Achievement

I’ve just finished reading Geraint Thomas ‘According to G: The Autobiography’. I’m half way through Hunter Davies’s biography of George Stephenson. I love the radio programmes The Life Scientific by Jim Al-Khalili and Desert Island Discs.

They are a few of the things that came to mind immediately I started to think of achievements. Everyone else will have very different answers if asked to name what they admire or even just consider is an achievement. There will be thousands, millions of choices.

So, is there any sort of judgement as to what may actually be an objective sort of measurement of an achievement. I was tempted to go for the Guinness Book of Records but does cycling backward with a violin count? That was by Christian Adam. He managed to cycle 37 miles (60km) in five hours and nine minutes. That feels more like an accomplishment. And a bit silly.

I eventually decided that a real test of an achievement is to be awarded a Nobel Prize. It also gave me the chance to look up the facts about the organisation behind the prize as I know little about it.

a Nobel medal

When the Swedish businessman Alfred Nobel passed away in 1896, he left behind what was then one of the world’s largest private fortunes. In his last will Nobel declared that the whole of his remaining fortune was to be invested in safe securities and should constitute a fund "the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind"

The will specified in which fields the prizes should be awarded – physics, chemistry, medicine or physiology, literature and peace – and which criteria the respective prize committees should apply when choosing their prize recipients. According to the will the Nobel Peace Prize was to be awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.”

Alfred Nobel’s will also declared that the Nobel Peace Prize was to be awarded by a committee of five persons selected by the Norwegian Storting (parliament). The Storting accepted the assignment in April 1897, and the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Storting was set up in August of the same year. Oddly enough no one seems to know why Norway.

Alfred Nobel

The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901.

Physics: Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen
“in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him”

Chemistry:Jacobus H. van 't Hoff
“in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions”

Physiology or Medicine: Emil von Behring 

“for his work on serum therapy, especially its application against diphtheria, by which he has opened a new road in the domain of medical science and thereby placed in the hands of the physician a victorious weapon against illness and deaths”

Literature: Sully Prudhomme 

“in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect”

Peace: Henry Dunant 

“for his humanitarian efforts to help wounded soldiers and create international understanding”

Frédéric Passy
“for his lifelong work for international peace conferences, diplomacy and arbitration”.

Economics was added in 1969 but I’m not counting that.

Nobel Prize ceremony

So, between 1901 and 2025, the Nobel Prizes and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel were awarded 633 times to 1,026 people and organisations. With some receiving the Nobel Prize more than once, this makes a total of 990 individuals and 28 organisations. I’m not listing them all but what a sum total of human achievement.

Curie

A unit of radioactivity
corresponding to
3.7×1010 decays per second

named after Marie and Pierre
whose idea of a good night in
was stirring tons of black pitchblende

well it takes all sorts
and I suppose if you get
something named after you
it should take years of effort

the men in Stockholm
awarded them a prize
even if at first they
didn’t acknowledge women
especially women who charmed
with the blue light of radium
tucked in their pocket

his half life mourned
she doubled her own
finding a sort of art
on the bloody walls of X-Ray units
chiaroscuros of bone from the front lines.

First published in the French Literature Review, 2018

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.