1938

Nobel Prize in Physics

The Slow Neutron's Useful Door

Enrico Fermi

Since 1934, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues in Rome had been working their way through the periodic table with methodical, almost industrial purpose — bombarding each element in turn with neutrons and cataloguing what came out the other side — when they discovered, largely by accident, that slowing the neutrons down by passing them through paraffin or water produced far more reactions than fast ones did. Fermi had no fully satisfying explanation for this at the time; he simply noted that it worked and moved on, in the manner of someone who has found a useful door and declines to be distracted by whether the hinges are well-understood. The Nobel committee in Stockholm announced the prize in November 1938, and Fermi attended the ceremony in December with his Jewish wife Laura and their children, having obtained exit visas from Fascist Italy for what the authorities believed was a temporary trip. He did not go back. The work on slow neutrons would become, within a few years, the theoretical backbone of the first nuclear reactor — a fact he was well aware of as he departed, and which made the prize, by any measure, the most consequential travel grant of the twentieth century.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Carrots, Egg Yolks, and a Forbidden Medal

Richard Kuhn

Richard Kuhn, working in Heidelberg, had spent years untangling the chemistry of carotenoids — the pigments that give carrots their orange and egg yolks their gold, and which shade, in a way that took considerable work to establish, into the fat-soluble vitamins A and the B-group that human bodies cannot manufacture for themselves. His investigations into vitamins B2 and B6 in particular mapped the molecular structures that underpin everything from vision to nerve function, and the Nobel committee judged the cumulative body of work worthy of the 1938 prize. The Nazi government disagreed — not with the science, but with the principle of a German citizen accepting an honour from what it considered an international, and therefore suspect, institution — and formally forbade Kuhn from receiving the medal or the money. He was permitted to accept the award itself only after the war ended, by which point the political machinery that had once forbidden it was mercifully unavailable to comment.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Body's Own Breathing Dial

Corneille Heymans

For most of medical history, the mechanism by which breathing adjusts itself — speeding when you run, slowing when you sleep, deepening at altitude without any conscious instruction from you — was essentially a mystery, attributed in loose terms to the brain responding to the blood without anyone being specific about how. Corneille Heymans, working in Ghent, traced the circuitry precisely: specialised chemoreceptors in the carotid bodies and the aortic arch, small clusters of tissue at strategic junctions in the arterial system, continuously sample the blood's oxygen and carbon dioxide and relay the results as nerve signals to the respiratory centres of the brain stem, which adjust the rate and depth of breathing accordingly. It is an automatic control loop, running continuously in every living person, and Heymans mapped it with a clarity that established the whole concept of peripheral chemoreception. The practical inheritance is considerable: without his work, anaesthesia, intensive care, and the entire management of respiratory failure would be operating, at best, by feel.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Farming Family, Rendered as People

Pearl Buck

Pearl Buck was raised in China by American missionary parents, spoke Chinese before she spoke comfortable English, and came to adulthood with the unsettling double perspective of someone who belongs, and does not quite belong, everywhere she stands. Her novel The Good Earth, published in 1931, followed the fortunes of a Chinese farming family across decades with an attention and a respect that most Western fiction of the period reserved for Westerners: her characters were not exotic, not representative, not lessons — they were people, navigating poverty and ambition and grief and luck, as people do. The novel won the Pulitzer, sold in enormous numbers, and was followed by a sequence of books extending the same patient, grounded gaze across Chinese society and history. The Swedish Academy cited her for rich and truly epic portrayals of Chinese peasant life and for masterpieces of biography. She remains the most translated American female author of the twentieth century, which is perhaps the quieter, more durable form of recognition.

Nobel Peace Prize

Paperwork That Made Statelessness Survivable

Nansen International Office for Refugees

The Nansen International Office for Refugees had been established in 1930 to carry forward the work of Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer and humanitarian who had, in the previous decade, devised the Nansen passport — a document issued by the League of Nations to stateless persons, so that the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the Russian Revolution and subsequent upheavals could cross borders and exist, in some legal sense, in the world. It was not a glamorous mandate; it involved paperwork, negotiation, and the constant effort of persuading governments to accept people that other governments had discarded. The office received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938 and closed its doors the same year, its mandate formally expired, at precisely the moment when Europe was producing stateless people faster than any administrative body could track. The timing had the quality of a bitter joke — except that the Nansen passport itself endured as a template for the modern refugee travel document, and the idea that a human being deserves some legal standing regardless of which state will claim them is one the world has been, unevenly, trying to honour ever since.

