Nobel Prize

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nobel Prize begins with a deathbed surprise. On the 10th of December 1896, Alfred Nobel died in his villa in San Remo, Italy, from a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 63 years old. When his will was opened, almost no one had expected what it contained. Nobel had quietly signed it at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris on the 27th of November 1895, just over a year before his death. He had bequeathed 94% of his total assets to fund a new series of prizes for those who confer the greatest benefit on mankind. That fortune amounted to 31 million SEK, roughly equivalent to US$186 million or 150 million euros in 2008 values.

  The man who left this gift to humanity was not a philanthropist by reputation. He was a chemist, engineer, and inventor whose 355 inventions included dynamite. In 1894, he had purchased the Bofors iron and steel mill and turned it into a major armaments manufacturer. A popular story holds that in 1888, Nobel was shaken to read his own premature obituary in a French newspaper, headlined "The Merchant of Death Is Dead." It was actually his brother Ludvig who had died. Historians have been unable to verify this story and some dismiss it as a myth, but the tale captures something real about how Nobel's legacy came to pivot from destruction to discovery.

  How did five prizes become six? Why do some of the most celebrated thinkers in history appear on lists of those the prize overlooked? And what happens when the medal itself has to be dissolved in acid to survive a war? Those questions are what this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Building the Foundation

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  Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, the executors of Nobel's will, faced immediate resistance when the document became public. The Storting in Norway did not approve the will until the 26th of April 1897, months after widespread skepticism had greeted its provisions. The executors responded by forming the Nobel Foundation to manage the fortune and organise the prize-giving, and the foundation was registered as a private organisation on the 29th of June 1900.

  One detail that made the prizes financially possible has little to do with dynamite. Robert and Ludvig Nobel had been involved in the oil business in Azerbaijan. According to Swedish historian E. Bargengren, who accessed the Nobel family archive, it was the decision to allow withdrawal of Alfred's money from Baku that became the decisive factor enabling the prizes to be established. Without that liquidity, the foundation's endowment may never have reached the scale Nobel envisioned.

  The prize-awarding institutions were named in quick succession once the will was approved. The Karolinska Institute was designated on the 7th of June, the Swedish Academy on the 9th of June, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on the 11th of June. In 1900, the foundation's newly created statutes were promulgated by King Oscar II. Since 1946, the foundation has been exempt from all taxes in Sweden, and since 1953 from investment taxes in the United States. As of the 31st of December 2007, the assets controlled by the Nobel Foundation amounted to 3.628 billion Swedish kronor, roughly US$560 million at that time.

• 3. The First Laureates

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  Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-rays topped the Nobel Committee's physics shortlist for the very first prize, alongside Philipp Lenard's work on cathode rays. The Academy of Sciences selected Röntgen. For chemistry, the academy received 20 nominations, eleven of them for Jacobus van 't Hoff, who was awarded the prize for his contributions in chemical thermodynamics.

  The Swedish Academy's choice for the first Literature Prize proved far more contentious. The academy selected the French poet Sully Prudhomme, prompting a protest from a group of 42 Swedish writers, artists, and literary critics who had expected Leo Tolstoy to receive the honour. Burton Feldman has criticised the award on the grounds that Prudhomme was a mediocre poet, suggesting that most academy members at the time preferred Victorian literature and chose accordingly.

  The first Physiology or Medicine Prize went to the German physiologist and microbiologist Emil von Behring. During the 1890s, von Behring had developed an antitoxin to treat diphtheria, a disease that until then had been causing thousands of deaths each year. The inaugural Peace Prize was shared between the Swiss Jean Henri Dunant, recognised for founding the International Red Cross Movement and initiating the Geneva Convention, and the French pacifist Frédéric Passy, founder of the Peace League, who had worked alongside Dunant in the Alliance for Order and Civilization.

• 4. War and Interruption

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  In 1938 and 1939, Adolf Hitler's Third Reich forbade three German laureates from accepting their prizes: Richard Kuhn, Adolf Friedrich Johann Butenandt, and Gerhard Domagk. All three were eventually able to receive their diplomas and medals after World War II. Even Sweden's official neutrality could not fully insulate the prizes from the conflict. No prize was awarded in any category from 1940 to 1942, owing to Germany's occupation of Norway, where the Peace Prize committee sat.

  Three members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee fled into exile during the occupation. The remaining members were shielded from persecution when the Nobel Foundation declared that the committee building in Oslo was Swedish property, making it a safe haven that the German military could not enter without challenging a neutral state. Those members kept the committee functioning but awarded nothing. In 1944, the foundation, working with the three members in exile, ensured that nominations were submitted so the Peace Prize could be awarded once again.

  The physical medals faced their own wartime peril. The gold medals belonging to German scientists Max von Laue and James Franck had been sent to Copenhagen for safekeeping. When Germany invaded Denmark, Hungarian chemist and Nobel laureate George de Hevesy dissolved them in aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid, to prevent confiscation by Nazi Germany and to shield their owners from legal consequences. After the war, the gold was recovered from solution and the medals were re-cast.

