1913

Nobel Prize in Physics

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes

Onnes received the prize two years after he had already discovered superconductivity, which is the sort of lag that prizes sometimes permit themselves. The formal citation was for liquefying helium — a prerequisite for everything that followed — and for his systematic study of how matter behaves when most of its thermal energy has been removed.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Alfred Werner

Werner showed that metal atoms in compounds do not simply bond to neighbours in a line; they arrange themselves in three-dimensional clusters, with other atoms or groups occupying specific positions in space around them. Coordination chemistry — the study of these arrangements — is now half of inorganic chemistry.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Charles Richet

Richet discovered anaphylaxis — the body's capacity to mount a violent, occasionally fatal reaction to a substance it has encountered before. The first exposure sensitises; the second can kill. He named it anaphylaxis from the Greek for "without protection," which is exactly what a severe allergic reaction feels like.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore was the first non-European to win the Literature prize. His "Gitanjali," translated into English partly by the poet himself, brought Bengali devotional verse to readers who had never encountered it. The Swedish Academy called it profoundly sensitive and fresh; readers across Europe simply called it unlike anything they had read before.

Nobel Peace Prize

Henri La Fontaine

La Fontaine was president of the International Peace Bureau and a tireless organiser of international arbitration through the Inter-Parliamentary Union. He accepted the prize in October 1913. The following August, the war he had spent his life trying to prevent began.

Bohr model of the hydrogen atom

Niels Bohr proposed that electrons orbit the nucleus only in certain allowed paths, and that jumping between paths releases or absorbs a precise quantity of light. The model was an improvised hybrid of classical mechanics and quantum ideas, violated several rules it was supposed to satisfy, and predicted the hydrogen spectrum with startling accuracy. Physics would spend the next twelve years working out what it actually meant.

Moseley establishes atomic number

Henry Moseley measured the X-ray spectra of element after element and found a clean relationship between spectral frequency and an integer he called atomic number. Atomic weight, it turned out, was the wrong way to organise the periodic table; atomic number — the number of protons — was the right one. He was twenty-five years old.

Millikan oil-drop experiment determines electron charge

Robert Millikan suspended tiny oil droplets in an electric field and watched them hover or drift, adjusting the field until gravity and electrostatic force balanced precisely. From hundreds of such measurements he extracted the charge of a single electron: 1.592 × 10⁻¹⁹ coulombs, within a percent of the modern value.

Treponema pallidum confirmed as cause of syphilis

Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann had identified the spiral bacterium Treponema pallidum in 1905; by 1913 its role as the sole cause of syphilis had been definitively confirmed through systematic experimental work. The confirmation mattered: Paul Ehrlich's drug salvarsan, introduced in 1910, now had a clearly identified target.

Cepheid variables observed in the Andromeda nebula

Variable stars in Andromeda were being catalogued and studied, but what they implied about the nebula's distance — and whether Andromeda lay inside or outside our own galaxy — remained fiercely contested. The argument would not be settled until 1924, when Hubble measured the distance properly and the Milky Way suddenly became one island among many.