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Edison and Tesla Win Nobel Prize in Physics

Literary Digest, December 18, 1915:

Announcement is made in the daily press that the Nobel prize for great discoveries in physics is to be awarded this year to two Americans -- Edison and Tesla -- and the chemistry prize to another American, Prof. Theodore W. Richards, of Harvard. The physics award, we are told editorially by The Electrical World (New York, November 13), will give especial satisfaction to the engineering profession, to which both the recipients have rendered distinguished service, tho the successes of both in contributing to the advances of pure science have been no less notable.

The article goes on to list the most notable accomplishments of these men. But, you will search in vain for the names Edison and Tesla on a list of Nobel Prize winners. The above-mentioned article was an error. Edison and Tesla never did win the Nobel Prize.


This is apparently the 1914 prize, as Richards won the 1914 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Max von Laue won the 1914 physics prize. I was surprised that the prizes were not awarded until November 1915 or later.


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