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]
• Vitamin E is discovered by Herbert McLean Evans and Katharine Scott Bishop at the University of California, Berkeley.^[5]
• Czech chemist Jaroslav Heyrovský invents polarographic methods of chemical analysis.
• German chemist Hermann Staudinger proposes what he will come to call macromolecules.^[6]

Ethnology

• Bronisław Malinowski's influential ethnological text Argonauts of the Western Pacific is published.

Mathematics

• First publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in an English translation.
• Ernst Steinitz proves Steinitz's theorem in polyhedral combinatorics.^[7]

Medicine

• January 11 – First successful insulin treatment of diabetes, by Frederick Banting in Toronto.

Meteorology

• English mathematical physicist Lewis Fry Richardson proposes a scheme for weather forecasting by solution of differential equations, the method used in modern times, in his work Weather Prediction by Numerical Process.^[8]

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.^[9]

Technology

• November 22 – The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) begins broadcasting a radio service in the United Kingdom from station 2LO in London.
• Lancia Lambda is the first automobile to use monocoque construction.
• Approximate date – Madeleine Vionnet introduces the bias cut dress in Paris.

Awards

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

Births

• January 9 – Har Gobind Khorana (died 2011), Indian-born biochemist and Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate (shared with Ralph F. Hirschmann).
• April 22 – Wolf V. Vishniac (died 1973), American microbiologist.
• May 4 – Eugenie Clark (died 2015), American ichthyologist.
• May 6 – Ralph F. Hirschmann (died 2009), German American biochemist, leader of a team responsible for the first organic synthesis of an enzyme, a ribonuclease; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate (shared with Har Gobind Khorana).
• June 19 – Aage Bohr (died 2009), Danish nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate.
• June 22 – Ewen Whitaker (died 2016), English-born lunar astronomer.
• July 18 – Thomas Kuhn (died 1996), American philosopher of science.
• July 25 – John B. Goodenough, German-born American solid-state physicist.
• August 24 – Donald Henry Colless (died 2012), Australian entomologist.
• September 5 – Denys Wilkinson (died 2016), English nuclear physicist.
• November 8 – Christiaan Barnard (died 2001), South African cardiac surgeon.
• November 15 – David Sidney Feingold, American biochemist and academic.

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