Alfred Nobel and His Prizes

Alfred Nobel was a man of great contrasts. A Swede born in Stockholm in 1833, he spent most of his life abroad. The inventor of dynamite and other explosives, he was even called a 'merchant of death', but aimed to promote world peace. A skilled chemist, he wrote poetry in Swedish and English and prose in other languages too. The son of a man who twice went bankrupt, he became one of the wealthiest people in the Western world.

His great wealth did not bring him happiness, however. He never married, suffered from loneliness and was in delicate health from childhood. Only in the last three years of his life did he have a home of his own in Sweden, where he had bought the Bofors (pr Boo-fosh) armaments factory. He nevertheless died in the Italian resort town of San Remo on December 10 1896. And December 10 is the day on which the Nobel Prizes are ceremonially awarded each year, the Peace Prize in Oslo, the others at the Concert Hall in Stockholm.

His will was written in Swedish without legal guidance, which let to much delay in its implementation as it was disputed. It stipulated that the greater part of his estate should be invested and the income distributed in the form of prizes to those conferring the greatest benefit on mankind during the preceding year in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and what he called 'brotherhood among nations' but which we know as the Peace Prize.

There is no doubt that Nobel had a great interest in each of these fields. Most intriguing is the Peace Prize, which is awarded by a committee of the Norwegian Storting or Parliament, the reason being that Norway was joined to Sweden in a union under the Swedish Crown during Nobel's lifetime. He fondly believed that when the great power of explosives was understood, nobody would use them for military purposes. He knew from personal experience what devastation they could cause. In 1864 the factory where he had been studying nitroglycerine was blown up, killing everyone in it including his 21-year-old brother Emil. Nevertheless, he maintained that his factories could put an end to wars sooner than any of the peace congresses that were held.

He was also influenced by the Austrian Baroness von Sutter, a pioneer in the peace movement who was herself awarded the Peace Prize in 1905. But as with the Literature Prize, some of the laureates selected in Oslo, such as Henry Kissinger and Le Duc To in 1973 and Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1978, have been highly controversial, while others generally considered to be worthy of the prize, such as Mahatma Ghandi, have been unacknowledged. And when the first Literature Prize was awarded to Sully Proudhomme, Sweden's foremost author, August Strindberg, who never received the prize, and many other prominent personalities wrote a letter of apology to Tolstoy.

The stipulation about conferring the greatest benefit on mankind in the preceding year has probably been taken into account more for the Peace Prize than the other awards, where it is common to look back over a candidate's career or recognize the person who originally made later developments possible.

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