Discovery of Teflon (PTFE)

A Failed Refrigerant Turns Waxy and White

On the sixth of April 1938, a young DuPont chemist named Roy Plunkett was attempting to develop a new chlorofluorocarbon refrigerant — a practical, unglamorous objective — when he found that his pressurised cylinder of tetrafluoroethylene gas had somehow solidified overnight into a waxy white powder. He weighed the cylinder, noted it was heavier than it should have been if the gas had simply escaped, and began investigating. The powder, which turned out to be polytetrafluoroethylene — PTFE, eventually trademarked as Teflon — was unlike anything previously synthesised: the carbon-fluorine bond, one of the strongest in organic chemistry, made it almost entirely chemically inert, extraordinarily resistant to heat, and possessed of a surface friction so low that almost nothing would adhere to it. The military found uses for it in the Manhattan Project; industry found uses for it everywhere else. It eventually reached the frying pan, which is how most people encounter it, though using a non-stick pan to illustrate the legacy of materials chemistry is a little like using a Post-it note to illustrate adhesives research — accurate, but underselling the point.

Public announcement of nylon fibre

A Fibre Designed Before It Was Found

On 27 October 1938, DuPont announced to the world a synthetic polyamide fibre it called nylon — the first material of its kind to be designed from molecular first principles rather than discovered, adapted, or borrowed from nature. Wallace Carothers, the Harvard-trained chemist who led the research, had approached the problem as a theoretical exercise: if one understood how polymers formed, one could design a molecule with specific properties rather than hoping that experimentation would happen upon something useful. His team did, and nylon — strong, elastic, resistant to heat and chemicals, capable of being drawn into fibres finer than silk — was the result. DuPont introduced it, slightly reductively, as a silk substitute for women's stockings, and the demand at the first public sale in 1940 was such that queues stretched round city blocks. Carothers himself did not see it: he had died by suicide in 1937, before the patent was even granted. Nylon eventually went into toothbrushes, parachutes, ropes, guitar strings, and surgical sutures — the full ambition of a material designed rather than found made plain over time.

Living coelacanth discovered off South Africa

Sixty-Six Million Years Late to Extinction

In December 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer — curator of a small natural history museum in East London, South Africa — was visiting a local trawler to look for interesting specimens when she noticed, among the usual catch, a large, strange, blue fish with limb-like lobed fins that she had never seen before. She had no means of preserving it properly, but she made careful sketches and measurements and sent them to J.L.B. Smith, the country's leading fish expert, who replied in a state of barely restrained incredulity: the fish was a coelacanth, a member of a lineage known only from fossils and believed to have been extinct for roughly sixty-six million years. The species was named Latimeria chalumnae in her honour, and Smith spent the next fourteen years trying to find a second specimen, eventually succeeding in the Comoros Islands in 1952. The coelacanth has not evolved dramatically in three hundred and fifty million years, which either speaks well of its original design or reflects a philosophy of life that requires no external validation.

Albert Hofmann synthesises LSD

Compound Twenty-Five, Shelved and Forgotten

On 16 November 1938, Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel synthesised the twenty-fifth compound in his series of lysergic acid derivatives — LSD-25 — as part of a programme to develop medicines that might stimulate circulation and respiration. He was working with ergot, the fungus that grows on rye and had been responsible for centuries of mass poisonings and, occasionally, historical misattributions, and the new compound emerged from routine combinatorial chemistry. Animal testing at Sandoz showed nothing particularly interesting, and the file was shelved. Hofmann himself forgot about it for five years, then, in April 1943, synthesised it again on a hunch — and inadvertently absorbed a trace amount through his fingertips, whereupon he was obliged to cycle home through Basel in a condition that defied the available medical vocabulary. LSD-25, which he had set aside as unremarkable, turned out to be the most potent psychoactive substance known to exist, active in microgram quantities: a reminder that the first experiment is not always the informative one.

Hahn and Strassmann observe uranium fission

Barium Where None Should Be

On 22 December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, working in Berlin, bombarded uranium with neutrons — an experiment in the Fermi tradition of probing the nucleus — and found among the products something that had no right to be there: barium, an element with roughly half the atomic mass of uranium, which the accepted physics of the day said could not simply appear from a uranium nucleus. Hahn was baffled and disturbed enough that he wrote immediately to his former colleague and collaborator Lise Meitner, who had fled Germany six months earlier and was now in Stockholm; she and her nephew Otto Frisch worked out over the Christmas holiday, on the back of calculations scratched out on a walk through the snow, that the uranium nucleus had split in two, releasing an enormous quantity of energy in the process. Meitner and Frisch coined the term fission and published the explanation in January 1939. Hahn alone received the Nobel in Chemistry in 1944 — a division of credit that has been disputed, with good reason, by historians ever since — and the physics they had collectively uncovered moved, with considerable speed, from a laboratory curiosity to the defining weapon of the century.