1971

Nobel Prize in Physics

Dennis Gabor

Gabor dreamed up holography in 1947 as a fix for blurry electron microscopes, then had to wait two decades for the laser to make the idea work. Light recorded in all three dimensions, a ghost image you can walk around — the physics was elegant; the waiting must have been rather less so.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Gerhard Herzberg

Free radicals are the molecules chemistry textbooks describe as too reactive to exist for long, yet Herzberg spent a career pinning them down with spectroscopy — catching their characteristic light, reading off their exact shapes, and proving they were there whether convenient or not.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Earl W. Sutherland, Jr.

Adrenaline floods your bloodstream and your cells respond instantly, yet the hormone never crosses the cell membrane. Sutherland found the go-between: cyclic AMP, a tiny molecule manufactured inside the cell the moment adrenaline knocks on the outside, carrying the message inward without itself being admitted.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Pablo Neruda

A Chilean poet whose output was so vast — Canto General, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, odes to tomatoes and socks and the open sea — that the prize committee settled on describing it as an elemental force, which is approximately accurate and considerably shorter than a bibliography.

Nobel Peace Prize

Willy Brandt

Brandt's Ostpolitik carefully normalized West Germany's relations with its eastern neighbours — formal treaties with Poland, East Germany, the Soviet Union. What the diplomacy could not fully capture was what the cameras caught in Warsaw in 1970: a chancellor kneeling, without prompting, at the memorial to the Ghetto uprising.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Simon Kuznets

Before Kuznets, national income was more rumour than measurement. He built the accounting frameworks that let governments actually see their economies, then used them to describe the Kuznets curve — the uncomfortable suggestion that inequality tends to worsen before it gets better as countries develop.

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Turing Award

John McCarthy

McCarthy coined the phrase "artificial intelligence" in 1955 — an act of naming that proved either prescient or presumptuous depending on where you were standing — and then invented LISP, a programming language that treated code and data as the same thing, which turned out to be a genuinely strange and useful idea.

Intel 4004: first commercial microprocessor

Federico Faggin, Masatoshi Shima, and Ted Hoff designed the 4004 for a Japanese calculator company, squeezing 2,300 transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail using 10-micron silicon-gate technology. It could execute about 92,000 instructions per second — almost comically modest now, but in November 1971 this was the entire CPU, on one piece of silicon, available to anyone who could afford $60.

First networked email sent over ARPANET

Ray Tomlinson at BBN Technologies modified an existing local messaging program to send text between two separate computers on ARPANET — machines sitting side by side in the same room, as it happens, though that rather missed the point. He chose the @ symbol to separate user from host, and nobody has thought of a better solution since.

Mariner 9: first spacecraft to orbit another planet

Mariner 9 arrived at Mars on 13 November 1971 to find the entire planet smothered in a global dust storm, and spent several weeks waiting politely for it to clear. When it did, the 7,329 images returned over 349 days dissolved the old picture of a Moon-like wasteland and replaced it with Olympus Mons, Valles Marineris, and the unmistakable traces of ancient rivers.

Apollo 14: third crewed Moon landing

Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell landed in the Fra Mauro Highlands on 5 February — the site Apollo 13 had been heading for before its oxygen tank had other ideas. They spent 9 hours 23 minutes outside collecting 42 kg of samples; Shepard, America's first astronaut a decade earlier, used a modified geology hammer to chip two golf balls down a lunar fairway of his own invention.