1922

Nobel Prize in Physics

Niels Bohr

Bohr had imagined electrons as tiny planets orbiting a nucleus — wrong in detail, deeply right in instinct — and the model predicted atomic spectra so well that the committee could hardly refuse him. The quantum weirdness that would eventually replace his picture was, at this moment, only beginning to form in younger minds around him.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Francis W. Aston

Aston's mass spectrograph sorted atoms by weight with a precision that revealed isotopes not as theoretical curiosities but as measurable, cataloguable facts. His whole-number rule — that atomic masses are, to a very good approximation, integers — hinted at something tidy underneath the apparent messiness of matter.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Archibald V. Hill · Otto Meyerhof

Hill measured the heat a muscle produces when it contracts, finding that the chemistry of exercise runs in two phases: an oxygen-free burst followed by a slower aerobic recovery. Meyerhof independently traced the same story through lactic acid. Together they had, without quite planning to, written the first chapter of exercise physiology.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Jacinto Benavente

The committee praised Benavente for continuing the illustrious traditions of Spanish drama, which is the kind of thing you say when you admire a writer enormously but cannot quite convey why in a single sentence.

Discovery of the Compton effect

Arthur Compton fired X-rays at electrons and found that the scattered X-rays came out at longer wavelengths — as if the photon had given some of its energy away in a collision, like a billiard ball. This was a particle behaving like a particle, and it became one of the cleaner demonstrations that light is both wave and thing.

Stern–Gerlach experiment demonstrates space quantization

Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach sent a beam of silver atoms through an uneven magnetic field in Frankfurt and watched the atoms split into two distinct streams rather than fanning out continuously. Quantum mechanics had just insisted that angular momentum comes in discrete portions, and the atoms had obliged.

First successful clinical use of insulin for diabetes

On 11 January, Leonard Thompson — fourteen years old, comatose, expected to die — was injected with insulin purified by James Collip. He improved within hours. Banting and Best had isolated the hormone the previous summer; Collip had made it safe enough to use; and what had been a death sentence handed to diabetics became, almost overnight, a manageable condition.

Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb

On 4 November, Howard Carter's team found a step cut into the floor of the Valley of the Kings. Three weeks later they stood before a sealed door. Beyond it lay the most complete royal burial ever found in Egypt — furniture, chariots, gold, the preserved face of a king who had died at around eighteen, in approximately 1323 BCE.

Roy Chapman Andrews discovers Velociraptor in Mongolia

An American Museum of Natural History expedition into the Gobi Desert, led by the improbably adventurous Roy Chapman Andrews, returned with fossils of creatures previously unknown to science: Velociraptor, Protoceratops, Oviraptor. The picture of dinosaur diversity that emerged was considerably stranger and more varied than anyone had expected.