1917 in science
overview of natural science-related events during the year of 1917
The year 1917 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Biology
September 3 – French-Canadian microbiologist Félix d'Hérelle, working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, announces his discovery of a bacteriophage.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's On Growth and Form is published.
Mathematics
Paul Ehrenfest gives a conditional principle for a three-dimensional space.
Medicine
March 23 – Canadian physician Charles A. Hunter first describes the rare genetic disorder Hunter syndrome.
Japanese ophthalmologisdt Shinobu Ishihara publishes his color perception test.
Austrian physician Julius Wagner-Jauregg discovers malarial pyrotherapy for general paresis of the insane.
Physics
Albert Einstein introduces the idea of stimulated radiation emission.
Nuclear fission: Ernest Rutherford (at the Victoria University of Manchester) achieves nuclear transmutation of nitrogen into oxygen, using alpha particles directed at nitrogen 14N + α → 17O + p, the first observation of a nuclear reaction, in which he also discovers and names the proton.
Technology
September 13 – Release in the United States of the first film made in Technicolor System 1, a two-color process, The Gulf Between.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1917 in science” as overview of natural science-related events during the year of 1917. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2378341. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “1917 in science” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.