Five years after dynamite magnate Alfred Nobel's death, his fortune funded the first Nobel Prizes, awarded on the fifth anniversary of his passing. Wilhelm Röntgen won for physics, Jacobus van 't Hoff for chemistry, and Henry Dunant shared the Peace Prize for founding the Red Cross. The ceremony established a tradition that would come to define global recognition of intellectual and humanitarian achievement.
Alfred Nobel died in 1896 leaving a will that shocked his relatives: nearly his entire fortune, earned largely from the invention and sale of dynamite, would fund annual prizes for those who conferred 'the greatest benefit to mankind.' It took five years of legal wrangling and family objections before the Nobel Foundation could distribute the first awards, fittingly on December 10, the anniversary of his death.
In Stockholm, the King of Sweden presented prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen received the first Physics Prize for discovering X-rays just six years earlier, a technology already transforming medicine. In Oslo, the Peace Prize went jointly to Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, and Frédéric Passy, a leading pacifist.
Nobel had never married and had no children; some biographers suggest guilt over dynamite's use in warfare shaped his final wishes. The prizes he created would eventually make December 10 an annual date of global attention, still celebrated in Stockholm's Blue Hall with the same pageantry established in 1901.