• 5. The Economics Addition

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  After World War II, economics grew rapidly as an academic discipline and gained recognition as a significant scientific field. In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden's central bank, celebrated its 300th anniversary and donated a sum of money to the Nobel Foundation to fund a new award in economic sciences. The following year, 1969, the Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded for the first time, going to Jan Tinbergen and Ragnar Frisch, recognised for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes.

  The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences selects the economics laureate using the same process it applies to the science prizes. The Nobel Foundation's board decided at the time of this addition that no further new prizes would be permitted. Not everyone has accepted the prize as a legitimate part of the Nobel family. Peter Nobel has described the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel as a "false Nobel prize" that dishonours his relative, and considers economics to be a pseudoscience.

  The cost of the Economics prize is paid separately by Sveriges Riksbank. In 2011, that cost stood at 16.5 million kronor, distinct from the overall Nobel prize fund, which in that year carried a total annual cost of approximately 120 million kronor.

• 6. Controversy and Omission

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  Mohandas Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times: in 1937, 1938, 1939-1947, and a few days before he was assassinated on the 30th of January 1948. He was never awarded it. In 1948, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to make no award on the grounds that there was no suitable living candidate. In 1989, when the 14th Dalai Lama received the Peace Prize, the committee chairman acknowledged it was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi." Geir Lundestad, Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in 2006, called Gandhi's exclusion undoubtedly the greatest omission in the committee's 106-year history.

  The 1973 Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger and Lê Duc Tho generated two resignations from the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Kissinger and Tho were recognised for negotiating a ceasefire between North Vietnam and the United States in January 1973. When the award was announced, both sides were still engaged in hostilities. Lê Duc Tho declined the prize, stating there was no actual peace in Vietnam. The satirist and musician Tom Lehrer remarked that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  The three-person limit on prize recipients has also drawn criticism. In 2013, Carl Hagen, Gerald Guralnik, and Tom Kibble published a paper in 1964 that addressed how the cosmos began, arriving at the same conclusion as Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, who received the 2013 Physics Prize. Hagen has argued that the committee should either abandon the three-person limit or expand recognition across two years. Meanwhile, the ban on posthumous awards prevented Fischer Black from sharing the 1997 Economics Prize for his landmark work on option pricing; his co-author Myron Scholes received the honour, and the Nobel committee prominently mentioned Black's key role in their announcement.

• 7. Records and Remarkable Laureates

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  Marie Sklodowska-Curie remains the only person ever awarded Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. She received the Physics Prize in 1903 for her work on radioactivity and the Chemistry Prize in 1911 for the isolation of pure radium. Her husband Pierre Curie shared the 1903 Physics prize with her, and their daughter Irene Joliot-Curie received the Chemistry Prize in 1935 together with her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie. The Curie family has received the most prizes of any family, with four prizes awarded to five individual laureates.

  Linus Pauling holds a separate distinction: he is the only laureate of two unshared prizes. Pauling received the 1954 Chemistry Prize for his research into the chemical bond and its application to the structure of complex substances, then the 1962 Peace Prize for his activism against nuclear weapons. Malala Yousafzai is the youngest laureate in the prize's history, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at the age of 17. John B. Goodenough is the oldest, receiving the Chemistry Prize in 2019 at the age of 97.

  The International Committee of the Red Cross is the only organisation or individual to have received more than two Nobel Prizes. It has been awarded the Peace Prize three times: in 1917 and 1944 for its work during the world wars, and in 1963 during the year of its centenary. Between 1901 and 2024, the prizes were awarded 627 times to 1,012 people and organisations in total. The United States has produced 403 Nobel laureates as of 2022, more than any other country.

• 8. Ceremony and Legacy

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  Every year on the 10th of December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death, the prizes are presented in Stockholm. The exception is the Peace Prize, which is awarded in Oslo. At Stockholm's Concert Hall, each laureate steps forward to receive the prize directly from the hands of the King of Sweden. The Nobel banquet follows immediately at Stockholm City Hall, in the Blue Hall, attended by the Swedish Royal Family and around 1,300 guests. In Oslo, the Peace Prize ceremony draws about 250 guests, including the president of the Storting and, since 2006, the King and Queen of Norway.

  Each laureate is also required to give a public lecture on a subject related to their prize. The Nobel lecture as a rhetorical genre took decades to reach its current format. US President Theodore Roosevelt received the Peace Prize in 1906 but did not deliver his lecture until 1910, after his term in office. The lectures are organised by the same institution that selected the laureates. Nobel Week normally begins with laureates arriving in Stockholm and ends with the Nobel banquet.

  The prize money has shifted substantially over time. In the 1980s, the award was 880,000 SEK per prize. In 2009, it reached 10 million SEK. It was lowered to 8 million SEK in June 2012. As of 2025, the monetary award per prize category stands at 11 million Swedish kronor, equivalent to approximately US$1.035 million. The medals themselves average about 175 grams each, struck in 18 carat green gold plated with 24 carat gold, with a diameter of 66 mm. Their obverse shows Alfred Nobel in profile alongside the Latin inscription recording his birth year of 1833 and his death year of 1896.