Table of Contents
- TLDR: The 1927 Nobel Prize Winners
- Physics: Arthur Compton and C.T.R. Wilson
- Chemistry: Heinrich Wieland (Awarded in 1928)
- Physiology or Medicine: Julius Wagner-Jauregg
- Literature: Henri Bergson (Awarded in 1928)
- Peace: Ferdinand Buisson and Ludwig Quidde
- Why Wasn’t There an Economics Prize?
- Why Two of the 1927 Prizes Got Delayed a Year
- What Else Was Happening in 1927
TLDR: The 1927 Nobel Prize Winners
Five categories were decided for 1927. Two of the medals didn’t actually get handed to anyone that year — the Nobel Committee couldn’t agree on a Chemistry or Literature laureate in time, so both prizes sat “reserved” and were formally awarded twelve months later, in 1928, still officially recorded as the 1927 prize.
| Category | Winner(s) | Country | For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physics | Arthur H. Compton & Charles Thomson Rees Wilson | USA / UK | The Compton effect; the cloud chamber |
| Chemistry* | Heinrich Otto Wieland | Germany | Structure of bile acids |
| Physiology or Medicine | Julius Wagner-Jauregg | Austria | Malaria-fever therapy for paralysis caused by syphilis |
| Literature* | Henri Bergson | France | His body of philosophical work |
| Peace | Ferdinand Buisson & Ludwig Quidde | France / Germany | Franco-German reconciliation work |
| Economics | — | — | The prize didn’t exist yet |
*Reserved in 1927, formally awarded in 1928.
Physics: Arthur Compton and C.T.R. Wilson
The Physics prize went to two men who never worked together and were solving completely different problems. Arthur Holly Compton, an American physicist, got his half for a 1922 experiment showing that when X-rays hit electrons in a metal, the scattered X-rays came out at a longer wavelength than they went in. That shouldn’t happen if light behaves purely as a wave. It happens if light also behaves like a particle bumping into another particle and losing energy in the collision. The Nobel committee’s own summary credits the finding with helping settle, for good, that radiation carries both wave and particle behavior — the same debate Einstein had reopened with the photoelectric effect two decades earlier.
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, a Scottish physicist, shared the other half for something almost the opposite of abstract: a device you could actually watch. His cloud chamber cooled moist air until it sat right at the edge of condensing, so that any charged particle passing through left a visible trail of tiny droplets, like a jet’s contrail scaled down to the size of a fishbowl. Wilson had been refining the idea since 1911, and it became the first instrument that let physicists photograph the paths of individual subatomic particles rather than just infer them from equations.
Chemistry: Heinrich Wieland (Awarded in 1928)
Officially the 1927 Chemistry laureate, Heinrich Otto Wieland didn’t receive his prize until the following December. He won for mapping the molecular structure of bile acids — the compounds your liver makes to break down fat — along with related steroid compounds. It’s unglamorous-sounding work that turned out to matter enormously: understanding that steroid skeleton is what later let chemists work out cholesterol, vitamin D, and sex hormones, all of which share the same core ring structure Wieland spent years untangling.
Physiology or Medicine: Julius Wagner-Jauregg
This one is the strangest-sounding Nobel-winning treatment on record, and it’s not close. Julius Wagner-Jauregg, an Austrian psychiatrist, won for showing that deliberately infecting patients with malaria could treat dementia paralytica — the late-stage neurological collapse caused by untreated syphilis, which at the time was a death sentence with no real treatment. The fevers triggered by malaria, it turned out, were hot enough to kill the syphilis bacteria, which don’t tolerate high body temperature. Doctors would then treat the malaria itself with quinine once the syphilis infection was under control.
By modern standards it’s an unsettling therapy — patients were knowingly given a second dangerous disease to fight the first — but before antibiotics existed, “pyrotherapy” was one of the only interventions that measurably worked, and it remained in use at some clinics into the 1940s until penicillin made it obsolete.
Literature: Henri Bergson (Awarded in 1928)
Like the Chemistry prize, Literature was reserved in 1927 and formally went to French philosopher Henri Bergson a year later. Bergson wasn’t a novelist or poet — he won for the body of his philosophical writing, honored, per the Nobel Prize’s official citation, for “his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.” His concept of durée — lived, subjective time as opposed to the clock-measured kind — influenced novelists like Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf as much as it influenced other philosophers, which is likely why the literature committee considered him eligible in the first place.
Peace: Ferdinand Buisson and Ludwig Quidde
The Peace Prize is the one 1927 category that wasn’t delayed, and it went to a French educator and a German historian jointly — a pairing that was itself the point. Ferdinand Buisson had spent decades building French public education and, after World War I, campaigning for Franco-German reconciliation through the League for the Rights of Man. Ludwig Quidde was doing the mirror-image work from the German side, having spent his career as one of Germany’s most persistent pacifist voices, including public opposition to German militarism that got him briefly jailed in 1924. The Nobel Peace Prize committee recognized both men specifically for cultivating public opinion in France and Germany that favored cooperation rather than the rematch World War I’s peace terms seemed to be setting up.
Why Wasn’t There an Economics Prize?
If you’re scanning the 1927 list wondering where economics went, it’s not an oversight — it didn’t exist yet. What’s commonly called the “Nobel Prize in Economics” is technically the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, created by Sweden’s central bank in 1968 and first awarded in 1969. It wasn’t one of the five prizes named in Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will, and no economics laureate exists for any year before 1969.
Why Two of the 1927 Prizes Got Delayed a Year
This is the part most “list of winners” pages skip past or get vague about: two 1927 prizes — Chemistry and Literature — were “reserved” rather than awarded, meaning no one received them that year at all. Nobel’s statutes allow this specific outcome: if a selection committee decides that none of that year’s nominees fully meets the standard in Nobel’s will, the prize money and medal can be held back and given the following year instead, still labeled as belonging to the original year.
That’s exactly what happened to Wieland and Bergson. Both were eventually judged worthy — just not in time for the December 1927 ceremony — so each received “the 1927 Nobel Prize” at the December 1928 ceremony, one year and one class of new laureates late. It’s a quirk of the prize’s own rules, not a controversy or a snub, and it means the 1928 ceremony actually handed out two years’ worth of laureates in Chemistry and Literature at once.
What Else Was Happening in 1927
Nobel week that December landed in the middle of one of the more electric years of the 20th century. Five months earlier, in May, Charles Lindbergh had flown the Spirit of St. Louis solo and nonstop from New York to Paris — 33 and a half hours in the air — landing to a crowd of 100,000 people at Le Bourget Field, according to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. In October, The Jazz Singer opened in New York with synchronized dialogue and songs, the film that effectively ended the silent-movie era. Werner Heisenberg published the uncertainty principle that same year, a piece of physics nearly as disruptive to its field as Compton’s discovery had been five years earlier. It was, in other words, a year when both flight and physics were being rewritten in public, and the Nobel committees were handing out prizes for work that fit right into that mood.
