1924

Nobel Prize in Physics

Manne Siegbahn

Siegbahn refined X-ray spectroscopy to a level of precision that turned it into a proper measuring instrument for atomic structure — one capable of detecting subtle differences between elements and confirming theoretical predictions with the kind of accuracy that makes physicists feel briefly at peace with the universe.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Willem Einthoven

Einthoven had devised the string galvanometer, a device sensitive enough to record the tiny electrical signals produced by a beating heart. His electrocardiogram — the ECG — gave physicians something they had never had before: a precise, legible picture of what the heart is doing, moment by moment, without cutting anything open.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Władysław Reymont

The committee gave the prize to Reymont for The Peasants, his four-volume novel following a Polish rural community through the cycle of a year. It is the kind of book that a nation prizes and the rest of the world has always meant to read.

Edwin Hubble proves existence of other galaxies

On 23 November, Hubble announced what his measurements of Cepheid variables in the Andromeda nebula had been telling him for months: it was not a gas cloud within the Milky Way but a separate galaxy, an island of hundreds of billions of stars at a distance of around 900,000 light-years. The Milky Way was no longer the universe; it was merely one of its addresses.

Louis de Broglie submits doctoral thesis on matter waves

De Broglie's doctoral committee at the Sorbonne was reportedly uncertain what to make of his thesis, which proposed that every moving particle — an electron, a proton, a billiard ball — has an associated wavelength given by h divided by its momentum. They consulted Einstein, who said it was good. The committee passed it. The wavelength is now measured routinely.

Bose and Einstein publish quantum statistics papers

Satyendra Nath Bose sent Einstein a paper deriving Planck's radiation law without classical assumptions, treating photons as genuinely indistinguishable particles. Einstein translated it, published it, and extended the idea to atoms — predicting a new state of matter, now called a Bose-Einstein condensate, that would not be confirmed in the laboratory for another seventy-one years.

Hans Berger records the first electroencephalogram

Berger attached electrodes to his son's scalp and recorded the brain's electrical activity — a faint, rhythmic signal that no one had measured before. He called the dominant pattern the alpha wave and spent years checking his results before publishing, not quite believing that the mind, of all things, could be read as a graph.

Discovery of the Taung Child fossil

In October, a small skull blasted loose from a limestone quarry in South Africa arrived on the desk of anatomist Raymond Dart. He recognised it as something new: a juvenile hominid with a brain larger than any ape's, a face more vertical, teeth more human. He named it Australopithecus africanus and argued that human evolution had begun in Africa. Most of his colleagues disagreed, and were eventually wrong.

John Logie Baird transmits television images

Working in a Soho attic with a tea chest, a biscuit tin, a motor from an electric fan, and a good deal of optimism, Baird managed in February to transmit a recognisable image across a short distance. The image was a Maltese cross, blurry and flickering. It was, nonetheless, television.