The Nobel Foundation

The Nobel Prize Calender

Every year at the beginning of October, the whole world turns its gaze towards Sweden and Norway.The Nobel Laureates are then announced in Stockholm and Oslo. Millions of people visit the Nobel Foundation?s website during these few days.

King Carl XVI Gustaf presents the Nobel Prize at the Concert Hall in Stockholm.

Meeting the Royal Family

Many Laureates say that meeting the Royal Family is the most memorable experience of their Nobel week.Traditionally, the Laureates and their husbands or wives sit with the Royal Family at the Nobel Banquet.They are also invited to a more intimate dinner at the Royal Palace where they meet the Royal Family again.

Crown Princess Victoria

Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden attends the Nobel Foundation Prize 2008 Awards Ceremony at the Concert Hall on December 10, 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden.

Visiting the Nobel Foundation is a great symbolic event. The Laureates receive a document confirming the prize amount and they sign their names in a guestbook, thereby joining hundreds of their famous predecessors.

Ragnar Sohlman

Ragnar Sohlman was Alfred Nobel?s personal assistant. After Nobel?s death, Sohlman played a vital role in carrying out his will.

The nominal value of the Prizes awarded in 1901 was SEK 150,782 ? roughly 7 million Swedish crowns at today?s rates. By the time of the centenary in 2001, the value of the Prize had risen to SEK 10 million, the highest amount ever both nominally and in real terms.

The Nobel Foundation

Alfred Nobel

Founder of the Nobel Prize

Alfred Nobel (born October 21, 1833 in Stockholm — died December 10, 1896 in San Remo) was a chemist, engineer, inventor and entrepreneur. He was devoted to the study of explosives and his inventions included a blasting cap, dynamite and smokeless gunpowder. He held 355 patents in different countries. Alfred Nobel became known all over the world when the St. Gotthard Tunnel was built in 1882, and dynamite was used for the first time in such a large scale.

Alfred Nobel lived and worked in many countries including Sweden,Russia, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy. He spoke five languages, was passionately interested in literature and wrote poetry and drama.

Alfred Nobel could probably never imagine how important his prize would become, or how much media attention the Nobel Laureates would create this century. And the Nobel Prizes continue …

The Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 and is responsible for the financial management of the capital in the prize fund. The Foundation is headed by a Board of Directors with its headquarters in Stockholm. It consists of a total of six Swedish and (since 1985) Norwegian nationals, appointed by the respective prize-awarding committees. The Board elects the Nobel Foundation’s Executive Director.

The capital was for a long time invested in so-called gilt-edged bonds. Financial market developments gradually made such bonds less satisfactory as investments. In the earliest decades, the real value of the fund fell steadily. From 1953 onwards, amendments to the Nobel Foundation’s statutes permitted more active asset management. Despite periods of rapid inflation, the capital value was not only successfully maintained but even increased. The 1980s and the first half of the 1990s in particular saw a significant increase in the real value of the Foundation’s investments. In 1987, for the first time, the fund’s real value was greater than in 1901. At the end of 2007, the nominal market value of the fund’s investments stood at an estimated SEK 3.6 billion.

Changes in the value of the fund are reflected in the amount of the Prize. In 1901, the Nobel Prize money amounted to SEK 150,782. In 1923 it reached its lowest nominal sum, just under SEK 115,000. Thanks to the more active asset management, the nominal value of the Prize rose from over SEK 175,000 in 1953 to 1 million in 1981, 2 million in 1986, 4 million in 1990, 7 million in 1994 and 10 million in 2001. Because of inflation, however, the real value did not increase correspondingly; sometimes, indeed, as in the 1970s, it even fell a little. Not until 1991 did the real value of the Prize money (SEK 6.5 million) exceed what it had been in 1901.

Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen

The first Nobel Prize in Physics went to Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen who discovered X-rays, or Roentgen rays, that still carry his name and are used by health care providers every day.

Marie Curie

Marie Skłodowska Curie received her second Nobel Prize in 1911 — this time in chemistry, for isolating and studying the new element radium. This discovery plus her research in radioactivity, which led to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, constituted major contributions to medical science.

Alexander Fleming

In autumn 1945, the Staff of Professors gathered at Karolinska Institutet to select a Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine. The professors selected three laureates, including Alexander Fleming for his discovery of the penicillin that saved millions of people’s lives during the second half of the 1900s.

Selma Lagerlöf

A decision made by the Swedish Academy in 1909 — to grant the Nobel Prize for Literature to Selma Lagerlöf, who was one of the most popular writers in Sweden at the time — was highly controversial. The men in the Academy were divided, but the majority voted for Selma Lagerlöf and she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Bertha von Suttner

This shows a portrait of the radical pacifist Bertha von Suttner, a symbol of Austria’s efforts over many decades to support peace.

In 1905, Bertha von Suttner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Alfred Nobel fell in love with von Suttner during the 1870s, and she later tried to involve him in the peace movement.

The Nobel Foundation (Swedish: Nobelstiftelsen) is a private institution founded on 29 June 1900 to manage the finances and administration of the Nobel Prizes. The Foundation is based on the last will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. It also holds Nobel Symposia on important breakthroughs in science and topics of cultural or social significance.

The discovery by the winner of the first Nobel Prize in Physics was used to determine the structure of DNA.

In 1965, the Foundation initiated the Nobel Symposia, a program that holds symposia “devoted to areas of science where breakthroughs are occurring or deal with other topics of primary cultural or social significance.” The symposia has covered topics such as prostaglandins, chemical kinetics, diabetes mellitus, string theory, cosmology, and the Cold War in the 1980s. The Nobel Symposium Committee consists of members from the Nobel Committees in Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine; the Prize Committee for Economics; the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation; and the Wallenberg Foundation.

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