1949

Nobel Prize in Physics

Hideki Yukawa

In 1935, Yukawa had calculated that the nuclear force holding protons and neutrons together required a carrier particle of intermediate mass — heavier than an electron, lighter than a proton. The pion was found experimentally in 1947, confirming the prediction twelve years on. Yukawa became the first Japanese Nobel laureate, collecting the prize while his country was still under Allied occupation.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

William F. Giauque

Giauque developed adiabatic demagnetization — a technique of cycling magnetic fields to cool a sample to within fractions of a degree of absolute zero. At those temperatures, the third law of thermodynamics stops being a theoretical proposition and becomes something you can actually watch happen, which Giauque did, carefully, over many years.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Walter Hess · Egas Moniz

Hess received half the prize for mapping, via electrical stimulation in cats, how the diencephalon coordinates the body's internal organs — fight, flight, rest, digestion, all orchestrated from a small region deep in the brain. Moniz received the other half for pioneering prefrontal leucotomy as a psychiatric intervention, a discovery that the committee considered promising and that subsequent decades would assess more critically.

Nobel Prize in Literature

William Faulkner

The 1949 prize was announced in 1950 — a year's delay that suited Faulkner's complicated relationship with fame. His acceptance speech in Stockholm, which spoke of the writer's duty to help humanity endure, became among the most quoted in the prize's history, delivered by a man whose novels the Swedish Academy had waited decades to honor.

Nobel Peace Prize

Lord Boyd Orr

John Boyd Orr, the founding director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, was honoured for his lifelong effort to conquer hunger — work premised on the observation that undernourished populations are not only suffering populations but unstable ones. He had been making this point, in various forms, since the 1930s.

Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

André Cournand · William S. Tillett · L. R. Christensen

Cournand was recognised for developing cardiac catheterization as a diagnostic tool — inserting a thin tube into the heart's chambers to measure pressures directly, a procedure that required a certain equanimity in both patient and physician. Tillett and Christensen received their share for developing streptokinase, an enzyme that dissolves blood clots.

EDSAC runs the first practical stored-program computation

On 6 May, Maurice Wilkes's Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator at the University of Cambridge executed its first successful program, producing a table of squares. EDSAC was the first fully operational stored-program computer put into regular scientific use, and scientists in Cambridge quickly lined up with real problems to give it.

Soviet Union detonates its first atomic bomb (RDS-1)

On 29 August, the USSR detonated RDS-1 — a plutonium implosion device — at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, three years and some months after Hiroshima. American intelligence detected the test through atmospheric sampling; the announcement from Washington was careful and measured, though what it meant for the decades ahead was plain enough.