Technikatörténeti szemle 25. (2001-02)
Papers of the Third International Conference on the History of Chemistry and Chemical Industry (Budapest, 2–4 July, 1999) – First Part - Tansjö, Levi: Mendelejev and the Nobel Prize in chemistry
dealing with the atoms of matter. But it wasn't that easy to get rid of the electron. Svante Arrhenius had in 1887 created the electrolytic dissociation-theory according to which electrolytes like sodium chloride are dissociated into ions in water. The chloride-ion could of course be looked upon as a compound of a chlorine atom and an electron, but what could the sodium ion be if not a sodium atom that has lost an electron. By that the idea began to grow that atoms have a structure of their own and that the electron is a constituent in all of them. That idea took in the first half of the 20 th century mankind into a quite new epoch. Marie Curie went after Becquerel's discovery of the uranium radiation through the Periodic Table of the elements and found that torium just as uranium gave ionized rays. She and her husband Pierre Curie then studied this type of radiation intensively and in 1898 they discovered two new, very as they now said "radioactive" elements, which they named polonium and radium. On the 27 th of November 1895, a few weeks after Rontgen's discovery of X-rays, the Swedish chemist and industrialist Alfred Nobel signed his will in San Remo in Italy. As executors of the will he took the two engineers Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Liljeqvist. Sohlman was only 26 years old and none of them had any experience in their task but they understood to appoint a lawyer in Stockholm, Carl Lindhagen, as attorney to Nobel's huge estate. Under leadership of Lindhagen the three men skilfully solved the many problems they had to face. Sohlman succesfully sold Nobel's houses and other properties in Paris, San Remo and other cities but to get the money delivered to Sweden was problematic. There was for a long time a threat pending that the will would be declared invalid by a French court. The problem was delicate since Nobel after he at the age of nine had moved with his mother and two brothers to Russia never had been a citizen in any country. And who said that the Nobel relatives in Russia and Sweden would be satisfied with only one million Swedish crowns which they all together would get In according to the will? The Nobel fortune, however, was delivered to Sweden and in the early 1898 Nobel's relatives declared that they accepted the will and would not raise any lawsuit against it. Nobel's fortune was worth about 33 million Swedish crowns. In his will Nobel directed that what was left of his fortune after fulfilling some legacies, or a little more than 30 million crowns, should be invested in safe securities to constitute a fund, the interest of which annually should be distributed in the form of prizes to those persons who "shall have contributed most materially to benefit mankind during the year immediately preceding". There should be one prize in physics and one in chemistry, both of them awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, one prize for physiological or medical works awarded by the Caroline Medical Institute in Stockholm, one prize for literature awarded by the Swedish Academy and one for peace, awarded by a Committee of five persons, elected by the Norwegian parlament, Stortinget. It was Nobel's expressed desire that no consideration should be taken to the nationality of the candidates.
