1928

Nobel Prize in Physics

Owen Willans Richardson

Richardson had worked out the mathematics of electrons boiling off hot metal — thermionic emission — and derived the law that describes how the current depends on temperature. Every vacuum tube ever made, every early radio and television, depended on the phenomenon he had quantified. The prize came fourteen years after the main work.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Adolf Windaus

Windaus spent years unpicking the molecular architecture of sterols — the family of waxy alcohols that includes cholesterol — and tracing their relationship to vitamins. His work showed that vitamin D could be produced from ergosterol by ultraviolet light, which eventually explained why sunlight prevents rickets.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Charles Nicolle

Nicolle had noticed something that should have been obvious but wasn't: patients with typhus in a Tunis hospital stopped infecting each other once they were admitted, bathed, and given fresh clothes. From this he correctly deduced that the body louse was the vector. The insight came, he later said, in a moment on the hospital steps — which is as good a place as any.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Sigrid Undset

Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy — a Norwegian woman's life across three volumes set in fourteenth-century Scandinavia — had appeared between 1920 and 1922 and was, the committee said, a powerful description of northern life during the Middle Ages. It is also simply a very good novel about marriage, faith, and consequence.

Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin

Fleming returned from holiday on 3 September to find a Penicillium mould growing uninvited on a staphylococcus culture plate, surrounded by a clear zone where the bacteria had died. A less curious man might have discarded it. Fleming looked more carefully, noted that something in the mould was killing the bacteria, and published a paper the following year. The drug that would eventually save hundreds of millions of lives took another fourteen years to produce in usable form.

Dirac formulates the relativistic quantum equation

Paul Dirac published in January an equation that married quantum mechanics with special relativity for the first time — an equation so elegant that he later said it had "a beauty that any scientist would appreciate." It described the electron's spin automatically, without being told to, and contained within it a prediction: a particle identical to the electron but with opposite charge. The positron was confirmed four years later.

First successful clinical tests of penicillin begin

Following Fleming's 1928 observation, initial tests of the crude mould extract on bacterial infections showed clear promise, though the compound remained too impure and unstable for general use. The path from contaminated petri dish to injectable antibiotic would prove to require the efforts of a second generation of chemists, a war, and the industrial capacity of two continents.