of frog embryo tissue, placed them in drops of lymph fluid on glass slides, and kept them alive and growing outside the body. He watched nerve fibres extend in real time — demonstrating both that cells could survive and function in isolation, and that nerve fibres grew from nerve cells rather than assembling from surrounding tissue. The technique would eventually underlie the entire field of cell biology.

Leo Baekeland invents Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic

Baekeland had already made one fortune by selling a photographic paper process to George Eastman. Working in his home laboratory in Yonkers, he combined phenol and formaldehyde under heat and pressure and produced a material that was hard, heat-resistant, non-conductive, and moulded into any shape. He called it Bakelite. Within twenty years it was in telephones, electrical fittings, radio cabinets, and gun handles — the first plastic that was not a modification of something natural.

Death of Lord Kelvin

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

Kelvin died on 17 December at his Scottish estate, aged 83. He had formulated the laws of thermodynamics, established the absolute temperature scale that bears his name, and supervised the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. He had also famously declared in 1900 that physics was essentially complete apart from two small clouds on the horizon. Those two clouds were quantum mechanics and relativity.