On 10 December this year the Nobel Foundation will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the award of the first Nobel prizes. As the winners of this year’s physics prize – Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman – gather in Stockholm and Oslo, along with the rest of the 2001 prize winners and numerous laureates from previous years who are taking part in the celebrations, it is easy to forget that they represent only the most visible part of the Nobel institution. Since only a maximum of three people can share each prize, one can count scores of unlucky candidates who naturally will not have been invited.

That the Nobel prizes tower above all other prizes in science and medicine is, in large part, due to their long history. The prizes were not even ten years old when one American journalist wrote: “The history of modern science might be written without going outside the names of the Nobel prizes for beneficent discoveries in physics, chemistry and medicine.” One may disagree with this assessment – arguing, for instance, that the physics prizes of the past century have been restricted to atomic and nuclear physics, omitting most of geophysics, astrophysics and mathematical physics. Nevertheless, one can fairly say that most of the great physicists of the past century have been rewarded with a Nobel prize.

In 1974 the Nobel Foundation changed its statutes so that material in the Nobel archives – those of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for the prizes in physics and chemistry – would become available to historians of science 50 years after an award was made. This rule means that records are released after a full 50 years have elapsed. Archive material related to the 1951 prizes, for example, will be made available on 1 January 2002.

The change in the statutes has, of course, made it possible for historians of science to study how specific individuals won prizes. But these studies have in fact gone far beyond the prize winners themselves. Historians have also looked at what might be termed the “Nobel population”, that is all those – prize winners, nominators and unlucky candidates alike – who have taken part in the prize-awarding process.

For the purposes of this article, we shall include both physicists and chemists as members of our “Nobel population”. The reason is that as far as the Nobel committees were concerned, what is usually considered physics – radioactivity, for instance – sometimes became chemistry. After all, the 1908 and 1935 chemistry prizes were awarded to Ernest Rutherford and to Frédéric Joliot and Irène Joliot-Curie, respectively, for their work in this field.

Male, white and university based

The backbone of the Nobel population consists of those people who were nominated for the prizes in physics, chemistry – or sometimes in both disciplines – by specially invited nominators. A list of who can make nominations is given below. Between 1901 and 1950, some 598 individuals were proposed, 104 of whom – roughly one in six – went on to win a prize. Who were these candidates?

One thing is clear. They were predominantly (99%) male. There were just eight women candidates, of whom three became prize winners. They were Marie Curie, who was awarded the physics prize in 1903 and the chemistry prize in 1911, Irène Joliot-Curie (chemistry 1935) and Dorothy Hodgkin (chemistry 1964).

Although there were few women candidates, they received proportionately more nominations (an average of ten per candidate) than the men (seven per candidate). This disparity was mainly due to the large number of nominations for the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner, who never actually won a prize. (She received a total of 20 nominations for the physics prize and 21 in chemistry – over half of those garnered by all women candidates between 1901 and 1950.) Having been forced to flee Nazi Germany shortly before the discovery of nuclear fission in December 1938, her share in the finding was discounted by the Nobel committees for physics and chemistry, and in 1945 it was Otto Hahn alone who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The other unlucky women candidates were the German chemist Ida Noddack, the British-American mathematician and biochemist Dorothy Wrinch, and the Austrian atomic physicists Marietta Blau and Hertha Wambacher.

Candidates between 1901 and 1950 also came from a very narrow range of countries. Of the 2416 nominations in physics, three-quarters were for scientists from only four nations: Germany (25%), the US (21%), France (16%) and Britain (13%). Germany in particular did very well early on (see figure). The rest were mainly distributed among other European countries, notably Scandinavia, eastern Europe, the Netherlands and Italy. Candidates from other continents – Latin America (Peru and Brazil) or Asia (India and Japan) – accounted for less than 2% of nominations. Africa was completely absent from the Nobel map.

