THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13390, 19 January 1907, Page 5 (Supplement)

THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS

THE SUCCESSFUL MEN

Thk announcement recently made that last year the Nobel prize for chemistry had been awarded to Professor Moissan, of Paris, and the prize for physics to Professor Thomson, of Cambridge, makes it interesting to know something of the men who have won the prizes since their institution in 1901. Alfred None!, the inventor of dynamite, died in 1898. leaving his entire fortune of £1.680,000 to form a fund, the interest of whicti was to he devoted to founding live annual prizes of £8000 each. These prizes were in be given for the best work in the promotion of universal peace, literature, medical research, chemical research, and physics. The prize-winners are now selected by a committee of the Norwegian Parliament, but nationality has nothing to do with the choice, from 1901 to 1905 the prizewinners have consisted of eight (brmfius, five Frenchmen, four Englishmen, three Swiss, two Dutchmen, one Swede, one Dane, one Norwegian, one Austrian, one Russian, one Pole, and one Spaniard. The prizes for peace literature and physics have sometimes been divided.

The first Englishman to be allotted a. prize was Major Ronald Ross, the head of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, who, for his invaluable studies of the cause of miliaria and the habits of the mosquito, was made the medical prizeman in 1902.

hi 1905 Mr. W. R. Cromer, M.P., was given the prize for peace. Mr. Cromer was originally a carpenter by trade, and first came to the front in 1859 in the "anions building trade lockout. He was concerned in the Reform Hill agitation, when the railings of Hyde Par- went down, and he has been working for international arbitration for thirty years- Mr. Cremer considered that Alfred Nobel intended his prizes to be used for continuing the peace propaganda and not for the private use of the winner. TWO KXCWSH .SCIENTISTS. The other Englishmen were selected in 1904, when Sir William Ramsay was given the chemistry prize and Lord Rayieigh that for physics. Sir William has added live new elements to those known to existbefore he started work, and it is said of him that if he had not been a chemist he would have made a great reputation as a musician. lie plays the violin and the piano with equal skill. ■ Lord Rayleigh has two great distinctions. He is ilie only peer who has ever been a senior wrangler, and the only Fellow of the Royal Society who has been a successful dairyman. Incidentally he discovered argon, and is a brother-in-law of Mr. Balfour.

Professor Thomson, to whom the physics prize was given last year, is known to lame as " the man who split the atom."

Among the foreign scientists in the prizeI list perhaps the best known names' are J those of Professor Rontgen, the Herman discoverer of the Rontgen rays; Professor ! Finsen. M. and Mine. Curie, the discoverers ot radium; M. Becqucrel, who I discovered the radiations emitted by ' i uranium; and Professor Koch, whose name I i is associated with the anti-toxin cure for I ; tuberculosis. I j i. init all -fit-:. I The literature list is rather a curious j ; one. Nobel laid it down that the prize ; | should be given to " the author who pro- ! j duced the most remarkable literary work j :of tin idealistic character-" Possibly it i ! has been found difficult to settle exactly i | the meaning of idealism in literature, mid I this difficulty may have limited the choice : of the judges. Jii 1901 the prize was given to M, Sully I ! Prudhomme, the French philosophic poet ; j | next year it wont to Professor Mommsen, j the Gorman historian ; in 1903 to Bjorn- | I son, the Norwegian novelist ; in 1904 it I . was divided between Echegaray, the ! Spanish dramatist, and Mistral, the ProI vencal poet. In 1905 the prize was award- I led to Sieukiewiez. the Polish author of 1

"Quo Vadis, ' and it has been stated that, for last year it will fall to Signer Carducci, an Italian poet, who will be the first of his countrymen to lie counted among the Noble prize-winners.

A i ritiurs list,

j This list is a very curious one. Lew ! people nowadays read Prudhoinme. Mis ■ tral is the head of a small school of I ivriteis engaged in the preservation of a | language spoken by few people nowadays, though his. " Mireill." was used by Gou- ! nod as the libretto of an opera ; and Sig- | nor L'arducci is hardly known outside his I own country. Sienkicwicz is of the same i staining in letters as our Mr. Hall Caine.

lijornson is. indeed, the only man of first-rate international reputation in the whole list, with the exception of Mommsen. And if lijornson is an idealist, one wonders why Ibsen has been omitted. Other striking omissions are Tolstoi. Maeterlinck. Swinburne, Meredith, and Hauptinuiin. It may be remembered that Herbert Spencer's name was mentioned in 1903. but the prijK- was not given him-

In addition to the names that have been mentioned it is rumoured that the medical prize will for 1906 be divided between an Italian and a Spaniard. And in this connection another name at

once occurs to one. However good has been the work of members of international peace leagues and the authors of peace books, it is the statesman who works most effectively, and among statesmen no one has been so effective iii these recent years a- King Kdward the Peacemaker.