The first ceremony was on the fifth anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel. He was the Swedish inventor of dynamite and other highly explosive materials. In his will Nobel had directed that the bulk of his vast fortune be placed into a fund and the interest on the fund would annually be distributed in the form of prizes to those that had contributed the most to mankind in the preceding year. Alfred Nobel had offered no public reason for his creation of the prizes. It has been suggested that it was out of his moral regret for the increasing use of his inventions of war.

Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born in the Swedish capital of Stockholm in 1833 and at the age of four his family moved to Russia. His father had a successful factory in St. Petersburg that built explosive mines and other military equipment. His education took him to Paris and the United States, he proved to be a brilliant chemist. At the end of the Crimean war his fathers business began to falter and they returned to Sweden where Nobel set up a laboratory to experiment with explosives. In 1863 he discovered a way to control the detonation of nitroglycerin, a highly volatile liquid that had recently been discovered but had been regarded as being too dangerous to use. Two years later he developed the first blasting cap, this detonator inaugurated the modern use of high explosives and replaced the previously dependable black powder, a form of gunpowder.

Nitroglycerin remained a dangerous substance to use and in 1864 his factory blew up killing his younger brother and several workers inside at the time. In his search for a safer explosive Nobel discovered that the combination of nitroglycerin and a porous substance called kieselguht produced a highly explosive mixture but it was safer to use. This discovery in 1867 was christened ‘dynamite’ from a Greek word ‘dynamis’ meaning power. He secured a patent on his new discovery and quickly acquired a fortune as his invention was used in both construction and warfare.

By 1875 he had produced a more powerful form of dynamite, in 1887 he introduced ballistite, a smokeless nitroglycerine powder. At this time one of his brothers died in France and a French newspaper printed an obituary mistaking him for his brother with the headline ‘The merchant of death is dead.’ The inventor of such an explosive material had a pacifistic side and in his latter years developed strong misgivings about his inventions. He died in San Remo, Italy on December 10th 1896 and as described at the beginning of this article his wishes for the awards began exactly five years after his passing.

The Nobel Prizes are regarded as the most prestigious awards in the world. Some of the notable winners have been Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, Hemingway, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. On some occasions the award is given to multiple people deserving of the award particularly in the scientific field. Who is to receive the awards each year is decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for the fields of physics, chemistry, and economic science. The Swedish Royal Caroline Medico-Surgical Institute decides the physiology or medicine award. The award for literature is the decision of the Swedish Academy and the peace prize is decided by a committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament. The prize money is quite substantial with each prize winner receiving over $1,400,000 as well as a traditional gold medal.