Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to give this year's Nobel Prize for Physics to Dr. Philipp Lenard, Professor at the University of Kiel , for his important work on cathode rays. The discovery itself was made by Hittorf as long ago as 1869 and therefore falls in a period before that which the Nobel Foundation is able to take into account.
Cathode rays are a phenomenon which occurs when electricity is discharged in a rarified gas.
If an electric current is led through a glass tube containing rarified gas, certain radiation phenomena appear both in the gas and around the metal wires or poles through which the current is carried. These phenomena change in form and nature if the gas contained in the tube is rarified even further. This is due to the fact that when these rays hit the walls of the glass tube, or other obstacles in their path, they cause them to glow or fluoresce and are able to bring objects against which they are directed to a glowing heat. Like rays of ordinary light they propagate in straight lines, but they differ in that they can be deflected from their straight path by means of a magnet. The general characteristics of these cathode rays had been known a long time, although not sufficiently to clarify their true nature.