1923

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Droplet Held Still by Argument

Robert A. Millikan

Between 1909 and 1913, Robert Millikan performed an experiment of almost maddening patience: he atomized oil into a fine mist, irradiated it with X-rays to knock electrons loose, and watched individual droplets drift between two charged plates, adjusting the electric field until a droplet — invisible as a rumour — hung perfectly still in the air. From those observations he worked backwards to the charge on a single electron: 1.6 × 10⁻¹⁹ coulombs, a figure that has not changed since. He also measured the photoelectric effect precisely enough to confirm Einstein's 1905 equation, which Millikan had spent some years expecting to disprove. The result vindicated Einstein and delivered Millikan a Nobel; the universe, as usual, was not consulting anyone's preferences. That single number, e, appears in every equation governing electronics, chemistry, and electromagnetism — a world without it would be a world that can't design anything smaller than a gear.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Chemistry Learns to Work in Milligrams

Fritz Pregl

Until Fritz Pregl rebuilt his balance and his methods, doing organic chemistry meant consuming your sample: grams of carefully prepared material burned away in a single analysis, which was fine if your compound was common and catastrophic if it was rare or biological or just painfully hard to synthesise. Pregl, working in Graz through the 1910s, redesigned his combustion apparatus until it could analyse organic substances using only a few milligrams — roughly one-thousandth of what his contemporaries needed — and achieved results as reliable as any done with far more material. The Nobel committee suggested this had opened the chemistry of life to proper investigation, and they were not wrong: trace metabolites, natural products, pharmaceutical candidates, substances scraped from the margins of living tissue, all of it suddenly workable. Every mass spectrometer that has since diagnosed a metabolic disorder or identified a new drug candidate stands in a long, unbroken line from Pregl's rebuilt scales.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Months of Dying, Reversed by Autumn

Frederick G. Banting · John Macleod

The 1923 Nobel came with unusual speed — barely two years after Frederick Banting and Charles Best, working in the Toronto laboratory of John Macleod, had isolated insulin and demonstrated in a dying diabetic boy that it worked. Banting had arrived at the idea almost as an outsider, a young surgeon with no particular reputation in endocrinology; Macleod, the laboratory's director, had been away in Scotland when the crucial experiments were done. That context explains what happened next: Banting, incandescent at sharing the prize with a man he felt had contributed chiefly his absence, immediately announced he was giving his half to Best. Macleod, with rather more equanimity, split his with the biochemist James Collip. The committee presumably had not intended to conduct a seminar in collaborative credit. Before insulin, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes was measured in months; the Nobel recognised not a discovery but a rescue.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Nation's Spirit, Given Strange Late Poems

William Butler Yeats

The Swedish Academy cited Yeats for poetry that gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation, which is the kind of formulation that sounds more straightforward than it is, given that the nation in question was Ireland and Yeats had spent the intervening years consorting with mystics, aristocrats, and the occult geometries of A Vision. His relationship to Irish nationalism was real but complicated — he had been part of the literary revival that lent the independence movement its imagery and its rhetoric, yet he was also a Protestant landlord's son who distrusted the clerical, populist direction the Free State was taking. The poems, fortunately, do not require that ambiguity to be resolved. What remains is a body of work that moves between the personal and the mythic with an ease that very few poets in any language have managed — the late poems in particular growing stranger, fiercer, and more memorable as the century around him grew darker.

Discovery of hafnium

The Gap the Table Had Reserved

The periodic table had been predicting a gap at element 72 for decades — Mendeleev's logic demanded something there, between lutetium and tantalum, but no one had found it, and for a while there was confusion about whether the rare earths had claimed the slot. In 1922 Niels Bohr's new quantum model of the atom clarified that element 72 should behave chemically like zirconium rather than the rare earths, and by January 1923 Dirk Coster and George de Hevesy, working in Copenhagen, had looked at zirconium ore with X-ray spectroscopy and found exactly the new element the table had been quietly holding space for. They named it hafnium, from Hafnia, the Latin name for Copenhagen, in a small act of proprietary satisfaction. The discovery did not keep Bohr from acknowledging it in his Nobel lecture that same year, which tells you something about the pace of physics in the 1920s. Hafnium turned out to be extraordinarily good at absorbing neutrons, a property that made it essential in nuclear reactor control rods — a use its discoverers could not have foreseen.

