Skip to main content

Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Prizes

Alfred Nobel was born on October 21, 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden, into a family of engineers. He was a chemist, engineer, and inventor. In 1894, Nobel purchased Bofors iron and steel mill, which he made into a major armaments manufacturer. Nobel also invented ballistite. This invention was a precursor to many smokeless military explosives, especially the British smokeless powder cordite. As a consequence of his patent claims, Nobel was eventually involved in a patent infringement lawsuit over cordite. Nobel amassed a fortune during his lifetime, with most of his wealth coming from his 355 inventions, of which dynamite is the most famous.

In 1888, Nobel was astonished to read his own obituary, entitled The merchant of death is dead, in a French newspaper. It was Alfred's brother who died; the obituary was eight years premature. The article disconcerted Nobel and made him apprehensive about how he would be remembered when he finally died. This inspired him to change his will. On December 10, 1896, Alfred Nobel died in his villa in San Remo, Italy, from a cerebral hemmorhage. He was 63 years old.


Nobel wrote several wills in his lifetime. He composed the last over a year before he died, signing it at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris on November 27, 1895. To widespread astonishment, Nobel's last will specified that his fortune be used to create a series of prizes for those who confer the "greatest benefit to mankind" in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets, 31 million SEK (c. US$186 million, €150 million in 2008), to establish the five Nobel Prizes. Owing to skepticism about his will, it was not approved by the Storting in Norway until April 26, 1897. The executors of the will, Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist formed the Nobel Foundation to take care of the fortune and to organize the awarding of the prizes. 

Nobel's instructions named a Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament to award the Peace Prize, the members of whom were appointed shortly after the will was approved in April 1897. Soon thereafter, the other prize-awarding organizations were designated. These were the Karolinska Institutet on June 7, the Swedish Academy on June 9, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on June 11. The Nobel Foundation reached an agreement on guidelines for how the prizes should be awarded; and, in 1900, the Nobel Foundation's newly created statutes were promulgated by King Oscar II. In 1905, the personal union between Sweden and Norway was dissolved.

In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden's central bank, established the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The award is based on a donation received by the Nobel Foundation from Sveriges Riksbank on the occasion of the bank's 300th anniversary. The first Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded on 1969.

x----x

Picture from Pixabay.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Create a Richly Imagined World

For someone who likes fantasy and sci-fi fiction, most of the time, a lot of people ask me about how to create a richly imagined world. Fantasy and sci-fi elements rest heavily on how an author weave the setting and the world in which the heroes dwell in, and it helps to make the novel to be imagined vividly in the readers' minds. A convincing world should be relatable, something that we can associate ourselves with. For us to be associated with a world an author created in his mind, and wrote on the pages of a book, this world has to be close to the real thing. It has to be systematic, real and alive, and very convincing. A real world has certain elements, and an author must consider them in writing a vividly imagined world: Cartography - a fantasy or sci-fi world depend heavily on geography and maps, especially if the plot requires war and the belligerents occupy so much space in the plot. A convincing world has the world separated in territories, and every part of the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Simple Machine

A simple machine is a mechanical device that changes the direction or magnitude of a force. In general, they can be defined as the simplest mechanisms that use mechanical advantage (also called leverage) to multiply force. Usually the term refers to the six classical simple machines that were defined by Renaissance scientists: Lever Wheel and axle Pulley Inclined plane Wedge Screw A simple machine uses a single applied force to do work against a single work load. Ignoring friction losses, the work done on the load is equal to the work done by the applied force. The machine can increase the amount of the output force, at the cost of a proportional decrease in the distance moved by the load. The ratio of the output to the applied force is called the mechanical advantage. Simple machines can be regarded as the elementary "building blocks" of which all more complicated machines (sometimes called compound machines) are composed. For example, wheels, levers, and pulleys are all use...
Post a Comment
Read more

Crusades

 The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Christian Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these military expeditions are those to the Holy Land in the period between 1095 and 1291 that were intended to conquer Jerusalem and its surrounding areas from Muslim rule. Beginning with the First Crusade, which resulted in the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, dozens of military campaigns were organized, providing a focal point of European history for centuries. Crusading declined rapidly after the 15th century. In 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the first expedition at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military support for Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos and called for an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Across all social strata in western Europe there was an enthusiastic response. Participants came from all over Europe and had a variety of motivations, including religious salvation, satisfying feudal obligations,...
Post a Comment
Read more