1916

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Nation's Soul, Written in Verse

Verner von Heidenstam

The Swedish Academy, impeded if not embarrassed by a world war that had reduced the idea of civilisational prizes to something awkward, awarded the Literature prize to one of their own: Verner von Heidenstam, Swedish poet, novelist, and champion of a romantic nationalism that celebrated Norse heritage and the Swedish countryside with unironic fervour. His 1888 debut, Vallfart och vandringsår, had announced a lyric voice interested in beauty and nation rather than the social realism then fashionable across Scandinavia, and his epic poems and historical novels spent the next three decades reinforcing that Sweden had a particular soul worth preserving. The committees for Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, and Peace reserved their prizes entirely that year — finding it hard, perhaps, to celebrate human achievement while half the continent was being shelled. Heidenstam, at least, had the distinction of being the only Nobel laureate of any kind in 1916, a title that carries its own grim irony. His legacy is less an influence on world letters than a document of how a literature can be turned, sometimes beautifully, sometimes narrowly, toward the project of national self-image.

Schwarzschild solves Einstein's field equations

A Solution Mailed From the Front

In November 1915, Einstein published his field equations of general relativity — a set of ten interlocking nonlinear equations that he himself doubted anyone would solve exactly. Within weeks, Karl Schwarzschild, an astrophysicist serving as an artillery officer on the Russian front and simultaneously battling the autoimmune disease that would kill him, had found the first exact solution: a precise mathematical description of spacetime geometry around any perfectly spherical, non-rotating mass. He sent the result to Einstein in December, and Einstein, reportedly astonished, presented it to the Prussian Academy in January 1916; Schwarzschild died at the front in May, aged forty-two. Hidden inside his neat solution was a critical radius — now called the Schwarzschild radius — at which the equations become singular: if a mass is compressed inside this boundary, spacetime curves so violently that nothing, not even light, can escape. Schwarzschild himself did not name the concept; the term "black hole" would not arrive for another half century. That a man doing artillery calculations in a trench could also be closing the first chapter of general relativity tells you something about the strangeness of the species.

Lewis and Langmuir develop electron-shell model of bonding

Two Atoms, Sharing a Pair

Gilbert Lewis had been carrying a peculiar idea around since at least 1902 — a sketch in his notebooks showed atoms as cubes with electrons at the corners, hinting that chemical bonds might form when neighbouring atoms shared those electrons — but he had published almost none of it, apparently unconvinced the world was ready. By 1916 he was ready, and his paper introducing the shared electron pair as the foundation of covalent bonding was a conceptual earthquake delivered with characteristic understatement. Irving Langmuir, at General Electric, picked up the model almost immediately and extended it into a broader theory of electron shells and valence, popularising it with a showman's energy that Lewis, who was temperamentally the opposite, found irritating for the rest of his life. The two men never quite resolved the credit dispute. What they bequeathed, between them, is the framework every chemistry student meets in the first week: Lewis dot structures, the octet rule, the idea that atoms combine by completing their outer shells. Modern drug design, materials science, and organic synthesis all sit, ultimately, on the picture of two atoms sharing a pair of electrons that Lewis sketched in private twenty years before he published it.

Shapley finds spectral variations in Cepheid variables

The Star Was Breathing All Along

By 1916 the Cepheid variable stars — stars that brighten and dim with metronomic regularity over periods of days to weeks — had already been transformed into distance markers by Henrietta Swan Leavitt's discovery that their period of pulsation correlates tightly with their intrinsic luminosity. What remained murky was what the pulsation actually was. Harlow Shapley, working at Mount Wilson, analysed the spectra of Cepheid variables as they moved through their cycles and found that the spectral lines shifted rhythmically — the star's surface was genuinely expanding and contracting, breathing in and out, rather than exhibiting some geometric trick like an unseen companion periodically eclipsing it. This was not a minor footnote. It confirmed that the period-luminosity relationship reflected a real physical mechanism, which meant the cosmic distance ladder built on Cepheids had a genuine physical foundation rather than an empirical correlation hanging in mid-air. Shapley would go on to use these distance measurements to map the Milky Way and correctly argue that the Sun sits far from its centre — conclusions that required trusting the Cepheid yardstick completely, and which turned out to be right.

First successful transfusion of stored blood

Blood That Could Wait for You

Before 1916, blood transfusion was a logistical nightmare: a willing donor had to be found, bled, and connected more or less directly to the recipient, ideally within minutes. The procedure was intimate, cumbersome, and impossible at scale — which was a problem when scale was precisely what the Western Front required. On New Year's Day 1916, the Royal Army Medical Corps performed the first successful transfusion using blood that had been drawn from a donor, mixed with sodium citrate to prevent clotting, refrigerated, and then used some time later in a patient who had never met the source. It was, taken as a step in the operating theatre, a modest adjustment. Taken as a conceptual leap, it was the founding act of blood banking: the recognition that blood was a storable, shippable medical resource rather than a live fluid requiring two people in the same room. The infrastructure that grew from this insight — blood types, storage protocols, nationwide donation programmes — now underpins trauma surgery, cancer treatment, and childbirth across the world. Every blood drive, every cooled unit on a hospital shelf, is a descendant of a decision made in a field hospital in 1916.

Discovery of Barnard's Star

A Red Speck Crawling Past the Neighbours

Edward Emerson Barnard had spent decades accumulating photographic plates of the sky at Yerkes Observatory with the obsessive patience of a man who genuinely enjoyed comparing images taken years apart, and in 1916 he noticed a dim red speck in Ophiuchus that had moved — visibly, strikingly — relative to its neighbours between one plate and the next. The proper motion he measured was ten arc-seconds per year, the largest of any known star, meaning it crawls the width of a full moon across the sky roughly every 180 years. A star moves fast against the background when it is near, and Barnard's Star, at about six light-years, is the second-nearest stellar system to Earth, after the Alpha Centauri group. Its redness — it is a dim M-class dwarf, far too faint to see without a telescope — means it will never be a dramatic sight, but for decades it occupied astronomers looking for planets around the nearest possible neighbours, and it acquired a mythology disproportionate to its modest luminosity. It has since been the subject of Project Daedalus, a serious 1970s study of what an interstellar probe to the nearest stars might look like, which rather neatly spans the distance from Barnard's careful plate-comparisons to the ambitions of the space age.