This is an excerpt from our featured article : NOBEL PRIZE

We thought that we shall share on this day….the day each year when Nobel Prizes are awarded…some lesser known facts about the grand prize :(courtesy: information on the internet)

The First Awardees of Nobel Prize

On the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, December 10, 1901, the first set of Nobel Prizes were awarded.

Chemistry: Jacobus H. van’t Hoff

Physics: Wilhelm C. Röntgen

Physiology or Medicine: Emil A. von Behring

Literature: Rene F. A. Sully Prudhomme

Peace: Jean H. Dunant and Frédéric Passy

First Ceremony
 (Memoirs of an attendee:)

“After long protracted negotiations, partly with the French government (which sought to impose a very hefty tax on the Nobel estate) and partly with the Nobel family, the first awarding of five Nobel Prizes could finally take place on 10 December 1901 – four of them given out in Stockholm and one, the Peace Prize, in Christiania, as Oslo was then called. Five years had passed since Alfred Nobel had died in San Remo, on 10 December 1896.

In the days leading up to the awarding of prizes, there was certain tension in the air. The prize winners’ names had been kept secret – they were not, as now, revealed months in advance. When three distinguished German – speaking gentlemen arrived by train from the south and were taken to the Grand Hotel, it was clear that they must be the winners. International traffic was not as commonplace then as now.”

What do the winners say :

“I have never cared very much for personal prizes. A man does not become a freedom fighter in the hope of winning awards, but when I was notified that I had won the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Mr de Klerk, I was deeply moved. The Nobel Peace P”…Nelson Mandela

“It wasn’t until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn’t understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.” … William Faulkner  (American short-story Writer and Novelist, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949)

“I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.” …George Bernard Shaw (Irish literary Critic, Playwright and Essayist. 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature)