1931
A year in which the atom quietly revealed new depths, a machine first bent electrons into images, and the man who lit the modern world went dark for the last time.
Nobel Prizes
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Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Carl Bosch · Friedrich Bergius
Bosch and Bergius had made chemistry industrial in the most literal sense — coaxing reactions that ordinarily refused to happen under ordinary conditions by applying extraordinary pressure. Between them they had changed how fertiliser and fuel were made, which is to say they had changed how the planet fed itself.
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Otto Warburg
Every cell in your body is burning, quietly and continuously, and Warburg worked out what does the burning: the respiratory enzyme that pulls electrons from food and funnels them toward oxygen. It is among the oldest chemistry in life, and he was the first to see it clearly.
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Nobel Prize in Literature
Erik Axel Karlfeldt
Karlfeldt had declined the prize once, while alive, on the grounds that he was too regional, too Swedish, too tied to the folk landscapes of Dalarna to warrant universal recognition. The Academy waited until he died and gave it to him anyway, which settled the argument in the most Swedish way possible.
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Nobel Peace Prize
Jane Addams · Nicholas Murray Butler
Addams had spent four decades running Hull House in Chicago, doing the patient, undramatic work of helping poor immigrants navigate a city that mostly wished they would go away. Butler had worked through diplomacy and education. The committee split the prize, which seemed about right for people who had approached peace from such different angles.
Discoveries
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Discovery of deuterium (heavy hydrogen)
Harold Urey
Hydrogen, the simplest element, turned out to be hiding a heavier version of itself. Urey and colleagues at Columbia found it by slowly distilling liquid hydrogen until the heavier fraction concentrated enough to notice — a process of patient reduction that ended with a second, unexpected hydrogen and, eventually, heavy water.
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First electron microscope prototype built
Ernst Ruska · Max Knoll
Light microscopes had been running up against physics for decades — wavelengths of visible light simply too long to resolve what biologists and chemists most wanted to see. Ruska and Knoll at Berlin Technical University bent electrons with magnets instead, achieving magnifications no glass lens could approach and opening a world that had been there all along, just too small to see.
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Dirac proposes magnetic monopoles
Paul Dirac
Every magnet you have ever encountered has two poles, and breaking it in half just gives you two more magnets, each with two poles. Dirac proposed, on purely theoretical grounds, that a single isolated magnetic pole ought to exist somewhere in the universe — and that if it did, it would neatly explain why electric charge only ever comes in whole-number multiples. Nobody has found one yet.
Milestones
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Death of Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison
He died on 18 October at 84, leaving more than 1,000 patents and a reputation so large it occasionally obscured the people who actually built what he imagined. The practical incandescent bulb, the phonograph, the motion picture camera — Edison's genius was less for lone inspiration than for industrial invention, for building the teams and laboratories that turned ideas into objects.
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