The vast majority of nominations in physics (67%) were for candidates based in university teaching departments and laboratories. The second largest group of nominees (10%) worked in institutes of technology – anything from technical schools to universities of technology. A few nominees worked in independent research institutes and government labs, such as James Dewar of the Royal Institution in London and Friedrich Kohlrausch of the German Bureau of Standards, although neither won a prize. Industrial physicists were also few and far between. Guglielmo Marconi, who shared the 1909 physics prize for his development of wireless telegraphy, was a rare example. The rest of the nominees included physicists such as Oliver Heaviside and William Crookes who had “no affiliation” and worked in laboratories that they had set up at home – a practice that was not uncommon at the start of the 20th century.

So how representative of their disciplines were the candidates who were nominated for the physics and chemistry prizes? The answer depends on the period in question. It has been estimated, for example, that of the 1000 or so physicists who were active in Europe and North America in the early part of the 20th century, between a quarter and a third probably figured either as candidates or as nominators for the physics prize. Indeed, the Nobel institution before the First World War came closest to embodying the ideal of an “international republic of science”.

The rise of fascism and the Second World War, however, led to the splitting of international science into “national” sciences. A direct result of Hitler’s coming to power was the break between nationalist Germany and the internationalist Nobel institution. Enraged by the awarding of the 1936 Nobel Peace Prize to the left-wing, anti-fascist pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, Hitler passed a law that prohibited German citizens from receiving a Nobel prize. Through a form of self-censorship, German scientists applied the law to nominations as well. Between 1937 and 1945, therefore, the only German scientists to be nominated were those put forward by researchers from other countries.

The decline of Germany as a major scientific player following the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 is clearly revealed by data from the Nobel archives (see figure). The data also show the spectacular growth of the US as a significant scientific force. In the early 1900s American physicists received only a tiny fraction of the nominations garnered by their colleagues in Germany, France and Britain. But by the end of the Second World War, they were receiving more nominations than physicists from these three countries put together. This was just the start of US hegemony within the Nobel institution. In the past ten years, for example, 15 out of the 24 physicists who have either won or shared the physics prize have been from the US.

Nominators for prizes in physics and chemistry

1 Swedish and foreign members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

2 Members of the Nobel committees for physics and chemistry.

3 Scientists who have been awarded a Nobel prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

4 Permanent and assistant professors in physics and chemistry at universities and institutes of technology in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway, as well as the Karolinska Institutet – the medical faculty of the University of Stockholm.

5 Holders of corresponding chairs in at least six universities or university colleges selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with a view to ensuring the appropriate distribution over the different countries and their seats of learning.

6 Other scientists from whom the academy may see fit to invite proposals.

Nominators in the categories 1 – 4 have permanent nominating rights. Those in categories 5 and 6 are invited in a given year. More than 500 individuals were invited to nominate for the physics and chemistry prizes of 1950. Nowadays they probably number in their thousands. See the Nobel Web site for more details.

Winners and losers

Since the Nobel population is made up of both winners and losers in the Nobel sweepstakes, we can examine the differences between the winning and the non-winning candidates. In total there were 278 candidates for the physics prize between 1901 and 1950, of whom some 55 – or about one in five – were successful (including a few who were awarded the chemistry prize). The differences between winning and losing are, of course, much more subtle than the quantitative data alone suggest. In particular, much depended on the scientific merits of the candidates and the Nobel committees’ appraisal of their abilities.

There are also other, more nebulous, considerations, such as the committee members’ stance toward theoretical, rather than experimental, physics. It is significant that the earlier resistance to the rewarding of theorists was broken after the First World War when Carl Wilhelm Oseen – a theoretical physicist at Uppsala University in Sweden – was elected to the Nobel Committee for Physics. The first out-and-out theoretical physicist to be rewarded was Max Planck, who won the 1918 physics prize for his development of quantum theory. Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr followed three years later. Such changes in committee policy can only be appreciated through a close study of the documents in the Nobel archives. Also vital is a knowledge of the scientific interests of the five Swedish scientists who then – as now – make up the committee.

