1922 in science

The year 1922 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Archaeology

• November 4 - British archaeologist Howard Carter and his men find the entrance to King Tutankhamen's tomb in the Valley of the Kings of Egypt.

Biology

• H.J. Muller sets out the basic properties of genetic heredity.^[1][2]
• Last known wild Barbary lion (P. l. leo) shot in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.^[3]

Chemistry

• June 20 - Degesch applies to patent the cyanide-based insecticide Zyklon B (credited to Walter Heerdt) in Germany.^[4]
• Czech chemist Jaroslav Heyrovský invents polarographic methods of chemical analysis.
• German chemist Hermann Staudinger proposes what he will come to call macromolecules.^[5]

Mathematics

• First publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in an English translation.

Medicine

• January - First successful insulin treatment of diabetes, by Frederick Banting in Toronto.

Paleontology

• First of four successive American Museum of Natural History expeditions to Mongolia under Roy Chapman Andrews which will discover fossils of Indricotherium (a gigantic hornless rhinoceros then named "Baluchitherium"), Protoceratops, a nest of Protoceratops eggs (found in 1995 to be from Oviraptor), Pinacosaurus, Saurornithoides, Oviraptor and Velociraptor, none of which were known before.

Physics

• Arthur Compton studies X-ray photon scattering by electrons.
• Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach show "space quantization".
• Hilding Faxén introduces Faxén's law for the velocity of a sphere in fluid dynamics.^[6]

Technology

• November 22 - The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) begins broadcasting a radio service in the United Kingdom from station 2LO.

Awards

• Nobel Prize
  • Physics - Niels Bohr
  • Chemistry - Francis William Aston
  • Physiology or Medicine - Archibald Vivian Hill and Otto Fritz Meyerhof

Births

• July 18 - Thomas Kuhn (died 1996), philosopher of science.
• July 25 - John B. Goodenough, solid-state physicist.
• November 8 - Christiaan Barnard (died 2001), surgeon.

Deaths

• January 5 - Ernest Shackleton (born 1874), explorer.
• January 15 - Edward Hopkinson (born 1859), electrical engineer.
• January 22 - Camille Jordan (born 1838), mathematician.
• April 1 - Hermann Rorschach (born 1884), psychiatrist.
• April 9 - Sir Patrick Manson (born 1844), the "father of tropical medicine".
• May 26 - Ernest Solvay, (born 1838), chemist.
• June 18 - Jacobus Kapteyn (born 1851), astronomer.
• August 2 - Alexander Graham Bell (born 1847), inventor.
• August 18 - W. H. Hudson (born 1841), naturalist.
• August 29 - Sophie Bryant (born 1850), mathematician and educationalist (in a hiking accident).

References