1923

Nobel Prize in Physics

Robert A. Millikan

Millikan had spent years dropping charged oil droplets through an electric field, watching them hover, and working backwards to the charge on a single electron. The result — 1.6 × 10⁻¹⁹ coulombs — is the same number that appears in every physics textbook today. He also measured the photoelectric effect directly, which confirmed Einstein's formula and, to Millikan's evident surprise, confirmed Einstein.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Fritz Pregl

Before Pregl, chemical analysis of organic substances required grams of material. His micro-analytical methods could work with milligrams — a reduction of a thousandfold — which meant that rare or expensive compounds could suddenly be studied at all. The Nobel committee, not given to understatement, described it as opening the chemistry of life to proper investigation.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Frederick G. Banting · John Macleod

The prize for insulin arrived swiftly, within two years of the clinical discovery. Banting, furious that Macleod shared the honour when Banting felt the laboratory director had done little of the actual work, immediately split his half with Charles Best. Macleod split his with James Collip. The committee, one suspects, had not anticipated this.

Nobel Prize in Literature

William Butler Yeats

The committee cited poetry that gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation — Ireland's, in this case, though Yeats had spent enough time with faeries, mystics, and aristocratic drawing rooms to make that a complicated claim. The poems stand regardless.

Discovery of hafnium

Dirk Coster and George de Hevesy used X-ray spectroscopy on zirconium ore in Copenhagen and found element 72 hiding within it — exactly where Mendeleev's periodic table had predicted a gap. They named it hafnium, after the Latin for Copenhagen, and reported it to a periodic table that was now, in this corner at least, complete.

Arthur Eddington publishes The Mathematical Theory of Relativity

Eddington's textbook did for general relativity what a good translation does for foreign literature: it made it accessible without making it simple. For a generation of physicists, it was the place you went when Einstein's own papers seemed to be speaking a private language.

Karl von Frisch publishes research on bee communication

Von Frisch had been watching bees and noticing that a forager returning to the hive seemed to tell the others not just that food existed, but roughly where. His early papers on this were met with interest and scepticism in roughly equal measure; the full picture of the waggle dance would take him decades more to establish, but the watching had begun.

Death of Wilhelm Röntgen

Wilhelm Röntgen

Röntgen died on 10 February at seventy-seven, having spent the twenty-eight years since discovering X-rays watching other people use them to transform medicine, crystallography, and security screening. He had refused to patent the discovery, on the grounds that it should belong to everyone, and died in comfortable but unremarkable circumstances.

Opening of the Maudsley Hospital

The Maudsley Hospital admitted its first patients in February, offering something still unusual in 1923: a London hospital where psychiatric patients were treated as patients, where research was expected alongside care, and where the ward did not look quite so much like a warehouse.