1909

Nobel Prize in Physics

Two Rivals Share One Signal

Guglielmo Marconi · Ferdinand Braun

When Guglielmo Marconi sent a wireless signal across the Atlantic in December 1901, he did so with equipment that was enormous, unreliable, and dependent in large part on improvements that another man — Karl Ferdinand Braun — had quietly developed in Strasbourg. Braun's coupled-circuit transmitter gave radio its sharpness and range; without it, Marconi's ambitions would have hit their ceiling rather early. The Nobel committee split the 1909 Physics prize between them, which was technically tidy and diplomatically awkward in equal measure, given that Braun had been openly sceptical of Marconi's methods and Marconi had borrowed rather liberally from other people's patents. At 35, Marconi became the youngest Physics laureate to that point — a record that rather glossed over how collective the invention had always been. What the two men together had actually built was a new nervous system for the world: the first technology capable of moving information without moving anything.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Cataloguing the Rules Reactions Obey

Wilhelm Ostwald

Wilhelm Ostwald spent the better part of four decades in Leipzig doing something that seemed, to many of his contemporaries, less like chemistry than like housekeeping: cataloguing the rates and rules of chemical reactions rather than discovering new substances. He was particularly interested in catalysis — the phenomenon whereby a third substance speeds a reaction between two others while remaining, maddenly unchanged itself — and in chemical equilibrium, the state of settled compromise between competing reactions. He brought rigour and mathematics to both. He also, almost in passing, worked out an industrial process for producing nitric acid by oxidising ammonia over a platinum catalyst, a procedure that would supply the raw material for both nitrogen fertilisers and explosives for generations. The Nobel committee in 1909 was rewarding not a single discovery but the systematic building of physical chemistry as a discipline — the creation of a framework inside which other people could do science that would otherwise have been groping in the dark.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Surgeon Cuts the Death Rate to Nothing

Emil Theodor Kocher

In 1877, thyroid surgery at the University of Bern's clinic killed roughly one patient in eight — an acceptable rate by the surgical standards of the day, which is itself a damning statement about the surgical standards of the day. Emil Theodor Kocher, who ran that clinic, found this unacceptable, and spent the next quarter-century refining his technique: meticulous dissection, careful haemostasis, scrupulous attention to the anatomy of the nerves running near the gland. By the early twentieth century his mortality rate had fallen below one percent. He had also noticed, while performing total thyroidectomies, that patients who lost the gland entirely became lethargic, mentally slow, cold, and peculiarly puffy — the syndrome now called hypothyroidism — which told him the thyroid was not decorative but essential. Surgery and endocrinology are both in his debt, which is an unusual combination for a single set of hands.

Nobel Prize in Literature

The Estate She Wrote Her Way Back To

Selma Lagerlöf

Selma Lagerlöf grew up on Mårbacka, a Swedish estate in Värmland thick with the folk legends she would spend her literary life transmuting into fiction, then lost the estate when the family fell into debt and became a schoolteacher for years before her first novel appeared in 1891. The Saga of Gösta Berlings, dense with ghosts and landscape and moral reckoning, did not much resemble the naturalist prose that Swedish literary culture expected; Lagerlöf seemed not to have received the memo. She went on to write The Wonderful Adventures of Nils — commissioned as a geography textbook, delivered as something stranger and more lasting — and accumulated an audience across Europe that the Academy in Stockholm finally acknowledged in 1909, making her the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize came with enough money to buy Mårbacka back. Some biographical arcs tie themselves off with a neatness that fiction would not risk.

Nobel Peace Prize

Faith Placed in Patient Paperwork

Auguste Beernaert · Paul Henri d'Estournelles de Constant

Auguste Beernaert had served as Belgian prime minister, helped draft the laws of war at the Hague Conventions, and spent his later career advocating for international arbitration as the civilised alternative to settling disputes by killing people. Paul Henri d'Estournelles de Constant, a French senator and career diplomat, had founded peace organisations, worked at Franco-German reconciliation, and genuinely believed that the structures of international law, patient and undramatic, were sufficient to the task. Both men were sincere, serious, and tireless, and in 1909 the Nobel Committee rewarded exactly the kind of steady institutional work that rarely attracts attention until it fails. Five years later, every mechanism they had built and trusted would be tested against the particular forces that mechanisms never quite anticipated, and be found wanting. Their effort was not therefore wasted, but the limit of its reach is the saddest possible context for any prize.

S.P.L. Sørensen invents the pH scale

Fourteen Numbers for Every Acid

Søren Peter Lauritz Sørensen

Søren Peter Lauritz Sørensen was a biochemist at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen — the brewery-funded research institute that would, over several decades, contribute an improbable amount to science — and he was studying how enzyme activity depended on the concentration of hydrogen ions in solution. The trouble was that hydrogen ion concentrations ranged across many orders of magnitude, making comparisons between slightly acidic and strongly acidic solutions almost impossible to express cleanly. In 1909 he proposed a logarithmic scale: the pH, for pondus hydrogenii, running from 0 (concentrated acid) to 14 (concentrated alkali), with pure water sitting at 7. A drop of one unit on the scale means a tenfold increase in acidity. The elegance of this is that it compresses an enormous range into a small, memorable number — a number that chemists, biologists, physicians, and schoolchildren have been writing on chalkboards and test strips ever since. Without the pH scale, the entire language of acidity in medicine, agriculture, food production, and environmental science would have to be invented from scratch.

