Category Famous Nobel Laureates

             A chemist and physicist, Ernest Rutherford was the central figure in the study of radioactivity who led the exploration of nuclear physics. Ernest Rutherford was born on 30th August 1871, in New Zealand. He is considered be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday.

               After studying at the Cavendish Laboratory, Rutherford became a professor at McGill University in Canada. Being the first to split the atom, Rutherford was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his theory of atomic structure. Working with Frederick Soddy, Rutherford advanced the hypothesis that helium gas could be formed from radioactive substances.

               He discovered that radioactive preparations gave rise to the formation of gases. Rutherford had an enormous influence in the field of nuclear physics and mentored scientists, including Chadwick, Niels Bohr, and Otto Hahn. He died on October 19th, 1937.

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               Sir William Ramsay was a Scottish physical chemist who at the end of the 19th century discovered four new elements. These were the noble gases, neon, argon, krypton, and xenon; they added a whole new group to the Periodic Table of the elements.

               William Ramsay was born on 2nd October 1852, and received his basic education in Glasgow before traveling to Germany to earn a doctorate in organic chemistry. He was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of this achievement.

               The remarkable inertness of the newly found elements resulted in their use for special purposes, for example, helium instead of highly flammable hydrogen for lighter-than-air craft and argon to conserve the filaments in light bulbs.

               Upon the outbreak of war in 1914, he became involved in efforts to secure the participation of scientific experts in the creation of government science policy. He died on 23rd July, 1916.

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            Hermann Emil Louis Fischer was a renowned German chemist of the 19th century, who did pioneering work in the field of organic chemistry. He was born on 9th October 1852, in Germany.

            In 1874, he received his doctorate from the University of Strasbourg, under Adolph von Baeyer.

            Fischer demonstrated the structure of biological compounds for instance sugars, proteins and purines. He also worked on the organic synthesis of glucose. This work showed that various substances, little known at that time, such as adenine, xanthine, caffeine all belonged to one homogeneous family and could be derived from one another.

            This parent substance, which at first he regarded as being hypothetical, he called purine in 1884, and he synthesized it in 1898.

            In 1902 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on sugar and purine syntheses. Fischer died in Berlin on July 15th, 1919. 

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          Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff was the first person to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was a Dutch physicist and organic chemist, who became the first to propose a three-dimensional model for the structure of simple carbon compounds. His pioneering work helped found the modern theory of chemical affinity, chemical equilibrium, and chemical thermodynamics.

          He is also widely considered as one of the founders of physical chemistry as the discipline is known today.

          Jacobus Henricus was born in Netherlands, and earned his doctorate in Utrecht in 1874. In 1885, van’t Hoff was appointed as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

          Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901. Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff died on 1st March, 1911.

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            Italian physicist Enrico Fermi built the prototype of a nuclear reactor and worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. Enrico Fermi was born in Rome  on 29th September, 1901.

            Enrico Fermi has been called ‘the architect of the nuclear age’, and ‘the architect of the atomic bomb’. He was one of the very few physicists to excel both theoretically and experimentally.

            In 1934, Fermi began his most important work with the atom, discovering that nuclear transformation could occur in nearly every element. One of the elements’ atoms he split was uranium. This work led to the discovery of slowing down neutrons, which led to nuclear fission, and the production of new elements beyond the traditional Periodic Table.

            In 1938, Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with artificial radioactivity produced by neutrons, and for nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.

            During the last years of his life Fermi occupied himself with the problem of the mysterious origin of cosmic rays. He died in Chicago on 28th November, 1954.

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          The Nobel Prize in Physics 1935 was awarded to James Chadwick for the discovery of the neutron. Chadwick was born in England on 20th October 1891. He attended Manchester High School prior to entering Manchester University in 1908. He graduated with first class honours in 1911.

          When Herbert Becker and Walter Bothe directed alpha particles (helium nuclei) at beryllium in 1930, a strong, penetrating radiation was emitted. One hypothesis was that this could be high-energy electromagnetic radiation.

          In 1932, Chadwick made the fundamental discovery that it actually consisted of a neutral particle about the same mass as a proton, and proved the existence of neutrons. Ernest Rutherford had earlier proposed that such a particle might exist in atomic nuclei.

          He was awarded the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society in 1932, and subsequently the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935. James Chadwick died on 24th July, 1974.

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