1907

Nobel Prize in Physics

The Ether That Wasn't There

Albert A. Michelson

Albert Michelson was, above all else, a measurer — a man who brought the obsessive patience of a master clockmaker to the problem of pinning down the speed of light. Born in Prussia, raised in California mining camps, trained at the Naval Academy, he spent decades refining optical instruments of such delicacy — interferometers, diffraction gratings, echelons — that his measurements of light's velocity were not seriously improved upon for a generation. The Nobel committee honoured the instruments. But the result that history remembers is the one from 1887, when he and Edward Morley used an interferometer to search for the luminiferous ether — the invisible medium through which light was supposed to travel — and found, definitively, nothing. The Earth, it turned out, was not ploughing through anything. This null result was profoundly uncomfortable to classical physics, which had no good explanation for it, and it would sit uneasily in the literature for nearly two more decades until Einstein simply abolished the ether from the theory altogether. Michelson himself never fully accepted that interpretation. He spent the rest of his career measuring more precisely the very thing that had undone the worldview he was born into.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Life Chemistry Was Just Chemistry

Eduard Buchner

The debate over fermentation had been one of the defining arguments of nineteenth-century biology. Louis Pasteur had insisted, with considerable authority, that fermentation required the presence of living cells — that some irreducible vital spark was needed to turn sugar into alcohol, and no mere chemistry could replicate it. Eduard Buchner, a German chemist not especially interested in biology, was trying in the 1890s to produce cell-free yeast extracts for possible medical use when he found himself with a problem: his extracts kept fermenting, and he had no living cells left. He had ground the yeast up, pressed out the juice, filtered everything scrupulously, and yet the sugar still became alcohol. The active agent, he concluded, was a soluble substance he called zymase — what we would now call an enzyme. The finding was so unexpected that when he first presented it, a colleague reportedly asked whether he was joking. He was not. The discovery drew a clean line through vitalism: life-chemistry was chemistry, subject to the same laws as everything else in a flask, and the long argument about whether biology needed its own special rules was, at last, over.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Small Creatures, Moving, in the Blood

Alphonse Laveran

In 1880, Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran was a French army physician stationed in Constantine, Algeria, examining the blood of malaria patients under a microscope, when he noticed something that no one had noticed before: crescent-shaped bodies inside the red blood cells, and, more compellingly, what appeared to be small creatures actively moving. He had found Plasmodium, the protozoan parasite responsible for malaria — and in doing so became the first person to identify a protozoan, rather than a bacterium or a toxin or bad air, as the cause of a human disease. The establishment was sceptical, as it tends to be; it took several years and independent confirmation before the finding was accepted. Laveran received his Nobel twenty-seven years after the discovery, which is the kind of lag that suggests the committee had been watching the clinical evidence accumulate. What he did with the prize money is perhaps the most admirable detail of the whole story: he donated it to found a laboratory for tropical disease research at the Pasteur Institute, on the reasonable grounds that the money should continue doing what he had spent his career doing. Malaria still kills hundreds of thousands of people a year; one prefers not to think about what the number would be without the century of targeted work his discovery made possible.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Bombay Childhood, Turned Into Prose

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling was forty-one when the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature — the youngest recipient to that point, a record he held for a remarkably long time. He had been born in Bombay in 1865, spent his early years surrounded by the textures and languages of India, and by his mid-thirties had produced an astonishing body of work: the Jungle Books with their dense mythological architecture, Kim with its affectionate and intricate portrait of India's roads and bazaars, the Just So Stories with their exuberant invented etymologies, and enough poetry to fill several shelves. The committee praised his originality, power of observation, and the vivid and extraordinary narrative gift. What the committee could not have fully reckoned with was the complicated posthumous career: the same imperial world that gave Kipling his material would, within decades, be the target of sustained moral criticism, and Kipling's work would be caught in the crossfire. The prose has not aged as badly as the politics, and serious readers who work past the discomfort generally find there a writer of genuine and strange gifts — one whose ear for vernacular, for landscape, for the grain of how people actually speak, remains as sharp as ever.

Nobel Peace Prize

Rules for a War Nobody Would Keep

Ernesto Teodoro Moneta · Louis Renault

The 1907 Peace Prize was divided between a man who had spent his life arguing that wars should not happen, and one who had spent his life trying to make them slightly less appalling when they did — which is either a coherent strategy or a telling admission about human nature, depending on your disposition. Ernesto Moneta had fought under Garibaldi as a young man and then, perhaps chastened by what he saw, turned to journalism and spent four decades editing a Milan newspaper devoted to international peace and arbitration. Louis Renault — the jurist, not the car manufacturer — was a French legal scholar who had been one of the principal architects of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the international agreements that attempted to codify rules of war: the treatment of prisoners, the protection of civilians, the prohibition of certain weapons. These conventions were fragile achievements, full of loopholes and dependent entirely on the goodwill of signatories; within seven years, a considerable portion of the signatory nations would be systematically violating them. Still, the legal architecture Renault helped build was not nothing — it was the framework on which modern international humanitarian law was eventually constructed, imperfect but present.

