The Nobel Laureates takes stage in Stockholm Concert Hall, today, the 10 December, in the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony – as an annual event on the day of Alfred Nobel’s death.
There are more than 300 peace prizes in the world. One of the most well known and highly respected is the Nobel Peace Prize that started already in 1901. The prize is named after it’s Swedish creator Alfred Nobel.
The foundations for the prize were laid 1895 when he in his will left more than SEK 31 millions (approx. SEK 1,500 millions today) to be converted into a fund and invested in “safe securities.”
Here you can see the Table of Nobel prize amounts.
Who was he? He was born in Stockholm Sweden in 1833 and is the inventor of the dynamite and had 355 patents in several countries, as an entrepreneur he was unbeatable in his time. He seemed to have dedicated all his life to his inventions, even his brother were killed during the preparation of nitroglycerine.
How goes that together, he inventing the dynamite, surely to be in good use in war and on the other hand, creating a peace prize? Read more in the article War and Peace in the Thinking of Alfred Nobel.
One interesting fact I didn’t know before is that a housekeeper he had for a short time, Bertha Kinsky von Chinic und Tettau (later von Suttner) left him and after that became a leading peace activist.
Did you know that he actually traveled quite a lot? Not me either. He did, but not for pleasure, it was in his work. He went to Finland, St. Petersburg, Russia, Paris, Italy, Germany (Krümmel near Hamburg), U.S, Ardeer, Scotland, UK and ends his life in San Remo, Italy in 1896.
Though he is buried at Norra begravningsplatsen in Solna, Stockholm, which also is the burial site for many Swedish famous persons including Salomon August Andrée (polar explorer), Ingrid Bergman (actress), Gustaf de Laval (engineer and inventor), Vilhelm Moberg (author), Jenny Nyström (artist, illustrator), August Strindberg (author, playwright) – and Mr Lifecruisers grandmother and grandfather 
Here you can find Alfred Nobel Biographical, if you want to know more about him.
There is perhaps nothing more Swedish than the Nobe prize award ceremony when the Swedish king Carl Gustaf XVI is handling out the awards of physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, literature. You can read about the 2007 Years Nobel Leaurates here. The one for peace is handled out in Norway. Alfred Nobel left no explanation to this dividing, so there is only speculations, no one knows for sure.
In the will he wrote:
“The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiology or medical works by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm, and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting.”
They laureates receive the Nobel Prize Medal, the Diploma and document confirming the Nobel Prize amount prize money from our Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf. Before 1980 the medals were made of 23-karat gold, but now they are “only” made of 18-karat green gold plated with 24-karat gold.
Notable facts: there is only 34 women of 797 Nobel Laureates – and Marie Curie twice. The oldest Laureate to date is Leonid Hurwicz, 2007 Economics Laureate, who is 90 years old! That confirms my thoughts: keep going, it’s never too late 
There is also a gigantic royal banquet in the Blue Hall of Stockholm City Hall, which really isn’t Blue at all. The bricks in there were planned to be painted blue, but the architect changed his mind in the last minute and by then the name Blue Hall was so firmly established that it was kept anyway.
Photo: Yanan Li
Over 1300 guests will be served there by hundreds of waiters & waitressess that has volunteered for this very prestige filled task!!!
Followed by entertainment of different kinds with dance in the Golden Hall, where the walls are covered with more than 18 million glass and gold mosaic pieces (!), a pure master piece of the artist Einar Forseth. The mosaics depict portraits of historical figures and events in Swedish history.
Photo: Yanan Li
Many of us Swedes follows this event on TV, not only because of the awards, but also because of all the elegant dresses, like The Swedish Queens Gowns. We really need some festivities to light up the winter darkness a bit.
So what could be more refreshing than the flower arrangements? Every year, more than 23,000 flowers are used as decorations, which are donated by the Azienda di Promozione Turistica di San Remo, a center for flower cultivation on the Italian Riviera where Alfred Nobel spent the last years of his life.
Anyone that is curious of the Menus from the Nobel Banquet 1901-2006? (Only in French up to 2004, English and Swedish translation from 2005). I wouldn’t mind to have dinner there… The preparations begins three days before the big day and demands 20 cooks!
Next time you find it exhausting to have dinner guests, consider this:
The Blue Hall is laid out with 65 tables with 470 meters of tablecloth. 30 people begin the time-consuming task of laying out 6,730 pieces of porcelain, 5,384 glasses and 9,422 pieces of cutlery.
You can follow the nobel prize award live webcast from Stockholm. 10 December, 4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. (CET)
Don’t miss that you can let your kids or pupils play Educational Games at nobelprize.org.
So you’re Swedish? And that’s a lot of information about the Nobel Awards and Alfred Nobel. I remember reading a book by Irving Wallace called ‘The Prize’. Had to do with Nobel laureatures, how they win the prize and all about how the Nobel Committee selects the winners. I recall from the book a store called Nordiska Kompaniet where one of the characters worked. The name is kinda catchy and stuck in my mind.
Fascinating run-through of the process! That’s a lot of silverware…I’m glad I don’t have to be on dishwashing duty post-awards ceremony…
Much of this I didn’t know. Very well laid out. Have a great day.
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Very, very interesting. Not too many women winners then! I remember being very excited years ago when my husband happened to be in Stockholm during the presentations. Not that he saw any of it!
About the Blogger comments, I believe there is a way of getting the link to go directly to your blog and not the OpenID profile. I have managed to get mine to go directly to my blog and bypass both the blogger profile and the openID profile. Meg at Dipping into the Blogpond has the instructions that I followed. And she was extremely helpful when I messed it up!
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Thanks for trying A.
The problem with that work around (I already knew of that one) is that it means I have to edit my template (themes) files, which:
1) I don’t think that one should be forced to do changes to the template code to get a thing like this work.
2) If I change template (which I plan to do more often than now) I have to make this changes again to the new template.
3) What happens if changes are done with how the OpenId work, will things screw up and I have to make other changes to the code snippet in the template file?
4) Read the security and spam issues they’re mentioning in several of the comments at the post.
“Basically, if someone can convince you to use your OpenID on their site, they can capture your login details if they’re sufficiently clever about it.”
“The big picture is that with Google jumping onto OpenID, it will become a huge target for spammers. Up until now, it wasn’t worth the trouble for spammers to setup their own authentication service. But if all you need is an OpenID to post a comment on a million blogs and not have it moderated, literally anybody can create one. No email verification necessary, no accountability.
I understand that it’s nice to have your blog URL visible in comments, and you’ve got a pretty clever solution. I’m just thinking ahead to when spam-through-openid becomes a problem (and it certainly will – only a matter of time). Your URL will probably get blocked from commenting at some point since it isn’t in any list of known and trusted openid providers.”
This can maybe be regarded as a very temporarily work around for some users, but I don’t recommend it.
…and I still refuse to use such a none-user friendly work around for something that should be easy and user friendly
What a great Noble Prize post Captain – very informative and readable!
I’ve seen a lot of it on TV (Yea, we get Swede Television in Norway you know
and it was a real nice and noble even.
I cant resist to add there is a Nobel Prize given in Oslo today too. You have red my post about it earlier:
http://www.terella.no/2007/10/12/nobel-peace-prize-to-al-gore-or-vint-cerf/
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My favorite book, fiction about Nobel prize was written by Erich Segal called Prizes. Excellent read!
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I saw some extrays on TV, but couldn’t see very much only Al Gor, this hall looks wonderful !
I wasn’t so aware of Nobel Prizes until I moved to Norway.
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Thanks for a great post about the Nobel Prizes. Very interesting.
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