Although a quantitative analysis of the Nobel population reveals how many nominations each physicist received, nominations for the Nobel prize should not be likened to “votes”. As the statutes point out, just one nomination is sufficient to be considered for a prize. A large number of nominations does not necessarily imply a greater chance of winning. For example, the Swedish inventor Nils Dalén was awarded the physics prize in 1912 for his development of the automatic light buoy even though he had received just one nomination that year and none at all before then. Dalén was an extreme case, however, since most other candidates – winners and losers – received many nominations over several years.

The Nobel archives can also be used to draw up a “hit parade” of the 40 most nominated physicists between 1901 and 1950 (see table). It contains 22 candidates who received a physics prize, three who won a chemistry prize (although their nominations for the physics prize were more numerous) and 15 who failed to win a prize of any kind.

The non-winners on the list illustrate the three major difficulties that faced all candidates. The first – and most common – difficulty was if a candidate worked in a field that had no representatives on the Nobel Committee for Physics. This was the case with the French mathematician and mathematical physicist Henri Poincaré, who received 51 nominations over the years yet never won a prize. It was also true for the Norwegian meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes (48 nominations and no prize), and the American astrophysicist George Ellery Hale (33 nominations without luck).

Another barrier was if the candidates’ achievements – although of a high scientific quality – prevented the committee from awarding the prize. In particular, the Nobel statutes state that prizes must be awarded for a specific discovery, rather than for a life’s work. This obstacle is illustrated by the “missing prizes” for good “all-round” physicists such as Arnold Sommerfeld (81 nominations), Robert Williams Wood (38) and Paul Langevin (25). Indeed, Sommerfeld has the dubious honour of being the most nominated physicist in the period 1901 – 50 never to win a prize.

The final challenge in winning a prize is for nominators to decide how long to run a campaign for a particular candidate. It seems that candidates generally did better if their nominators waged a major voting “offensive”, rather than a long, drawn-out “war of attrition”. This is clearly shown by the fact that less than five years elapsed between first nomination and prize for James Chadwick, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Ernest Lawrence and Erwin Schrödinger. And even though Planck and Einstein had to wait 12 years for their prizes – because the physics committee regarded quantum physics and relativity with scepticism – the build-up of their support also resembles a victorious offensive. In contrast, there were lengthy and ultimately futile campaigns for non-winners such as Paul Langevin (36 years between first and last nominations), Aimé Cotton (34 years), Arnold Sommerfeld (33) and Robert Williams Wood (24).

The top 40 most nominated physicists 1901 – 1950

Rank and name	Number of nom’s	Years nom’ed	Prize and year of award	Working nationality
1 Otto Stern	81	1925 – 1944	Physics [1]1943	American
2 Arnold Sommerfeld [7]	81	1917 – 1950		German
3 Max Planck	74	1907 – 1919	Physics [2] 1918	German
4 Albert Einstein	62	1910 – 1922	Physics [3] 1921	German
5 Henri Poincaré	51	1904 – 1912		French
6 Vilhelm Bjerknes	48	1923 – 1945		Norwegian
7 Friedrich Paschen	45	1914 – 1933		German
8 Clinton Joseph Davisson	44	1929 – 1937	Physics 1937	American
9 Percy Williams Bridgman	41	1919 – 1946	Physics 1946	American
10 Erwin Schrödinger	41	1928 – 1933	Physics 1933	Austrian
11 Augosto Righi	40	1905 – 1920		Italian
12 Robert Williams Wood	38	1926 – 1950		American
13 Jean Perrin	36	1913 – 1926	Physics 1926	French
14 Enrico Fermi	35	1935 – 1939	Physics 1938	Italian
15 Carl David Anderson	34	1934 – 1950	Physics [4] 1936	American
16 George Ellery Hale	33	1909 – 1934		American
17 Peter Debye	31	1916 – 1936	Chemistry 1936	German
18 Walter Gerlach	30	1925 – 1944		German
19 Werner Heisenberg	29	1928 – 1933	Physics [5] 1932	German
20 Wolfgang Pauli	28	1933 – 1946	Physics 1945	Swiss
21 Aimé Cotton	26	1915 – 1949		French
22 Lester Halbert Germer	26	1929 – 1937		American
23 Paul Langevin	25	1910 – 1946		French
24 Gabriel Lippmann	23	1901 – 1908	Physics 1908	French
25 Pierre Weiss	23	1916 – 1937		French
26 Patrick Blackett	21	1935 – 1949	Physics 1948	British
27 James Chadwick	21	1934 – 1935	Physics 1935	British
28 Valdemar Poulsen	21	1909 – 1923		Danish
29 Isidor Isaac Rabi	21	1939 – 1945	Physics 1944	American
30 Joseph John Thomson	20	1902 – 1906	Physics 1906	British
31 Lise Meitner	20	1937 – 1949		German/ Swedish
32 Ernest Rutherford	20	1907 – 1937	Chemistry [6] 1908	British
33 Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes	20	1909 – 1913	Physics 1913	Dutch
34 Niels Bohr	20	1917 – 1922	Physics 1922	Danish
35 John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh)	20	1902 – 1904	Physics 1904	British
36 Hideki Yukawa	20	1940 – 1949	Physics 1949	Japanese
37 Robert Millikan	17	1916 – 1923	Physics 1923	American
38 Ernest Orlando Lawrence	17	1938 – 1940	Physics 1939	American
39 Wander Johannes de Haas	16	1935 – 1945		Dutch
40 Irène Joliot-Curie	16	1934 – 1935	Chemistry 1935	French