Arthur Eddington publishes The Mathematical Theory of Relativity

A Bridge Into Einstein's Private Language

By 1923, general relativity was eight years old and widely agreed to be either the greatest achievement in physics since Newton or else utterly incomprehensible — often by the same person in the same conversation. Einstein's own papers were dense, tensor-laden, and assumed a mathematical fluency that even many professional physicists lacked. Eddington, who had done more than almost anyone to bring relativity to English-speaking audiences after his 1919 eclipse expedition confirmed the light-bending prediction, now attempted something harder than popularisation: a rigorous mathematical treatment aimed at working physicists who needed the machinery, not just the metaphor. The result was a book that managed to be both demanding and clear, which is rarer than it sounds. For the better part of a generation it was the standard route into the subject for anyone who wanted to do physics with general relativity rather than merely admire it — a bridge between Einstein's private formalism and the wider community that would eventually extend it.

Karl von Frisch publishes research on bee communication

A Forager Comes Home With Directions

Karl von Frisch had been watching bees with unusual attentiveness since before the First World War, building on the then-contested idea that insects could perceive colour and might use it to locate flowers. By the early 1920s he had noticed something stranger: a forager returning to the hive after finding food seemed to communicate not just that food existed but something about where. Other bees would leave after watching the returning forager's movements and fly, not randomly, but in roughly the right direction. His early papers on this were received with interest and the polite scepticism that greets any claim that insects are doing something sophisticated. The full theory of the waggle dance — its orientation to the sun, its duration encoding distance, its entire improbable choreography — would take him decades more to establish, earning him a Nobel in 1973. But the watching had begun here, in 1923, in a garden with bees, and what he was looking at turned out to be one of the most elaborate communication systems in the animal kingdom.

Death of Wilhelm Röntgen

Buried Without a Patent to His Name

Wilhelm Röntgen

Wilhelm Röntgen died on 10 February 1923, aged seventy-seven, having lived long enough to watch the accidental discovery he made on a November evening in 1895 transform surgery, diagnosis, crystallography, and airport security — without, it must be said, becoming wealthy from any of it. He had declined to patent X-rays on the grounds that scientific discoveries should belong to everyone, a decision that was either principled self-abnegation or naive generosity depending on your disposition, but that had at least the practical virtue of allowing the technology to spread quickly. He received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 and spent his remaining decades in Würzburg and Munich watching the world reorganise itself around an observation he had made in a darkened laboratory when he noticed a barium-coated screen glowing across the room for no good reason. He did not name the rays after himself. The "X" was the mathematician's symbol for the unknown, and he kept it because he was not sure what they were. He was buried, as he had lived, without fuss.

Opening of the Maudsley Hospital

Treating the Mind Like Any Other Organ

The Maudsley Hospital admitted its first patients in February 1923, and its founding philosophy was, by the standards of British psychiatry at the time, almost radical. Henry Maudsley, the Victorian psychiatrist whose bequest made it possible, had wanted an institution where psychiatric patients would be received early, treated actively, and studied rigorously rather than warehoused indefinitely. The result was a hospital attached to the University of London, built on the premise that mental illness was a medical problem that medicine should take seriously — not a social embarrassment to be managed somewhere out of sight. It would become the teaching and research centre that trained much of twentieth-century British psychiatry, affiliated eventually with King's College London, and it remains one of the largest mental health training institutions in the world. In 1923 the very idea of a psychiatric outpatient clinic in an ordinary London building was still unusual enough to be remarked upon. The Maudsley made it a model.

Roy Chapman Andrews discovers Velociraptor in Mongolia

The Flaming Cliffs Gave Up Their Nests

Roy Chapman Andrews was, by disposition and legend, the sort of man who was rumoured to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones and who took the rumour in stride. His American Museum of Natural History expeditions into the Gobi Desert of Mongolia — a region almost entirely unmapped by Western science — set out from 1922 armed with automobiles, camels, and a plan to find the evolutionary ancestors of humanity. They did not find those, but on the 1923 season at the Flaming Cliffs the team turned up something considerably more varied and strange: the first known fossils of Velociraptor, a small but emphatically not to be trifled with predatory dinosaur; Protoceratops, a horned dinosaur whose nesting colonies lay in remarkable abundance; and Oviraptor, found sitting atop what were then assumed to be Protoceratops eggs and were only decades later revealed to be its own. The expedition returned a picture of Cretaceous Central Asia as an ecosystem far richer and more peculiar than the European and North American dinosaur record had suggested, and demonstrated that the Gobi — forbidding, remote, and frequently very hot — was one of the richest fossil beds on earth. Palaeontologists have been going back ever since.