Einstein's quantum theory of specific heat of solids

Why Cold Solids Stop Absorbing Heat

Albert Einstein

The problem was embarrassingly simple to state and, until 1907, embarrassingly difficult to solve. Classical physics — specifically, the equipartition theorem — predicted that all solids should absorb heat in much the same way regardless of temperature: heat capacity ought to stay roughly constant as you cool a substance down. Experiments at very low temperatures told a different story: heat capacity dropped, steeply and consistently, toward zero as temperature approached absolute zero. The theory was simply wrong, and no one working within classical mechanics had a good explanation. Einstein, the same year he was also working out special relativity and the photoelectric effect, picked up Planck's recent and still-controversial quantum idea — that energy is absorbed and emitted only in discrete packets — and applied it not to light but to the vibrations of atoms in a solid. If each atom can only vibrate with certain quantised energies, and if at low temperatures there is not enough thermal energy available to excite even the lowest quantised vibration, then of course the heat capacity falls. The curve Einstein's model produced matched the experimental data far better than classical mechanics could. It was the first successful application of quantum ideas to matter other than light itself — a quiet demonstration that Planck's 1900 hypothesis was not a trick for fixing radiation problems but something more fundamental, and stranger.

Ross Harrison develops first in vitro tissue culture

A Nerve Fibre Growing Under Glass

Ross Harrison

Before 1907, the only way to study how nerve fibres developed was to examine dead tissue at various stages — a series of frozen snapshots from which one inferred what movement might look like. Ross Harrison, working at Johns Hopkins, thought this unsatisfying and set about watching development happen instead. He removed small fragments of frog embryo tissue, placed them in drops of clotted lymph fluid on glass slides, sealed the slides, and kept them warm. The cells survived. They divided, moved, and — crucially — extended fibres, and Harrison could watch the process in real time under a microscope. This settled a long-running argument in neuroscience about whether nerve fibres grew outward from existing nerve cells or were assembled, link by link, from material contributed by surrounding tissue: they grew. The wider implications took decades to unfold. The technique Harrison invented — keeping living cells alive and functional outside the body — became the foundation of cell biology, virology, vaccine production, cancer research, and eventually the entire enterprise of growing tissue in the laboratory. The next time someone mentions cells grown in a dish, the line runs back to a frog embryo in a drop of lymph on a Baltimore laboratory bench.

Leo Baekeland invents Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic

A Sticky Brown Mess, Finally Tamed

Leo Baekeland had already demonstrated a talent for profitable chemistry: a few years earlier he had invented Velox, a photographic printing paper that worked under artificial light, and sold it to George Eastman for a sum variously reported as between half a million and a million dollars — enough to build a private laboratory behind his house in Yonkers, New York, and spend his time on whatever interested him. What interested him was the reaction between phenol and formaldehyde, which chemists had been prodding at for years without finding anything particularly useful in the sticky brown masses it produced. Baekeland attacked the problem systematically, controlling temperature and pressure with a vessel he called the Bakelizer, and in 1907 produced a material that was hard, heat-resistant, non-conductive, machinable, and could be moulded under pressure into essentially any shape. He called it Bakelite. Within a generation it was everywhere: telephone casings, electrical fittings, radio cabinets, billiard balls, costume jewellery, camera bodies, distributor caps — anywhere that required something that did not conduct electricity, did not melt in moderate heat, and could be made cheaply in quantity. It was the first synthetic plastic that was not a modification of something found in nature, which means it was, in a practical sense, the beginning of the modern plastics industry — with all the convenience, and all the consequences, that implies.

Death of Lord Kelvin

Two Small Clouds, One Wrong Forecast

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

William Thomson — ennobled as Lord Kelvin, a title he took from the river that ran past his Glasgow laboratory — died on 17 December 1907 at Netherhall, his Scottish estate, aged eighty-three. The obituaries were extensive and deserved: he had spent more than fifty years at the University of Glasgow, formulated the second law of thermodynamics with Clausius, established the absolute temperature scale that still bears his name, and personally supervised the engineering of the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, for which he received his knighthood. He was, in short, one of the great physical scientists of the nineteenth century, and knew it. What the obituaries were too polite to dwell on was the famous remark he had made in a 1900 lecture: that the future of physics consisted of clearing up two small 'clouds' obscuring an otherwise complete theory. The first cloud was the failure to detect the luminiferous ether — the null result of Michelson and Morley's experiment. The second was the inexplicable behaviour of blackbody radiation at high frequencies. These two clouds, in the seven years between that lecture and his death, had already begun to resolve into quantum mechanics and special relativity — not clarifications of classical physics but its successors. He was a great man who lived just long enough to be wrong about the most important thing.