I learned this today. The first ever Nobel Peace Prize was given to Henry Dunant in 1901. He was the man who founded the Red Cross.
The Nobel Prize was created through the will of Alfred Nobel. He was a chemist, engineer, and inventor. He invented 355 things during his lifetime. The most famous thing he invented was dynamite. He also invented ballistite, which is used in smokeless grenades. In 1894, he bought an iron and still mill and became an arms manufacturer. All of his inventions and businesses made him an extremely wealthy man.
In 1888, his brother Ludvig died. A French newspaper mistakenly thought that Alfred had died and wrote an obituary for him. The headline was, “The Merchant of Death is Dead”. Alfred Nobel was so shocked to see how he would be remembered that he decided to do something about it.
He rewrote his will and he said that he was going to leave 94% to establish a fund that would award five prizes to “those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to Mankind.”
His money was put into a trust and the Nobel Prize committee was formed. They were tasked with awarding a prize for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace every year.
In 1896, Nobel died, and his will was read. It took about a year before people would actually accept it. Then, once they had, the process started. First, they had to assemble a committee and come up with rules. Once they had done that, they accepted nominations. It took a while, as anything does when it is first starting out, but they made a list of candidates.
The first Nobel Prize in physics went to Wilhelm Rontgen for his discovery of X-rays.
The first Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff for discovering the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions.
The first Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Emil Adolf von Behring for his work on serum therapy, especially against diphtheria.
The first Nobel Prize in Literature went to Sully Prudhomme for his poetic composition.
And the first Nobel Peace Prize went to Jean Henry Dunant for his creation of the Red Cross and Frederic Passy for his lifelong work for international peace.
Henry Dunant started his road to creating the Red Cross when he witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino. He petitioned the governments of the world to create a humanitarian outfit that would care for wounded soldiers irrespective of which side they fought for. He used the inverted flag of Switzerland as his symbol: the Red Cross.
It seems natural that he should have won the first Nobel Peace Prize because the Red Cross is a huge aid organization, but it was not inevitable. The committee that he created in 1863 became huge, but Dunant was not a part of it. He focused all of his attention on building the Red Cross and his business went bankrupt. A lot of his friends lost money and Dunant was accused of deceptive practices in his bankruptcy and he was forced to resign as secretary of the Red Cross in 1867. He had no money, and he was often homeless and had to beg for food. He disappeared and his name disappeared. Nobody knew who he was or what he had done.
He moved to Heiden in Switzerland and lived in a hospice. It was there that he met a young teacher called Wilhelm Sonderegger and his wife Susanna. They persuaded Dunant to write his life story. In 1895, almost 30 years after he had been forced to leave the Red Cross, an editor of a German newspaper heard about him and wrote an article. This article was picked up by other papers and Dunant was suddenly back in the public eye.
Recognition for the great thing he had done followed and he was awarded the first Nobel Peace Price in 1901. The Red Cross itself won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1917 for its work during World War 1.
Dunant shared the prize with Frederic Passy, the founder of the Peace League. Some members of the committee actually, and bizarrely to my mind, argued that Dunant shouldn’t win the prize because the Red Cross had made war more attractive and imaginable by eliminating some of the suffering. Still, sanity prevailed, and Dunant won. His prize money was put out of the reach of his creditors who were still following him 30 years later, but he didn’t spend any of it and gave it to charity when he died.
So, Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, was one of the first recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. The prize had been started by Alfred Nobel who bequeathed all of his money to start it because he was afraid of what people would think of him after he died. He was criticized for doing it purely to affect his reputation, but is that a bad thing? If you do a good thing for bad reasons, it is still a good thing. And it worked. Very few people remember him as the inventor of dynamite. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Dunant
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1901/dunant/facts/
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1901/passy/facts/
https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-nobel-prizes-awarded