1947

Nobel Prize in Physics

Edward V. Appleton

Appleton used radio waves to probe the upper atmosphere and located a conducting layer at 200 to 400 kilometres altitude — the F-layer, now bearing his name — whose ability to reflect shortwave radio made long-distance communication possible. He had effectively found the ceiling off which the world was bouncing its broadcasts.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Sir Robert Robinson

Robinson elucidated the structures of morphine, strychnine, and many other plant alkaloids, and developed electronic theories of organic reaction mechanisms that chemists still use. He was also, by some accounts, a formidable and somewhat intimidating chess player, which is perhaps neither here nor there.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Carl Cori · Gerty Cori · Bernardo Houssay

Carl and Gerty Cori shared half the prize for mapping the cycle by which lactic acid from working muscle is carried to the liver and reconverted to glycogen — a loop of chemistry that the body runs millions of times a day. The other half went to Houssay for showing that the pituitary gland's hormones regulate blood sugar, connecting the brain to the problem of diabetes. Gerty Cori became the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in science.

Nobel Prize in Literature

André Gide

Gide's prize, for writings of fearless truthfulness and keen psychological insight, came at eighty years of age and after a long career in which he had offended a satisfying variety of institutions including the Catholic Church, the Communist Party, and a portion of the French literary establishment. He seemed broadly unbothered.

Nobel Peace Prize

Friends Service Council · American Friends Service Committee

The prize went jointly to the British and American Quaker service organizations for relief work across war-torn Europe during and after both World Wars. The Quakers had been feeding civilians and assisting refugees on all sides of various conflicts for decades, on the quiet principle that suffering has no nationality.

Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Oswald T. Avery · Homer Smith

Avery was honoured — belatedly — for the 1944 demonstration, with MacLeod and McCarty, that DNA carries hereditary information. He never received a Nobel. Smith was recognised for rigorous quantitative work on kidney physiology and the precise regulation of body fluid composition.

Transistor invented at Bell Labs

On 23 December, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, in William Shockley's solid-state physics group at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, pressed two gold contacts against a germanium crystal and found that a small input current controlled a much larger output one. The vacuum tube had just acquired a very small, very cool, very quiet rival.

Dennis Gabor invents holography

While working at British Thomson-Houston, Dennis Gabor conceived wavefront reconstruction — a method of recording not just the intensity of light but its phase, so that a full three-dimensional image could be recovered. He named it holography, from the Greek for "whole writing," and published the theory in Nature in 1948; practical holograms would wait for the laser.

Death of Max Planck

Max Planck

Max Planck died on 4 October in Göttingen, aged 89. He had proposed in 1900 that energy comes in discrete packets proportional to frequency — a hypothesis he initially considered a mathematical trick rather than a description of nature. It was, of course, both, and quantum mechanics followed from it.