Nobel Prize: The Strange Life of a Prestigious Award

Once you find out that the Nobel Prize was born out of a misprint and a guilty conscience, it all makes a bit more sense. Picture this: in 1888, a French newspaper prematurely published the obituary of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, under the headline “The merchant of death is dead.” A dramatic error, but it jolted Nobel enough to rethink how he’d be remembered. Instead of going down in history as a man who turned big rocks into smaller, more dangerous ones, he decided to set up an award celebrating humanity’s finest minds. An eternal PR rebrand, basically.

The Nobel Prize hasn’t stopped being deliciously odd since.

For a start, there’s the fact that Alfred Nobel made his fortune blowing things up. He held 355 patents, most of them explosive. His labs were as flammable as his reputation, and several of his relatives and colleagues met untimely ends due to his inventions. Yet the man also wrote poetry, loved Byron, and even penned a few amateur plays. Explosives and existentialism—an oddly fitting résumé for a man who rewrote his legacy before dying, properly this time, in 1896.

He left most of his enormous fortune to fund a series of prizes. But the will was so vague and riddled with surprises that his relatives and the Swedish authorities spent years squabbling over it. One line changed everything: his money was to reward those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” That was it. No detailed instructions, no Pinterest board of ideal laureates. Just vibes.

By 1901, the first prizes were handed out. Peace, Literature, Chemistry, Medicine, and Physics. Economics snuck in much later in 1969, like the awkward plus-one at a wedding. And just to be clear, Nobel never mentioned economics in his will. The Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) made it up for the prize’s 300th birthday gift. Economists have been gatecrashing the party ever since.

Let’s talk about the Peace Prize. It’s the only one not handed out in Stockholm. Instead, it’s awarded in Oslo, because Nobel apparently admired Norway. Why? Unclear. Possibly just to annoy Sweden, which was stuck in a union with Norway at the time. Or perhaps he thought Norwegians seemed less likely to start wars. Either way, it’s been Norway’s gig ever since.

Winners of the Peace Prize haven’t always been, shall we say, universally peaceful. Henry Kissinger won it in 1973 while the Vietnam War was still very much not over. The satirical magazine The Onion once joked the award was now being given out pre-emptively, just in case someone might do something peaceful in the future. At this point, it’s hard to tell satire from the official selection process.

You don’t apply for a Nobel. That would be vulgar. You get nominated, often by professors, past winners, or members of parliament. Which leads to some spectacular snubs. Gandhi? Never won. Leo Tolstoy? Rejected. James Joyce? Not even close. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan took home the Literature Prize in 2016 and then didn’t answer their calls for weeks. The Nobel Committee eventually gave up and sent the medal via FedEx. No joke.

The prizes are handed out every December 10th, the anniversary of Nobel’s death. There’s a ceremony, a banquet, and a royal handshake. The Peace Prize includes a lecture, sometimes inspiring, sometimes more like a TED Talk with diplomats. Winners get a medal, a diploma, and a generous pile of Swedish krona, usually around $1 million. Unless the money gets split among multiple winners, in which case it’s a Nobel group project.

And sometimes, laureates just say “nah.” Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Literature Prize in 1964, saying no institution should own his words. The Committee tried to award it anyway, like an unwanted Christmas jumper. Le Duc Tho, who won alongside Kissinger, also refused. He said he couldn’t accept the prize while Vietnam was still at war. Bold move.

Then there’s Marie Curie, who didn’t just win one Nobel, but two. One in Physics with her husband Pierre, and another solo in Chemistry. She’s the only person to win Nobels in two different sciences. And yes, she carried radioactive samples in her pockets. Health and safety hadn’t been invented yet.

Her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, also won a Nobel in Chemistry. That makes them the only mother-daughter Nobel-winning duo in history. Thanksgiving dinners in that family must’ve been stressful.

Albert Einstein only won one Nobel, and not for relativity. The Committee thought relativity was a bit too spicy. He got his in 1921 for explaining the photoelectric effect, a safer bet. It’s like awarding Hemingway a prize for his fishing tips.

Nobel’s own legacy is oddly absent from the prizes that bear his name. No award for engineering, maths, or architecture. The rumour goes that Nobel’s love interest ran off with a mathematician, so he spitefully excluded the field. That’s probably apocryphal, but it’s too entertaining to dismiss entirely.

The average age of a Nobel winner? Mid-60s. It’s basically the Oscars for scientists: you wait a lifetime for the gold. Though Malala Yousafzai won the Peace Prize at just 17, making her the youngest laureate ever. She shared it with Kailash Satyarthi, a veteran children’s rights activist. He said they balanced each other out: youth and experience. Aww.

Sometimes the prize goes to organisations. The Red Cross has won three times. The UN has had its moment. Even the European Union bagged one in 2012, presumably for not self-destructing.

There’s an entire Nobel Museum in Stockholm, where you can sip coffee next to cases of laureates’ scribbled notes and extremely modest suits. They even let visitors eat Nobel ice cream. It tastes like creamy meritocracy.

Occasionally, a prize is awarded posthumously by mistake. The rules say no, but if a nominee dies after being selected but before the ceremony, the award still goes through. This happened with Ralph Steinman in 2011. The Committee didn’t know he’d passed away three days before the announcement. They awkwardly stuck with it.

One fun quirk: Nobel medals differ. The Peace Prize medal has three naked men holding hands. The Medicine one shows a young man listening to the whisperings of a goddess. Symbolism or late-Victorian weirdness? You decide.

The Nobel name has inspired spinoffs, too. There’s the Ig Nobel Prize, awarded for ridiculous yet real research, like why wombats poop cubes. Or how sword-swallowing injuries relate to performance frequency. It’s science with a wink and a wince.

The Nobel Prize has its share of controversies, oddities, and grandstanding. But it still carries a whiff of old-school prestige, that kind of slightly dusty honour that says, “You did a thing so brilliant we’re giving you a shiny object and a room full of applause.”

And when you think about it, that’s exactly what Alfred Nobel wanted: a legacy less explosive, more exalting. A man who turned dynamite into dignity. A man who rewrote his obituary.