Letter from Henry Moseley to George de Hevesy
- ID-nummer
- 2014.007.001
- Titel
- Letter from Henry Moseley to George de Hevesy
- Objektkategori
- Brev, vykort & frimärken
- Publik beskrivning
-
This letter was written in 1914 by the young physicist Henry Moseley to George de Hevesy, who many years later would be awarded the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Moseley talks about his investigations of various elements and asks for help in obtaining samples of various elements.
Moseley used X-ray diffraction to study the spectra of different elements and found a relationship between the wavelengths of X-rays and the element's atomic number. This allowed the periodic table to be revised and supplemented.
Moseley's life came to a tragic end when he was killed in the First World War in August 1915. Could his discoveries have resulted in a Nobel Prize? Yes, probably. Svante Arrhenius nominated him for the Nobel Prize in both Physics and Chemistry in 1915. In presenting a later Nobel Prize in a related field, the 1924 physics prize to Manne Siegbahn, Nobel Committee Chairman Allvar Gullstrand said: "Moseley fell at the Dardanelles before he could be awarded the prize... ". Gullstrand said that Moseley's work, however, had drawn the committee's attention to Charles Barkla, who was awarded the 1918 physics prize for his work on the X-ray spectra of atoms.
The letter was presented to the Nobel Prize Museum by the Hevesy family in 2000. - Pristagare
- George de Hevesy
- Provenance
- 881