1909

Nobel Prize in Physics

Guglielmo Marconi · Ferdinand Braun

Marconi had sent a signal across the Atlantic in 1901; Braun had independently developed coupled-circuit transmitters that significantly extended range and selectivity. The prize acknowledged both, though their paths to wireless had been different enough that the choice of sharing it was not entirely obvious. Marconi, at 35, was the youngest Physics laureate to that point.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Wilhelm Ostwald

Ostwald spent decades working out the fundamental rules of catalysis — how substances speed up reactions without being consumed by them — and the principles governing chemical equilibria. He also developed an industrial process for producing nitric acid by oxidising ammonia, which had immediate applications in fertiliser and explosives manufacture. Physical chemistry owed him a considerable debt.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Emil Theodor Kocher

Kocher reduced the mortality rate from thyroid surgery at his Bern clinic from 13% in 1877 to well under 1% by the early twentieth century — an achievement of surgical technique that any other generation would have called miraculous. He also worked out that removing the entire thyroid caused a syndrome now called hypothyroidism, establishing the gland's role in regulating the body's metabolism.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Selma Lagerlöf

The first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Lagerlöf wrote novels rooted in Swedish folklore and landscape — The Saga of Gösta Berlings, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils — with a directness and imaginative energy that had no obvious precedent. She had become a teacher after failing to sell a family estate; the Nobel committee did not mention the teaching career.

Nobel Peace Prize

Auguste Beernaert · Paul Henri d'Estournelles de Constant

Beernaert, a Belgian statesman and former prime minister, had championed international arbitration and the rights of small nations. D'Estournelles de Constant, a French senator, had founded peace organisations and worked to improve French-German relations. Both were working, in good faith, with the tools available — five years before those tools would prove entirely insufficient.

S.P.L. Sørensen invents the pH scale

Søren Peter Lauritz Sørensen

Sørensen needed a consistent way to describe the acidity of solutions while studying enzyme activity in a brewery laboratory — the work demanded precision that the existing vocabulary of "acid" and "alkaline" could not provide. His logarithmic scale, running from 0 to 14, converted hydrogen ion concentration into a number that could be measured, reported, and compared. The symbol pH, for pondus hydrogenii, is his.

Wilhelm Johannsen coins the terms gene, genotype, and phenotype

Wilhelm Johannsen

Mendel's heritable factors needed a name. Johannsen proposed "gene" — short, clear, carrying no assumptions about what the thing physically was. He also drew the crucial distinction between genotype (the heritable information an organism carries) and phenotype (what you can actually observe) — a distinction without which genetics cannot be discussed coherently. Three words; most of a century's work built on top of them.

Millikan oil-drop experiment begins measuring the electron charge

Robert A. Millikan

Millikan sprayed oil droplets into an electric field, balanced the electrical force against gravity, and watched individual droplets hang motionless in mid-air. From the field strength required, he could calculate the charge on each droplet — and found that every charge was a multiple of the same tiny unit. The electron's charge was not just measurable; it was discrete, the same everywhere, always.

Peyton Rous discovers the first tumor-causing virus

Peyton Rous

A farmer brought Rous a Plymouth Rock hen with a tumour in its breast muscle. Rous ground up the tumour, filtered out every cell, and injected the filtrate into healthy chickens. They developed the same tumour. Something too small to see was causing cancer — a virus, though the word barely existed in its modern sense. The discovery was so far ahead of its time that Rous received the Nobel Prize for it 55 years later.

Rutherford-Geiger-Marsden gold foil experiment reveals nuclear atom

Geiger and Marsden, under Rutherford's direction, fired a stream of alpha particles at a thin gold foil and measured where they went. Most passed straight through. A few deflected at large angles. A very small number bounced almost directly back. Rutherford said this was as surprising as firing artillery shells at tissue paper and having them come back and hit you. The only explanation was that atoms were mostly empty space, with almost all their mass concentrated in a tiny, dense nucleus.

Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process developed

Fritz Haber demonstrated that nitrogen from the air could be combined with hydrogen at high pressure and temperature, over an iron catalyst, to make ammonia — and from ammonia, nitrates for fertiliser. The Haber process would go on to enable roughly half of the nitrogen in every human body alive today to have been fixed from the atmosphere. It also enabled industrial-scale production of explosives, a duality that Haber spent the rest of his life failing to resolve.

Louis Blériot makes first airplane crossing of the English Channel

Louis Blériot

At 4:35 on the morning of 25 July, Blériot took off from near Calais in a monoplane he had largely designed himself, with no compass and no landmarks below because the Channel was fogged in. He landed 37 minutes later in a field near Dover Castle. The Daily Mail had offered £1,000 for the crossing; more importantly, the British press noted, for the first time in memory, that England was no longer an island.