1939

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Spiral Instead of a Mile

Ernest Lawrence

The dream of smashing atoms together requires giving them enough speed to do interesting damage, and the obvious approach — accelerating them in a straight line — meant building machines of implausible length. Ernest Lawrence, working at Berkeley through the late 1920s and early 1930s, found a rather more elegant solution: bend the particle's path into a spiral using magnetic fields, let it loop around again and again picking up energy with each pass, until it reaches the rim of the machine at genuinely useful velocity. The device fit on a laboratory bench. That it resembled a stubby hatbox rather than a mile-long tunnel was, to the physicists who had to find funding, considerably more appealing. The cyclotron became the indispensable instrument of nuclear physics — used to produce radioisotopes, probe the structure of the nucleus, and, in time, deliver targeted beams of protons to tumours. A world without Lawrence's spiral is one where particle physics remains theoretically rich and experimentally impoverished, and where proton therapy for cancer waits another generation to be invented.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Tonnes of Urine, Milligrams of Command

Adolf Butenandt · Leopold Ruzicka

Adolf Butenandt spent the early 1930s doing something that sounds straightforward until you attempt it: isolating, from quantities of urine measured in tonnes, the chemical signals that govern mammalian reproduction. He isolated oestrone, androsterone, and progesterone in succession, determining their structures and demonstrating that a few milligrams of a small organic molecule could command the entire machinery of sex. Leopold Ruzicka worked on terpenes — the enormous carbon-chain family that encompasses turpentine, rubber, and, as Ruzicka showed, the very skeleton of steroid hormones — linking the chemistry of forests to the chemistry of bodies in ways nobody had expected. Together they mapped the molecular grammar of fertility. The Nazi government, with its particular genius for self-harm, forbade Butenandt to accept the prize at the time; he received it after the war. This did not change the chemistry, which has since underpinned contraception, hormone replacement therapy, and half a century of reproductive medicine.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

A Red Dye Cured His Daughter

Gerhard Domagk

In the early 1930s, bacterial infections killed with a thoroughness that modern medicine has difficulty imagining — a scratch could become septicaemia, a sore throat could become a funeral. Gerhard Domagk, testing hundreds of coal-tar dyes at Bayer on the theory that something bactericidal might lurk in them, found in 1932 that a red compound called prontosil cured streptococcal infection in mice with striking reliability. The human test came when his own daughter Hildegard developed a severe streptococcal infection after a needlestick accident; facing the alternative, Domagk administered prontosil, and she recovered. The active agent, a sulfonamide, proved to be the first of an entire drug class. The Nazis, again performing their characteristic service to science, forbade him to accept the Nobel Prize; he was briefly arrested by the Gestapo and only received his medal after the war. The sulfonamides he unlocked cut mortality from bacterial pneumonia, puerperal fever, and meningitis before penicillin arrived to take most of the credit.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Rural Elegy, Invaded Mid-Sentence

Frans Eemil Sillanpää

Frans Eemil Sillanpää wrote about the Finnish countryside and its people — the crofters, labourers, and landless poor who worked the land through the brutal Finnish civil war of 1918 — with a naturalist's patience and a lyricist's ear for the slow rhythms of rural life. His 1931 novel Silja captured a vanishing Finland, its peasant world passing into industrial modernity while the characters themselves passed, quietly and without heroics, through their brief lives. The Swedish Academy praised his deep understanding of his country's peasantry and the exquisite art with which he depicted their way of life and their relationship to nature. That the prize was awarded in 1939, just as the Soviet Union invaded Finland in the Winter War, lent his rural elegy an irony nobody had planned. Sillanpää remains, somewhat against the odds, the only Finnish author to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is perhaps less a judgment on Finnish letters than on the committee's attention to them.

Meitner and Frisch explain nuclear fission

Worked Out in the Swedish Snow

Otto Hahn had bombarded uranium with neutrons in Berlin and got results that made no chemical sense — the products seemed to include barium, an element far lighter than uranium, which ought to have been impossible. He wrote to his long-time collaborator Lise Meitner, by then a refugee in Stockholm after fleeing Nazi Germany, admitting he could not explain his own experiment. Meitner took the letter to her nephew Otto Robert Frisch for the Christmas holiday of 1938, and the two of them worked it out in the Swedish snow: the uranium nucleus, like a liquid drop, could stretch until the electrostatic repulsion of its protons tore it in two, releasing energy calculable directly from Einstein's E=mc². The mass deficit was tiny; the energy was enormous. Frisch borrowed the biologists' word for cell division — fission — and the physics of 1939 was never quite the same afterwards. Hahn collected the Nobel Prize in 1944. Meitner, who had done the theoretical work that made sense of the experimental result, did not, which is perhaps the most consequential omission in the Nobel Committee's long history of omissions.