Notes
1. Prize awarded 1944.
2. Prize awarded 1919.
3. Prize awarded 1922.
4. Anderson also received 14 nominations for a second physics prize.
5. Prize awarded 1933.
6. Rutherford also received eight nominations for a second prize, this time in physics.
7. Arnold Sommerfeld must be the unluckiest man in physics. Best known for modifying Niels Bohr’s atomic model to include elliptical (rather than circular) electron orbits, he also has the dubious honour of being the most-nominated physicist in the period 1901 – 1950 never to win a Nobel prize. He received a total of 81 nominations between 1917 and 1950 but was never once successful. He also came to an untimely death in 1951 after being run down by a car.

Listed above are the 40 physicists who received the most nominations between 1901 and 1950, along with the number of nominations and the years in which they were nominated for the first and last time. Also included is the year in which their prize (if any) was won, the prize that they were awarded and their “working nationality”. This definition refers to the country of the institution with which the candidate was associated at the time of nomination. For those scientists who moved around a lot – as was common in the 1930s and 1940s – they are assumed to have retained their original nationality for up to seven years. If they stayed in a particular country for eight or more years, they are deemed to have acquired the nationality of their new homeland retroactively from the time of arrival.

Nationalism and internationalism in the nominations

Anyone who submits a nomination for a Nobel prize should, in principle, follow the dictum in Nobel’s will that “no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidate”. In practice, however, the nationality of a candidate has always played a major role in two key ways. The first has been the tendency for nominators to propose candidates from their own country – what I term “own-country” nominations. The other is for the constellation of nominations from “own” or “other” countries for a particular candidate to influence the decision over the award of a prize. I shall discuss each of these in turn.

If we restrict our analysis to the four major scientific powers of Germany, France, Britain and the US – who together accounted for three-quarters of nominations and a third of nominators between 1901 and 1950 – we find major differences in the level of participation of physicists from these countries in the nominating process. German physicists were the most active, putting forward 34% of the total nominations. The Americans were second with 28%, followed by France (21%) and Britain (17%). These variations cannot be traced to differences in the number of invitations to nominate sent to each country – at least as far as France, Britain and the US are concerned. Only Germany had a slight upper hand in the nominating game, mainly because it already had more laureates than the other three nations. The differences are more to do with the attitudes of the scientists in each country to the act of nominating itself, and tell us something about the scientific culture within each country.

Just over half (51%) of the nominators in the four countries taken together favoured their compatriots, although their propensity to do so varied for each country and also with time. Between 1901 and 1950, the French were the most chauvinistic, with some 60% of nominations going to other French scientists. The British were the fairest, with just 35% of nominations for their fellow countrymen and women. The Germans and the Americans fell between these extremes with 53% and 49%, respectively.

