1910

Nobel Prize in Physics

Where Real Gases Stick Together

Johannes Diderik van der Waals

The ideal gas law — pressure times volume equals a tidy constant — had a long and distinguished career of being wrong whenever anyone actually compressed a gas. Van der Waals addressed this in his 1873 doctoral thesis at Leiden by doing something rather obvious in retrospect: he acknowledged that molecules take up space and pull on each other. His corrected equation of state, with its two additional constants accounting for molecular volume and intermolecular attraction, described real gases as they are compressed and cooled toward liquefaction rather than the frictionless spheres that inhabit physics problems. The equation was elegant, the insight was foundational, and the intermolecular forces it implied — now universally called van der Waals forces — turned out to underpin everything from how geckos grip ceilings to the folding of proteins. He received the Nobel thirty-seven years after the thesis, which at least proves the committee eventually catches up.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Grammar for a Thousand Scents

Otto Wallach

By the mid-nineteenth century, the chemistry of terpenes — the volatile compounds that give pine needles, citrus peel, camphor, and turpentine their characteristic smells — was in a state that could charitably be described as creative. Dozens of compounds had been assigned the same or contradictory formulae, often by chemists who had not spoken to each other. Otto Wallach, working at Göttingen over two decades of painstaking distillation and analysis, untangled this thicket by establishing the true molecular structures of the major terpenes and demonstrating their relationships to one another. The isoprene rule he helped develop showed that terpenes are built from a common five-carbon unit, a pattern repeated with almost monotonous elegance across thousands of natural compounds. The fragrance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and rubber chemistry all stand on the foundation he quietly laid. Wallach was, in essence, the man who imposed grammar on a language that had been shouted in several dialects simultaneously.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

An Alphabet Catalogued Before Anyone Could Read It

Albrecht Kossel

In the 1880s and 1890s, when most physiologists were focused on what cells do, Albrecht Kossel was obstinately interested in what cells are made of — specifically the nucleus, and specifically its curious protein-rich contents. Through careful chemical decomposition, he identified and characterised the five nucleotide bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine, and uracil. He had no way of knowing, working sixty years before Watson and Crick, that these five compounds were the letters of an alphabet encoding every living thing on the planet. He catalogued them with the quiet thoroughness of a man organising a library whose books no one could yet read. The Nobel committee recognised his biochemistry of the cell nucleus in 1910, awarding him the prize for work whose deepest significance would only become clear to a generation of scientists not yet born.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Celebrated in His Century, Not Ours

Paul Heyse

Paul Heyse was, by any reasonable nineteenth-century measure, one of the most accomplished writers in the German language — a prolific novelist, playwright, translator, and above all master of the short story, of which he produced more than a hundred and fifty over a long career begun under the patronage of King Maximilian II of Bavaria. The Swedish Academy recognised this sustained achievement with the 1910 prize, citing his artistry, idealism, and lyrical gift. He was eighty years old. Tolstoy, who had been conspicuously alive and writing since before the prize existed, did not win. Heyse is now, in the way of many household names in their own century, read almost exclusively by literary historians — a fate shared by a disconcerting number of Nobel laureates in literature, which perhaps says something about the difficulty of predicting what endures.

Nobel Peace Prize

Peace Needs an Office Too

Nobel Peace Prize

Permanent International Peace Bureau

The Permanent International Peace Bureau, established in Bern in 1891, served as the organisational backbone of the European peace movement — coordinating the dozens of national peace societies, facilitating the international peace congresses that had been convening since the 1840s, and maintaining the correspondence networks through which pacifist ideas circulated across borders. Giving the Nobel to an institution rather than any of its prominent individual advocates was a recognition that conviction, however sincere, requires infrastructure to become a movement. The Bureau's work was meticulous, patient, and slightly against the grain of the age, which was busy building battleships. Four years later, the movement it had sustained would face its stiffest test.

Paul Ehrlich introduces Salvarsan, the first targeted chemotherapy drug

A Bullet Built to Find One Target

Paul Ehrlich · Sahachiro Hata

Paul Ehrlich had spent years pursuing what he called the "magic bullet" — a compound that would seek out and destroy a specific pathogen while leaving the patient largely intact, a concept borrowed from the theory of immune receptors he had spent a career developing. He and his team at the Frankfurt institute tested hundreds of arsenic-based compounds against the bacterium responsible for syphilis, Treponema pallidum; compound 606 had been assessed, set aside, and largely forgotten when Ehrlich's Japanese collaborator Sahachiro Hata retested it in 1909 and found it worked with remarkable specificity. Marketed as Salvarsan, arsphenamine became the first rationally designed antimicrobial drug — before it, syphilis was incurable, progressive, and frequently fatal over years of systemic devastation. A course of injections could now clear the infection. The drug was painful to administer, arsenic-based, and far from ideal, but it established the principle that disease could be treated chemically with precision rather than merely palliated or outlasted. Modern pharmacology begins here.

Thomas Hunt Morgan discovers sex-linked inheritance in Drosophila

One White Eye Rewrites Heredity

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Thomas Hunt Morgan was, in 1908, not especially convinced by Mendelian genetics and actively sceptical of the chromosome theory of heredity. He began breeding Drosophila melanogaster — the humble fruit fly, admirably productive at a dollar for a thousand — partly to test his doubts. Then, in 1910, a white-eyed male appeared spontaneously in a flask of red-eyed flies. When Morgan crossed this mutant through several generations, the white-eye trait did not distribute itself evenly between male and female offspring: it tracked with the X chromosome, appearing almost exclusively in males. This was the first clear experimental demonstration that a specific heritable trait corresponds to a specific chromosome — that genes are not floating statistical abstractions but physical entities located at particular addresses. Morgan, to his credit, promptly revised his scepticism. He went on to map the Drosophila genome and win the Nobel in 1933, having built, from a jar of flies and one white-eyed anomaly, the physical foundations of genetics.

Halley's Comet returns as predicted by Newton's laws

Earth Passed Through the Tail, Unharmed

Edmund Halley had argued in 1705 that the comets observed in 1531, 1607, and 1682 were the same object on a roughly 75-year elliptical orbit, and predicted it would return around 1758. It did — sixteen years after Halley's death, which he cannot have enjoyed — and again in 1835, each time on approximately the schedule Newtonian mechanics dictated. Its 1910 return was visible to the naked eye, reached perihelion in April, and passed close enough that Earth moved through the comet's tail in May. Spectroscopic analysis had revealed the tail contained cyanogen, a poisonous compound, and a portion of the public concluded that this was the end. Newspapers were helpful. Astronomers patiently explained that the density of a cometary tail is approximately that of a very good vacuum, and that no measurable atmospheric effect had been detected. No ill effects were reported. Mark Twain, who had been born during the comet's 1835 passage and had predicted he would die with its return, obliged in April 1910 — lending the whole event a literary tidiness that the universe rarely provides.