Wilhelm Johannsen coins the terms gene, genotype, and phenotype

Naming What Mendel Left Nameless

Wilhelm Johannsen

Gregor Mendel had demonstrated heritable factors in pea plants in the 1860s, but had called them nothing in particular — they were simply the discrete units responsible for traits passing from parent to offspring. By 1909, the concept was being elaborated by a generation of biologists who urgently needed a word for whatever it was they were talking about. Wilhelm Johannsen, a Danish botanist working on inheritance in beans, provided three. He proposed "gene" as a neutral label — short, clean, carrying no assumptions about physical structure or location, which was wise given that nobody knew what genes physically were. He also drew the distinction between genotype, the set of heritable information an organism carries regardless of whether it is expressed, and phenotype, what you actually observe when you look at the organism. This was not a minor refinement but a conceptual rescue operation: without the distinction, genetics keeps confusing the recipe with the dish. Three words coined in a single paper, and most of the next century's biology became possible to discuss.

Millikan oil-drop experiment begins measuring the electron charge

A Droplet Held Still by Argument

Robert A. Millikan

Robert Millikan's apparatus was not much to look at: an atomiser sprayed a fine mist of oil between two electrically charged plates, and Millikan watched individual droplets through a short telescope, adjusting the electric field until a droplet hung perfectly still in mid-air, its electrical repulsion exactly balancing gravity. From the field strength required, he could calculate the charge on that droplet. Working through hundreds of droplets over several years — with his graduate student Harvey Fletcher doing much of the counting, a collaboration that the Nobel citation would not trouble to acknowledge — Millikan found that every charge was a whole-number multiple of the same irreducibly small unit. The electron's charge was discrete, universal, and the same everywhere in the universe. The value he measured, about 1.6 × 10⁻¹⁹ coulombs, remains essentially what textbooks print today. Without it, atomic physics and chemistry would have no firm foundation; the electron would be a concept without a number to anchor it.

Peyton Rous discovers the first tumor-causing virus

A Farmer's Hen Rewrites Cancer

Peyton Rous

In 1909, a farmer arrived at the Rockefeller Institute in New York carrying a Plymouth Rock hen with a large tumour in its breast muscle, and Peyton Rous, a young pathologist who had not yet been at the Institute a year, agreed to look at it. He ground up the tumour, filtered the resulting fluid through a porcelain filter fine enough to remove every intact cell and every bacterium, and injected the cell-free filtrate into healthy chickens. They developed the same tumour. Something smaller than any cell, something that passed through a filter that stopped everything visible, was causing cancer. The word "virus" in its modern sense barely existed yet, and the idea of a cancer-causing infectious agent was so foreign to medical orthodoxy that the discovery was largely dismissed. Rous published in 1911, was met with polite scepticism, set the topic aside, and received the Nobel Prize for the work in 1966 — fifty-five years after the fact, at the age of eighty-seven. Science occasionally has the grace to correct its own errors. It simply takes rather longer than one would prefer.

Rutherford-Geiger-Marsden gold foil experiment reveals nuclear atom

Artillery Shells Bounce Off Tissue Paper

The dominant model of the atom in 1909 was J. J. Thomson's — electrons embedded in a diffuse positive sphere, like plums distributed through a pudding — and it predicted that alpha particles fired at thin metal foil should pass through with only minor deflection, absorbed and gently scattered by the smeared-out positive charge. Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, in Rutherford's Manchester laboratory, performed exactly this experiment on gold foil and found that while most alpha particles did pass straight through, a small fraction deflected at large angles, and an astonishing few bounced nearly straight back toward the source. Rutherford's own description entered scientific lore: it was as if you had fired artillery shells at tissue paper and had them come back and hit you. The only explanation was that almost all the mass of the atom was concentrated in a region so small it was effectively a point, with the rest of the atom being empty space. The nuclear model of the atom — dense centre, orbiting electrons, mostly nothing — had arrived, and with it the century's most consequential branch of physics.

Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process developed

Air Becomes Half the World's Bodies

The limiting factor in feeding the world, by the early twentieth century, was nitrogen. Plants need it; the atmosphere is 78 percent of it; and yet combining atmospheric nitrogen into a form that plants can actually use required, in nature, the labour of specialised bacteria, and in industry, no reliable method at all. Fritz Haber, a German chemist, demonstrated in 1909 that nitrogen and hydrogen could be combined directly over an iron catalyst at high pressure and temperature to produce ammonia — and from ammonia, nitrate fertilisers at industrial scale. Carl Bosch of BASF then engineered the process into something that could be built and operated in factories. The Haber-Bosch process now fixes more nitrogen than all the biological processes on Earth combined, and estimates suggest that roughly half the nitrogen in the bodies of everyone alive today passed through this reaction. It also enabled the mass production of explosives, a duality that Haber — who would go on to develop poison gas weapons in the First World War while his wife opposed him — never found a way to separate from the process he was most proud of.

Louis Blériot makes first airplane crossing of the English Channel

A Flag Waved Him Out of the Fog

Louis Blériot

At 4:35 on the morning of 25 July 1909, Louis Blériot climbed into a monoplane he had largely designed himself — his eleventh design, following ten that had variously sunk, crashed, or caught fire — and took off from a field near Calais with no compass, no radio, and no clear view of where he was going because the Channel below him was wrapped in fog. He flew for 37 minutes in a direction he could only approximately identify, guided at the end by a French journalist on the Dover cliffs who had thought to wave a tricolour. He landed, hard, in a field near Dover Castle, breaking his undercarriage and his propeller on touching down. The Daily Mail had offered £1,000 for the crossing; he collected it. The British press, however, was focused on something larger: for the first time in recorded memory, England was no longer safely surrounded by water. Within five years, that observation would be pressed into service by those arguing for military air power. Blériot had meant to cross a channel; he had, somewhat inadvertently, contracted an island.