1914

Nobel Prize in Physics

Max von Laue

Two years after his experiment confirming that X-rays diffract through crystal lattices, von Laue received the prize. The method he established could read the spacing of atoms from the patterns scattered light makes, a technique that would eventually reveal the structure of DNA. At the time, it was simply the most precise ruler anyone had yet pointed at matter.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Theodore W. Richards

Richards spent years determining the atomic weights of elements with a precision no one had previously achieved, measuring some dozens of them with errors in the fourth decimal place. The work sounds tedious — it was not; the exact weights were the scaffolding on which the whole periodic system depended.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Robert Bárány

Bárány worked out the function of the vestibular apparatus — the inner ear's balance organ — and how its canals detect rotation. He received the prize while a prisoner of war in Russia, having been captured at the front, and collected it in Stockholm in 1916, after a diplomatic release arranged partly at the request of the Nobel Committee.

Rutherford bombards nitrogen with alpha particles

Firing alpha particles at nitrogen, Rutherford found that something unexpected emerged: hydrogen nuclei, knocked loose from the nitrogen atoms. He had performed the first deliberate transmutation of one element into another — nitrogen into oxygen — and in the process stumbled across a particle that would eventually be named the proton.

Death of Henry Moseley

Henry Moseley

Moseley, who had reorganised the periodic table by establishing atomic number as its governing principle, volunteered for the Royal Engineers rather than accepting a research post. He was killed by a sniper at Gallipoli on 10 August 1915, aged twenty-seven. After the war, several nations stopped allowing their leading scientists to serve in combat.

Salvarsan and neoarsphenamine in use against syphilis

Paul Ehrlich's arsenic-based compounds, introduced from 1910, had become the standard treatment for syphilis by the war years — the first chemical therapies to target a specific infectious agent. They worked imperfectly and required multiple injections, but they worked, which was more than anything before them had managed.

Hale observes magnetic fields in sunspots

George Ellery Hale detected the Zeeman effect — the splitting of spectral lines by magnetic fields — in sunspot spectra, confirming that sunspots are intensely magnetic regions. It was the first detection of a magnetic field anywhere other than Earth.

Soddy formally names isotopes

Frederick Soddy gave the name "isotope" to atoms of the same element with different atomic masses — from the Greek for "same place," because they occupy the same position in the periodic table. The concept had been floating around for a few years; now it had a word.