Didn't see the award. Nobel Prize for his contribution to the development of lighthouses

(autotranslated, could have mistakes)

Source: http://polymus.ru Author: Alexey Paevsky

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Nils Gustav Dahlen

Date of birth November 30, 1869, Stenstorp, Sweden

Date of death: December 9, 1937, Lidingo, Sweden.

Nobel Prize in Physics 1912

Formulation of the Nobel Committee: “for the invention of automatic regulators used in combination with gas batteries for light sources on lighthouses and buoys.”

For the modern, enlightened layman (that is, someone who understands at least a little the difference between physics and physics), the Nobel Prize in Physics is something from the realm of high science. The Higgs boson, pulsars, cosmic microwave background radiation, the theory of relativity, the multiverse, quanta, superstrings - this is how modern science appears. Beautiful words, concepts that go beyond common sense... Therefore, when you first come across the full list of Nobel Prize laureates in physics and see some formulations, often the first reaction is “what’s this for?! Where is the physics here? They found an equal to Dirac, Einstein and Heisenberg.” But if you look at it, with such laureates everything is often much more in order than with Planck and Higgs - from the point of view of Nobel himself. Yes, and physics is present there.

Today we will talk about just such a person who very accurately satisfies the wording of Nobel’s own testament - for “the most important discovery or invention” in the field of physics, which brought “the greatest contribution to the progress of mankind”, and during the past year. It is about a man who was severely injured and blinded while perfecting his invention, just months before winning the Nobel Prize.

We're talking about Swedish engineer Niels Gustav Dahlen. On the one hand, he was a pure engineer, an excellent mechanic and an outstanding inventor, on the other hand, his “Nobel” invention is associated with quite beautiful physics, although simple by our standards.

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Dalen was a rural child, the son of a farmer. His father is Anders Johansson Dahlen, and his mother appears to have been Icelandic: her name was Lovisa Andersdottir. Nils' first specialized education was also very down-to-earth - he graduated from an agricultural school, where he was taught horticulture and dairy farming. Even then, Dalen showed his mechanical abilities by designing and building several samples of agricultural machinery, and the invention of a device for determining the fat content of milk attracted the attention of large companies. Then Dalen received advice to get a higher engineering education.

Dalen graduated from the Chalmers Institute in Gothenburg (diploma in mechanical engineering) and studied for another year in Zurich, at the Federal Institute of Technology.

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A year before receiving the first Nobel Prize in history, in 1900, Dahlen founded, in modern parlance, a startup - the company Dahlen and Celsing (Celsing is the surname of his fellow engineer, a partner in the company). Apparently, the startup was unsuccessful, because a year later Dalen is already an employee, albeit in the high status of a technical consultant for the Swedish Carbide-Acetylene Company. Back then, acetylene was used as a fuel in lighthouses—when free, it burns with a bright white light. As a matter of fact, then the engineers were faced with the same task that the designers of hydrogen cars now face: to “compress” a large volume of gas into a fairly compact volume.

In 1901, the company Dalen worked for bought the French patent for “dissolved acetylene.” It was a solution of acetylene in acetone, which was absorbed by the porous mass and sealed in a cylinder. Back then it was just a patent, and the company was going to innovate by using this “dissolved acetylene” in lighthouses and buoys. Nowadays a plane can land in any fog, and the ship can easily determine its coordinates using GPS. At that time, lighthouses and offshore buoys were vitally important. I myself grew up in Odessa near a lighthouse and remember very well both its light and the hum of a sea buoy in the fog. For Sweden, with its rugged coastlines and scatterings of islands, this is doubly vital.

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Experience has shown that “dissolved acetylene” is unstable and explosive.

Dalen set about improving it and managed to obtain a “gas accumulator” in the same year, which contained acetylene, the volume of which was 100 times larger than the cylinder. This is how the first part of the invention appeared, for which Dalen was to receive the Nobel Prize.

However, a problem remained — all the lighthouses needed to be maintained. There were no electronics then, which means that in the dark or in fog, someone had to light the fire in the lighthouse and extinguish it in sunny weather. Otherwise, the gas consumption would be too high.

Dalen set about developing a special valve that would release gas only in low light conditions. And for this he took advantage of a well-known physical phenomenon: the expansion of bodies when heated.

Gustav Dahlen's "solar valve" consisted of four rods. The central rod was blackened, the other three were located around it and were polished to a shine. Sunlight reflected from the mirror rods, heated the black rod, it extended and pressed the lever that closed the gas valve. It was even possible to adjust the device so that it turned the gas on or off at a certain light threshold.

By the way, another Nobel Prize is associated with the exact opposite physics - the creation of an alloy that hardly expands when heated. But more on that in due time.

The company's business took off, it was bought by another, larger one, and eventually in 1909 Dahlen became managing director of the Swedish Gas Accumulator Company - Svenska Aktiebolaget Gasaccumulator (AGA). By the way, the company exists to this day and honors the memory of Dalen [1].

It must be said that after becoming the “big boss,” Dalen did not rest on his laurels—he continued to improve batteries. In 1912, tragedy struck: a powerful explosion occurred while testing a device that was supposed to ensure the safety of “packaged” acetylene. Dalen was wounded and lost his sight forever. He spent the remaining quarter of a century in complete darkness. He did not see his bonus, and his brother received it. “Gas battery-powered lamps make it possible to install beacons and buoys in the most inaccessible places. These devices have proven extremely useful for illuminating railway cars and for use in railway traffic lights, carriage lamps, as well as for welding, melting and cutting metals,” H. Söderbaum from the Royal Swedish Academy summed up at the award ceremony.

Interesting fact: according to the nomination database of the Nobel Committee [2], Dahlen was by no means the leader - out of 28 nominations, Kamerlingh Onnes received 6 and Max Planck received 7. There is one nomination for Albert Einstein, and one for our Peter Lebedev, who first measured the pressure of light and died in March 1912.

But even after losing his sight, Dalen continued to work in the company and invent. He has more than 100 patents. Particularly effective was the Dalena stove, which he patented in 1922. This stove could accumulate heat from slowly burning coal, which was then used for cooking. [3]

Now we think that improving lighthouses and buoys is ridiculous for a Nobel Prize. However, you need to understand that a century ago it was precisely this that saved tens, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. It is not for nothing that after the war Dalen was one of the people about whom the book “Lives That Moved Our World” was written. [4]

• http://www.aga.com/web/web2000/com/wppcom.nsf/pages/History_GustafDalen

• http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/list.php

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGA_cooker

-Shipp H. Lives That Moved the Word. 1948