On December 10th 1901 the first Nobel Prizes were awarded.

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish businessman, chemist, engineer and innovator who, amongst other things, owned Bofors, an armaments company, and invented dynamite. When Nobel's brother, Ludvig, died in 1888, Alfred's own obituary was published by mistake in a French newspaper, condemning him for inventing dynamite.

This apparently led him to leave a better legacy. In 1895, Nobel therefore set aside the bulk of his estate, 94%, after his death (which was in the following year; the first prizes were awarded on the fifth anniversary of his death) to establish five Nobel Prizes, physical science, chemistry, medical science or physiology, literary work and the fifth, originally rather broadly defined, is commonly called the Peace Prize. The prizes are given to those who have bettered mankind. Which is how someone called a "merchant of death" in his mistakenly published obituary became associated with a prize awarded for peace.

Image: By Gösta Florman (1831–1900) / The Royal Library [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AlfredNobel_adjusted.jpg)