The Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics established an award for significant progress in aviation research in 1929. The award for that year was given in April 1930.

1929: Orville Wright, for his role in inventing the first workable airplane.

Nobel Prize Winners

During the 1920s there were two Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans in the sciences. Both were in physics. (Albert Einstein, who became a resident of the United States in 1930 and a citizen in 1944, won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921, while still a citizen of his native Germany.) The Nobel Prize represents worldwide recognition of a scientist's work and is widely considered the highest honor a scientist can receive.

1923: Robert Millikan won the Nobel Prize for physics for his work on measuring the charge of the electron and the photoelectric effect.

1927: Arthur Holly Compton shared the Nobel Prize for physics with British scientist C. T...