The First Nobel Prizes: Who Won in 1901?

On 10 December 1901 — the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death — five prizes were awarded for the first time, launching the most famous honours system in the world. The inaugural class set the template, and one of its choices ignited a controversy that has never quite gone out.

Physics: Wilhelm Rontgen

The obvious, unanswerable first choice. Röntgen's 1895 discovery of X-rays — announced with the ghostly photograph of his wife's hand, wedding ring floating around finger bones ("I have seen my death," she reportedly said) — had already transformed medicine within months. Röntgen refused to patent the rays, insisting they belonged to humanity, donated his prize money to his university, and declined to call them anything but "X-rays" even as colleagues named them after him.

Chemistry: Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff

The Dutch founder of physical chemistry, honoured for the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure. As a young man his theory of the three-dimensional carbon atom had been savaged by a senior chemist as "fantastical nonsense"; the first Chemistry Nobel was the establishment's formal surrender.

Medicine: Emil von Behring

The Prussian army doctor whose diphtheria antitoxin — the first effective serum therapy — was strangling one of childhood's great killers. Contemporaries called it simply "the saving of children." His collaborator Paul Ehrlich, whose quantitative work made the serum practical, was passed over that year — the first, but not the last, Nobel sharing controversy.

Literature: Sully Prudhomme — the scandal

The Swedish Academy's first choice was the gentle French poet Sully Prudhomme. The problem: Leo Tolstoy was alive, world-famous, and manifestly the greatest living writer. The outcry was immediate — forty-two Swedish writers and artists signed a public letter of apology to Tolstoy, and the Academy compounded the error by never awarding him in the nine years of life he had left, the founding entry in the Nobel's hall of omissions.

Peace: Henry Dunant and Frédéric Passy

The first Peace Prize was split between the two available conceptions of peace: Passy, the grand old man of the European peace movement — and Dunant, the Swiss businessman who, after witnessing the battle of Solferino's forty thousand casualties in 1859, had founded the Red Cross and inspired the Geneva Convention. Dunant received the news in the obscure alpine nursing home where he was living in poverty, having lost everything in a business collapse decades earlier; he never spent the prize money, and the world's rediscovery of him remains one of the Peace Prize's finest hours.

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

— Leo Tolstoy

What year one established

The 1901 class fixed the prize's character permanently: science choices of unimpeachable consequence; a literature prize destined to be argued about forever; and a peace prize capable of resurrecting the forgotten. The prize amounts — about 150,000 kronor, a fortune — instantly made the Nobel the world's most valuable award, and its December ceremony has run every year since, wars permitting, growing its own record book of youngest, oldest and doubles along the way.

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Watch: Wilhelm Rontgen | The Discovery of X-Rays

Frequently Asked Questions

Who won the first Nobel Prize in Physics?

Wilhelm Röntgen, for the discovery of X-rays — which he refused to patent, insisting they belonged to humanity.

Why was the first Literature prize controversial?

It went to Sully Prudhomme while Leo Tolstoy was alive; 42 Swedish writers signed a public apology to Tolstoy.

Who shared the first Peace Prize?

Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, and the French peace campaigner Frédéric Passy.