Paul Müller discovers DDT's insecticidal properties

A Wall That Kept Killing Mosquitoes

Swiss chemist Paul Müller had been searching methodically for the perfect insecticide — cheap, chemically stable, toxic to a wide range of insects, and harmless to plants and warm-blooded animals — when in September 1939 he found that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, first synthesised in 1874, killed flies with extraordinary speed and persistence. The compound clung to surfaces for months, which was precisely what malaria-control programmes needed: you could spray a wall and the mosquitoes would die on it for seasons. In the years after the Second World War, DDT campaigns drove malaria from Southern Europe and dramatically reduced it across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, saving millions of lives by any reasonable estimate. The persistence that made it so effective, however, proved to be its undoing in ecological terms — the compound concentrated up the food chain, thinning eggshells in raptors and accumulating in fatty tissues across the animal kingdom, a phenomenon Rachel Carson would document in Silent Spring in 1962. The story of DDT is, in miniature, the story of the twentieth century's relationship with chemistry: tremendous power, deployed before the consequences were understood.

Francium discovered

An Element You Will Never Hold

By the late 1930s, the periodic table had one conspicuous gap: element 87, expected to be an alkali metal heavier than caesium, stubbornly refused to be found. Marguerite Perey, working at the Curie Institute in Paris — she had been Marie Curie's personal laboratory assistant and knew her way around radioactive materials — noticed in January 1939 that the decay products of actinium included something emitting radiation in a pattern that did not match any known element. She identified it as the missing alkali metal, named it francium after France, and thereby became the last person in history to discover a naturally occurring element. Nature had been holding it back for good reason: francium's most stable isotope has a half-life of twenty-two minutes, which means the total quantity present on Earth at any moment amounts to perhaps a few tens of grams — scattered invisibly across uranium ores worldwide, never accumulating, perpetually decaying. You cannot hold it in your hand, and you never will.

Einstein–Szilard letter warns Roosevelt of atomic weapons

A Traffic Light, Six Years Early

Leó Szilárd had understood the implications of a nuclear chain reaction in 1933, standing at a London traffic light, and had spent the intervening years growing increasingly alarmed that Germany might reach it first. By the summer of 1939, with fission freshly explained and uranium research visibly underway in Berlin, Szilárd persuaded Einstein to lend his name to a warning letter to President Roosevelt. The letter, signed on 2 August, explained that chain reactions in large masses of uranium might produce bombs of unprecedented destructive power, and that Germany had already stopped the sale of Czechoslovak uranium ore. It took two months to reach Roosevelt through intermediaries, and further months to produce even a modest government response. The Manhattan Project that eventually emerged consumed three billion dollars, the work of over one hundred thousand people, and four years — turning Szilárd's 1933 thought experiment into a weapon that ended the war and inaugurated an era of threat that has not since ended. The letter is the most consequential piece of unsolicited correspondence in the history of the presidency.

First jet aircraft flight

No Immediate Military Utility, They Said

The piston engine had been the unquestioned heart of aviation since the Wright brothers, and by the late 1930s it had been refined to something approaching its practical limits — adding more power meant adding more weight and complexity, and the propeller itself became inefficient above certain speeds. Hans von Ohain in Germany and Frank Whittle in Britain had independently conceived of the jet engine as the solution, and it was von Ohain's design that flew first: on 27 August 1939, test pilot Erich Warsitz lifted the Heinkel He 178 from the runway at Rostock-Marienehe and completed a flight of a few minutes powered entirely by a centrifugal-flow turbojet. Officials from the German Air Ministry attended a demonstration days later, judged the aircraft to have no immediate military utility, and filed their report. They were not wrong about the He 178 specifically, but the principle had been demonstrated. Within a decade, jet aircraft were carrying bombs across Europe and intercepting each other over Korea; within three decades they were carrying tourists to Majorca, which the Air Ministry had perhaps not anticipated.

World War II begins

From Cure to Annihilation, One Span

German forces crossed into Poland before dawn on 1 September 1939, and within days Britain and France had declared war, and the particular world that European science had inhabited — international, collaborative, largely peaceful — ceased to exist. Laboratories across occupied Europe were shuttered, redirected, or stripped; Jewish scientists who had not already fled were expelled or murdered; the networks of correspondence and conference that had built modern physics and chemistry in the preceding decades were cut. What the war accelerated it accelerated with brutal selectivity: radar was developed at emergency pace, computing was pushed forward by the need to break ciphers, medicine advanced under the pressure of mass casualties, and nuclear physics was driven to its terrible conclusion in New Mexico. The war ended with the first atomic bombs falling on Japan and with penicillin available for the first time in clinical quantities — a range of outcomes that captures, in its span from cure to annihilation, the particular character of science conducted under existential pressure.