The first Nobel Prize ceremony is held…

The first Nobel Prize ceremony is held in Stockholm on  December 10, 1901, the fifth anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the  Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist most famously known for the invention of dynamite.

Nobel had  bequeathed all of his "remaining realizable assets" to be used to establish five separate prizes that, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to Mankind."

Once the Nobel Foundation and its guidelines were in place, the Nobel Committees began collecting nominations for the inaugural prizes, which become known as "Nobel Prizes."

Subsequently, they sent a list of preliminary candidates to the prize-awarding institutions.

The Nobel Committee's Physics Prize shortlist cited Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-rays and Philipp Lenard's work on cathode rays.

The Academy of Sciences selected Röntgen for the prize.

Many chemists had made significant contributions in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Thus, with the Chemistry Prize, the academy "was chiefly faced with merely deciding the order in which these scientists should be awarded the prize".

The academy received twenty nominations, eleven of them for Jacobus van 't Hoff, who is awarded the prize for his contributions in chemical thermodynamics. 

The Swedish Academy chooses the poet Sully Prudhomme for the first Nobel Prize in Literature.

A group including forty-two Swedish writers, artists, and literary critics protested against this decision, having expected Leo Tolstoy to be awarded.

The first Physiology or Medicine Prize goes to the German physiologist and microbiologist Emil von Behring.

During the 1890s, von Behring developed an antitoxin to treat diphtheria, which until then was causing thousands of deaths each year. 

The first Nobel Peace Prize goes to the Swiss Jean Henri Dunant for his role in founding the International Red Cross Movement and initiating the Geneva Convention, and jointly given to French pacifist Frédéric Passy, founder of the Peace League and active with Dunant in the Alliance for Order and Civilization.