1939

Nobel Prize in Physics

Ernest Lawrence

Lawrence had solved the problem of accelerating particles to high energies without building a machine kilometres long, by bending the particle path into a spiral using magnets — the cyclotron. Each loop added energy; the particle spiralled outward until it reached the rim and was extracted. It was compact, practical, and became the workhorse of nuclear physics and, eventually, cancer therapy.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Adolf Butenandt · Leopold Ruzicka

Butenandt had isolated and characterised the sex hormones — oestrone, androsterone, progesterone — working out the structures of the molecules that regulate reproduction. Ruzicka investigated the terpenes, the vast family of carbon compounds that includes everything from rubber to steroids. The Nazi government forbade Butenandt to accept the prize; he received it after the war.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Gerhard Domagk

Domagk had discovered that the red dye prontosil cured bacterial infections in mice, and then — his daughter developing a life-threatening streptococcal infection — tested it in a human being in circumstances that concentrated the mind considerably. Prontosil was the first sulfonamide drug, the first effective antibacterial agent, and a proof that infections need not be fatal. The Nazi regime forbade him to accept the prize.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Frans Eemil Sillanpää

Sillanpää wrote about Finnish country people — farmers, labourers, the landless poor — with the same attention to texture and light that a naturalist might bring to a landscape. The committee praised his understanding of his country's peasantry; the Finns, who had just survived a brutal civil war and were about to be invaded by the Soviet Union, may have found the timing bittersweet.

Meitner and Frisch explain nuclear fission

Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch spent the Christmas holiday of 1938 in the Swedish snow working through what Hahn had found, and by January had the answer: the uranium nucleus, struck by a neutron, wobbled and split like a liquid drop, releasing an enormous burst of energy calculable from Einstein's E=mc². Meitner coined the term fission; Hahn, who had done the experiment, collected the Nobel Prize. Meitner did not.

Paul Müller discovers DDT's insecticidal properties

On 3 September, Swiss chemist Paul Müller found that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane was devastatingly effective against insects — persistent, cheap, and lethal to a wide range. It would save millions of lives from malaria, typhus, and other insect-borne diseases before its persistence in food chains and its effects on bird reproduction prompted bans beginning in the 1970s.

Francium discovered

On 7 January, Marguerite Perey at the Curie Institute in Paris isolated francium from the decay products of actinium — the last element to be discovered in nature rather than synthesised. It is so unstable and so rare that at any given moment, the total quantity of francium on Earth amounts to a few tens of grams.

Einstein–Szilard letter warns Roosevelt of atomic weapons

On 2 August, Einstein signed a letter drafted by Leó Szilard warning President Roosevelt that nuclear chain reactions might soon make possible bombs of unprecedented destructive power, and that Germany was already pursuing uranium research. The letter took two months to reach the President; the Manhattan Project it eventually catalysed took four years and three billion dollars to produce what Szilard had imagined on a London street in 1933.

First jet aircraft flight

On 27 August, Erich Warsitz lifted the Heinkel He 178 off the ground at Rostock — the first flight of an aircraft powered entirely by a jet engine. The German Air Ministry attended a demonstration, noted that the aircraft had no practical military application at present, and returned to other business. The practical application would arrive within a decade.

World War II begins

On 1 September, German forces crossed into Poland. Within the year, physics laboratories across occupied Europe had been shuttered or redirected; scientists who had not already left were conscripted or suppressed. The war would accelerate certain branches of science — radar, computing, medicine, and, fatally, nuclear physics — while halting or destroying much else.