Radiocarbon Dating: Development of a Nobel Method

This chapter reviews the key events associated with the development of the radiocarbon (14C) dating method immediately following World War II by Willard F. Libby (1909–1980) and his collaborators, James R. Arnold (1923–2013), and Ernest C. Anderson (1920–2013). It also considers the historical background and earlier discoveries that Libby and others drew upon in forming the concepts that he employed in developing this technique. Libby received the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for, in the words of the Nobel citation, his “method to use Carbon-14 for age determinations in archeology, geology, geophysics and other sciences.”