The first Nobel Prizes were awarded on 10 December 1901

The first Nobel Prizes were awarded on 10 December 1901, five years to the day after Alfred Nobel died in San Remo. Four were presented in Stockholm, for physics, chemistry, medicine and literature, and the Peace Prize in Christiania, as Oslo was then called. Getting there took years of negotiation with Nobel’s family and with the French government, which wanted to tax his estate heavily.

The first laureates were Wilhelm Röntgen (physics, for X-rays), Jacobus van ‘t Hoff (chemistry), Emil von Behring (medicine, for diphtheria antitoxin) and the French poet Sully Prudhomme (literature). The Peace Prize was shared by Red Cross founder Henry Dunant, by then impoverished, and French peace campaigner Frédéric Passy.

What an eyewitness saw

A 20-year-old student marshal, Folke Henschen, later chair of the Medicine Nobel Committee, described the Stockholm ceremony decades afterwards:

• The winners’ names were secret until the day; Stockholm guessed them when three distinguished German-speaking men arrived by train and were taken to the Grand Hotel.
• The prizes were handed out in the hall of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, not the Concert Hall used since 1926.
• Crown Prince Gustaf presented the medals, because King Oscar had gone to Christiania as the Swedish–Norwegian union came under strain.
• Prudhomme was ill, so a French minister accepted for him.
• At the banquet, two marshals carried van ‘t Hoff around the room in a gold chair.

The literature choice produced the first Nobel row. Henschen heard the next day that young Swedish writers, including Verner von Heidenstam and Ellen Key, were so upset that they considered sending a letter of protest to Leo Tolstoy.

10 December remains the date of every Nobel ceremony.