1917

Nobel Prize in Physics

Charles Glover Barkla

Barkla found that when X-rays strike an element, the element emits its own characteristic secondary X-rays at wavelengths specific to that element — a kind of fluorescent signature. Each element has its own X-ray voice, and Barkla was the first to hear them all as distinct.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Karl Gjellerup · Henrik Pontoppidan

The prize was split between two Danes. Gjellerup wrote philosophical novels and verse of a rather Germanic idealism; Pontoppidan's work was earthier — realistic portraits of Danish provincial life, doubt, and disappointed ambition. They were an odd pairing but not an incoherent one.

Nobel Peace Prize

International Committee of the Red Cross

The Red Cross received the Peace Prize while the war it was trying to mitigate was still being fought. It would receive the prize again in 1944, for the same reason. The ICRC had been visiting prisoners of war, coordinating medical relief, and carrying messages between families separated by front lines since 1914.

Rutherford achieves first artificial nuclear transmutation

Bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles, Rutherford watched hydrogen nuclei emerge — something knocked out of the nitrogen atom by the collision. He had converted nitrogen into oxygen and, in the process, identified the proton as a constituent particle of every atomic nucleus. He called it one of the most striking results he had ever encountered in his laboratory.

Einstein introduces stimulated emission

Einstein published a theoretical treatment of how atoms interact with radiation and identified three processes: spontaneous emission, absorption, and stimulated emission — where an incoming photon of exactly the right energy causes an excited atom to emit a second, identical photon. The paper was filed away as interesting but abstract. Thirty-five years later it became the operating principle of the laser.

Félix d'Hérelle discovers bacteriophages

D'Hérelle was investigating a dysentery outbreak among French troops when he noticed clear spots in his bacterial cultures — patches where all the bacteria had died. He realised a filterable agent was killing them: a virus whose only host was bacteria. He named it bacteriophage, from the Greek for "eater of bacteria," and immediately began thinking about therapeutic uses that would not arrive for another century.

D'Arcy Thompson publishes 'On Growth and Form'

Thompson's book proposed that biological shapes — the spiral of a shell, the branching of a coral, the proportions of a bone — follow mathematical principles as reliably as any physical system. It was not quite biology and not quite mathematics, and it irritated specialists in both disciplines. It has never gone out of print.