While all the world's attention is focused on the Nobel Prize laureates, Quartz is worried that the most prestigious award in the world has bypassed technology. Therefore, they compiled a list of scientists who were bound to receive it for their invaluable contribution to the development of mankind.
Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel established the award more than a hundred years ago, bequeathing to turn all his property into liquid values and place in the bank at interest. "The income from the investments must belong to the fund, which will annually distribute them in the form of bonuses to those who during the previous year brought the greatest benefit to humanity," Nobel wrote in his will. In the same place, the scientist indicated the categories according to which the award should be awarded: physics, chemistry, literature, physiology or medicine, and also a peace prize. In 1968, the economy was added to this list.
However, 118 years after Nobel's death, the world has changed a lot. The industrial epoch has come to an end successfully, and now we live in the era of informatization. Half of humanity moved to cities, the greenhouse effect reached an unprecedentedly high level, and mobile phones became the most popular technology in the world. Four billion people have access to the Internet, and data flows affect the growth of the economy more than production goods. All these changes have occurred exclusively thanks to technology, but for them still, do not give the Nobel Prize. Neither for cars, nor for light bulbs, nor for mobile phones, nor for the Internet. They did not give a prize to the inventors of a modern combine and to scientists who first sequenced the human genome. Not to mention Nicholas Tesla and Thomas Edison - geniuses who forever changed the vector of human development.
If suddenly the inventors manage to become Nobel laureates, then only in the category of physics. For example, Guglielmo Marconi for the invention of a radio transmitter (1909), as well as the creators of transistors (1956), lasers (1964), semiconductors (2000) and light-emitting diodes (2014). Of the 881 Nobel Laureates, only 28 are engineers or technologists.
No less than undeservedly, the reward goes around the attention of mathematicians, and they do not get tired of complaining for decades. But mathematics is a universal language, the basis of all exact sciences, the most important theoretical discipline. There is a legend that Alfred Nobel simply did not like Finnish mathematician Rolf Nevanlenn, and knowing that he was the first winner of the award, he decided to exclude math from the list altogether. According to another legend, Nobel's wife had a lover - a Swedish mathematician. True, this version does not withstand any criticism, since Nobel was not married.
Perhaps the scientist simply did not consider mathematics an independent discipline, perceiving it as an applied science. But this argument is also refuted by the great discoveries of the twentieth century, beginning with Einstein's theory of relativity and ending with the Higgs boson, which directly follows from fundamental achievements in mathematical theory.
However, despite the obvious injustice of what is happening, the Nobel Committee decided to stop at the economy and no longer add disciplines to the already available list. Yes, engineers, technologists, mathematicians and information technology specialists have their own, not less prestigious awards. But they do not attract a hundredth attention to themselves, which goes to the Nobel Prize.
In honour of those people who made their life better with their discoveries, Quartz compiled a list of engineers and inventors who did not receive the Nobel Prize but fully meet its criteria.
- Willis Carrier - air conditioning, 1902
- Orville and Neville Wright - Airplane, 1903
- Alva J. Fisher - washing machine, 1908
- Henry Ford - conveyor, 1909
- Thomas E. Murray - power station, 1910
- Fred Wolf - Refrigerator, 1913
- John Lougy Bird - TV, 1928
- Thomas Carroll - self-propelled combine harvester, 1937
- Catherine Blodget - non-reflective glass, 1938
- Grace Hopper - programming language COBOL, 1950
- Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller and Gerald Pierson - solar photovoltaic panels, 1954
- Frank Rosenblatt - artificial neural networks, 1958
- Robert Goddard - rocketry, 1961
- Malcolm McLain - ship-container system, 1964
- Stephanie Kwolek- Kevlar, 1965
- Ray Tomlinson - e-mail, 1972
- Marty Cooper - mobile phone, 1973
- Roger Easton, Ivan Goetting and Bradford Parkinson - GPS, 1974
- Raymond Damadyan - magnetic resonance imaging, 1977
- Stanley Whittingham and John Goodenough - lithium-ion batteries, 1980
- Tim Berners-Lee - Internet, 1991
- Steve Jobs - iPhone, 2007
- Satoshi Nakamoto - bitcoin, 2008
- Tsutomu Miyasaka, Nam-Gui Park and Henry Snaith - perovskite solar cells, 2009
- Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier - CRISPR-Cas9, 2012
