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SWEDEN: No Prizes

6 minute read
TIME

From Stockholm the following sentence flashed along the cables of the world: “The Board of Directors of the Nobel Fund announces that, for the first time since the initial awards 24 years ago, all five of the annual Nobel Prizes will be withheld for the current year.”

To serious thinkers the announcement was saddening. It meant that throughout the realms of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace the year has brought no overwhelming and secure accomplishment. Meanwhile many a semiliterate inquired, “Why do them Swedes spell ‘noble’ ‘n-o-b-e-l’?”; and many a citizen of ripe culture wondered just who Alfred Bernhard Nobel really was, and exactly how he had occupied himself in amassing the thirty million Swedish kroner ($9,000,000) with which he endowed the Nobel Foundation.

Quoth indulgent Swedes, tabloidizing Mr. Nobel for U. S. consumption: “He came of a family of inventors and princes of finance. His father, Immanuel Nobel, invented the submarine mine. His brothers, Robert Hjalmar Nobel and Ludvig Immanuel Nobel, founded the naphtha industry at Baku, Russia, one of the most phenomenally successful enterprises of the 19th Century. He himself invented dynamite, and reaped fabulous tribute from the whole world for the secret. The entire family labored incessantly at the invention and manufacture of super-combustibles. So numerous were the explosions and fires which wrecked their laboratories that the Swedish Government forbade them at one time to experiment on Swedish soil. Undaunted, they anchored a laboratory-barge in the middle of Lake Malaren, near Stockholm, and continued their death-pregnant experiments.”

Meanwhile the personality and eccentricities of Mr. Nobel were recalled at length. Born in 1833, at Stockholm, he was so delicate and sickly as a child that when his family moved to St. Petersburg it was feared that he would not survive. There, however, he grew into a nervous high-strung youth, who paradoxically combined extreme personal sensitiveness with a passion for explosives.

Once he was so depressed by a chance word of rebuke from his father that he wandered off and disappeared for a time. Per contra, he once jumped from his bed in the middle of the night, intent on performing a newly conceived experiment, rushed to the Neva (on the other side of which stood his father’s laboratory), plunged in and swam across. “I could not wait. The ferryboat was delayed,” said he.

His arrival at a Manhattan hotel in 1867, when he quietly dumped down his bags and announced that they were full of explosives, is still recalled by the family of the horrified hotelman, who promptly summoned both the fire department and the police.

Later, as the opulent proprietor of 15 dynamite factories located throughout the world,” Mr. Nobel developed many whims unrelated to explosives. For example, he was fond of pictures yet tired so easily of them that he preferred not to buy any. An obliging Parisian art dealer accommodated him. Mr. Nobel might choose any pictures which struck his fancy, and the dealer would rent them to him until he grew irritable and called for others.

Of all his decorations Mr. Nobel confessed that he cared only for the red rosette of the Legion of Honor, which he habitually wore. Of the many honorary distinctions showered upon him, he once admitted that none consoled him for the slight he felt at never having been made a Fellow of the Royal Society.*

He once remarked, “Among all the women I have known, I have never found one whom I felt I could marry to our mutual satisfaction.” Cautious, in at least this one respect, he died a bachelor at 63, after setting forth explicitly in his will the terms of his great philanthropy.

Five Nobel Prizes are awarded annually at the discretion of the following bodies: 1 and 2) In physics and chemistry, by the Swedish Academy of Science. 3) In medicine or physiology, by the Caroline Institute (the Faculty of Medicine at Stockholm). 4) In literature, by the Swedish Academy of Letters. 5) For “fraternization among nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the calling in and propagating of peace congresses,” an award (the so-called “Peace Prize”) determined by the Norwegian Storting (Parliament).

The Amount of the Prizes (at present about $40,000 each) varies from time to time, as follows: The principal of the Nobel Fund is annually increased by one-tenth of the interest; three-fourths of what remains is divided into five equal prizes, and the rest goes for “expenses.”*

The List of Prize Winners, now numbering 129, embraces men and women of almost every nationality. With the idea of fostering international understanding, each recipient is brought (whenever practical) to Scandinavia to receive the award formally.

Prominent men and women who have received the awards:

Physics: W. C. Rontgen (1901, X-ray), M. and Mme. Curie (1903), A. A. Michelson (1907), Guglielmo Marconi (1909), Albert Einstein (1921), R. A. Millikan (1923), Calvin S. Page (1924).

Chemistry: Ernest Rutherford (1908), Mme. Curie (1911), T. W. Richards (1914).

Medicine: Alexis Carrell (1912), F. G. Banting and J. J. R. Macleod (1923, insulin).

Literature: Sienkiewicz (1905), Kipling (1907), Maeterlinck (1911), Hauptmann (1912), Tagore (1913), Hamsun (1920), Anatole France (1921), Benavente (1922), Yeats (1923).

Peace: Theodore Roosevelt (1906), Elihu Root (1912), International Red Cross of Geneva (1917), Woodrow Wilson (1918), Leon Bourgeois (1920).

The Swedish Press severely criticized the directors of the Nobel Fund for withholding all the prizes this year, and clamored, that at least the prize in Literature be awarded, preferably to author Thomas Mann (German) or authoress Sigrid Undset (Norwegian).

The directors at length caused still more indignation by announcing that the awards had been withheld partly from a lack of qualified candidates, and partly because the heavy taxes imposed by the Crown had depleted the Nobel fund to a point where retrenchment for a year was necessary.

Cried Herr Verner Heidenstam, noted Swedish author, winner of the prize for Literature in 1916: “The situation is a scandal unworthy of the culture of such a nation as Sweden.”

*Strictly speaking, “The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge,” the oldest and most “honorable” scientific society in Great Britain and one of the oldest in Europe.

*The machinery for determining the awards is elaborate and thorough. Numerous experts of the Nobel Institutes devote their entire time to searching for prizewinners. At their disposal are special libraries, laboratories and many foreign assistants—all paid for by the Nobel Fund.

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