1934
The year radioactivity became something you could manufacture rather than merely find, and two of the figures who had shaped modern science — Marie Curie and Santiago Ramón y Cajal — died within months of each other.
Nobel Prizes
-
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Harold C. Urey
Urey had found deuterium — the heavier twin of ordinary hydrogen — by a method of great patience: repeatedly evaporating liquid hydrogen until the heavier fraction refused to leave. Heavy water, made with deuterium instead of the usual thing, would soon become indispensable to nuclear physics, which perhaps justified the trouble.
-
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
George H. Whipple · George R. Minot · William P. Murphy
Pernicious anaemia had been a death sentence until Whipple's experiments on dogs showed that raw liver could reverse it. Minot and Murphy tested the finding in humans — feeding patients large quantities of liver, which they generally found disagreeable — and confirmed that it worked. The active ingredient, vitamin B12, would not be isolated for another fifteen years.
-
Nobel Prize in Literature
Luigi Pirandello
Pirandello had spent his career worrying at the boundary between performance and reality — between who people are and who they pretend to be, and whether there is a difference. His plays put the audience in the uncomfortable position of watching characters question whether they are characters, which is the kind of thing that sounds irritating until you actually watch it.
-
Nobel Peace Prize
Arthur Henderson
Henderson had chaired the World Disarmament Conference from 1931 to 1934, holding together tortuous negotiations while the political ground shifted beneath him and Germany rearmed. The conference ultimately failed; Henderson got the prize anyway, for effort of a kind that deserves recognition precisely when it does not succeed.
Discoveries
-
Discovery of artificial radioactivity
Frédéric Joliot · Irène Joliot-Curie
Until Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie bombarded aluminium and boron with alpha particles, radioactivity was something nature provided and humanity merely detected. They found that the bombardment left the target itself radioactive — continuing to emit particles after the source was removed. They had made radioactivity to order, and collected the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it.
-
Enrico Fermi bombards uranium with neutrons
Enrico Fermi
Fermi's team in Rome systematically fired neutrons at every element in the periodic table, working their way up to uranium. They produced new radioactive species and assumed, reasonably but incorrectly, that they had created elements heavier than uranium. What they had actually done, though they would not know it for four more years, was split the atom.
Milestones
-
Death of Marie Curie
Marie Curie
She died on 4 July of aplastic anaemia, almost certainly caused by the decades of radiation her unshielded hands and body had absorbed. She had discovered two elements, won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, and remains the only person to have done so. Her notebooks are still too radioactive to handle without protective equipment.
-
Death of Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Cajal died on 17 October at 82, having spent half a century making extraordinarily detailed drawings of neurons stained by the Golgi method — drawings so accurate that twenty-first century electron microscopy still confirms them. He had established that the nervous system was made of discrete cells, not a continuous web, and the prize committee had got round to acknowledging it in 1906.
No entries match that category.