However, all four countries saw an upsurge in own-country nominations during and after the two world wars. This trend was particularly strong during the Second World War in France, Britain and the US, and was probably due as much to patriotism as it was to the country’s scientists being isolated from colleagues abroad. The absence of German nominators from 1937 to 1945 that resulted from Hitler’s vendetta against the Nobel institution means, of course, that there are no corresponding figures for Germany during this period.

The differences between the French and British attitudes to nomination are, however, more complex than they may first appear. For example, when it was discovered that no British scientist or author had been included among the prize winners in 1901, an acrimonious debate broke out in the letters page of The Times. Some correspondents maintained that the absence of a centralized body to co-ordinate the British nomination process was a disadvantage – particularly against France where, it was thought, the highly organized system of academies performed this function. But while it is true that many of the campaigns for French candidates centred on the Academy of Sciences in Paris, it is doubtful if they or the academy were well served by this approach. Indeed, it is significant that there are no unsuccessful British candidates on the physics top 40 but four from France: Poincaré, Cotton, Langevin and Weiss.

The differences in the French and British nomination strategies are shown most clearly in the area that matters the most – the Nobel prizes actually won. As we have seen, French nominators were more active than their British colleagues. Largely as a result of the high proportion of French “own-country” nominations, French candidates received almost a third more nominations than British candidates. This numerical advantage did not, however, make much difference. In physics, for example, France won just seven prizes between 1901 and 1950, compared with 13 for Britain, 12 for the US and 10 for Germany.

There are, of course, many other reasons for British success in terms of the number of Nobel prizes actually won. These can only be discussed in very general terms, for the circumstances and opportunities that would produce a prize were, if not fortuitous, often unique to a particular prize. However, the fact that British candidates, despite the laid-back attitudes of British nominators, attracted influential support – especially from other countries – was certainly important. So was the breadth, intensity and originality of British research in atomic and nuclear physics, the areas favoured by the Nobel Committee for Physics during the first half of the 20th century. The committee members also had much stronger ties with British science – probably on a par with those that bound them to Germany – than they did with their colleagues in France, whose language and scientific culture often felt alien to them. In the period after the Second World War, committee members’ affinities to Germany, and to some extent to Britain, were largely replaced by American ones.

The mainly nationalist predilections of the nominators did not, however, actually dictate the prize decisions. Consciously or unconsciously, the prize committees used their prerogative as final arbiter to even out the decisions in favour of internationalism. A crude measure of this mechanism in action can be obtained by comparing the nominations received by winners and non-winners for both physics and chemistry between 1901 and 1933. Whereas the prize winners received 83% of their nominations from countries other than their own, non-winners received half as many nominations (43%) from foreign scientists. When limited to the major powers, the corresponding figures are 53% for the winners and 40% for the non-winners. These figures probably depend as much on the desire of the prize givers to support internationalism in science as they did on the fact that candidates who enjoyed such support received more “votes” than those whose reputations were restricted to home turf. “Going international” proved to be a real advantage in the Nobel sweepstakes.

The archives from 1951: pure speculation

After the slump in nominations caused by the Second World War, the annual number of nominations in physics rapidly climbed back its pre-war level of between 50 and 75. As the archives for the 1950s and 1960s open up, we can expect the Nobel population to grow at an even faster rate – and eventually number several hundred per year.

Because the Nobel population offers so many opportunities for studies not just of the Nobel institution but of the international physics community more generally, it will remain a valuable resource to historians of science long after the hullabaloo surrounding the Nobel centenary has subsided. Such studies will be enriched by the data concerning publications and citation rates that started to ensnare the scientific community – and especially its financial backers – in the 1950s and beyond. All this is for the good – provided that researchers remain acutely aware of the limitations in these kinds of quantitative data. Nevertheless, historical studies based on the Nobel archives are the closest we will ever get to knowing how prize winners are selected. Everything else is pure speculation.