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Saturday, December 4, 2010

The Nobel Prize: The Nobel Prize captures the world’s attention - SWEDEN.SE

The Nobel Prize: The Nobel Prize captures the world’s attention - SWEDEN.SE

Every year in early October, the entire world turns its gaze towards Sweden and Norway as the Nobel Laureates are announced in Stockholm and Oslo. Millions of people visit the Nobel Foundation’s website at this time.

The Nobel Prize has been awarded to people and organizations every year since 1901 (with a few exceptions such as during World War II) for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.

December 10 is Nobel Day. For the prizewinners, this is the climax of a week of speeches, conferences and receptions.

At the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm that day, the laureates in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature are awarded a medal from the Swedish king, a diploma and a cash award. The ceremony is followed by a gala banquet. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo the same day.

Prize in Economic Sciences

In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden‘s central bank) established the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The prize is based on a donation received by the Nobel Foundation in 1968 from Sveriges Riksbank on the occasion of the Bank‘s 300th anniversary.

The Prize in Economic Sciences is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences following the same principles as for the Nobel Prizes.

Legacy of Alfred Nobel

The Nobel Prize is the legacy of Sweden’s Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) and is awarded to “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” When he signed his last will in 1895, Nobel declared that the bulk of his estate should be converted into a fund and invested in safe securities.

The four institutions in Sweden and Norway (these two countries were united between 1814 and 1905) conferring the prizes were to be “the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Caroline Institute in Stockholm, the Academy in Stockholm” and “a committee of five persons to be elected by the Storting” (the Norwegian Parliament).

The Nobel Foundation

In 1900, the four institutions awarding the prizes agreed to create the Nobel Foundation, a private institution based on the will of Alfred Nobel. The Nobel Foundation would administer Alfred Nobel’s willed assets, totaling SEK 31 million (USD 4.7 million, EUR 3.3 million), make public announcements and arrange the prize ceremonies. The prize amount each year is based on the most recent return on investment. The capital is currently worth around SEK 3.1 billion (USD 472 million, EUR 337 million), which is almost twice the amount of the initial capital, controlling for inflation.

The Nobel Prize is currently SEK 10 million (USD 1.5 million, EUR 1.1 million) for each prize category, even when the prize is shared. There may be no more than three laureates for each prize category.

Organizations affiliated with the prize

The Nobel Prize is affiliated with several organizations and institutions entrusted with different tasks associated with the prize. The Nobel Foundation Rights Association was established in 1999 to meet the demands of an ever expanding global audience for quality information about the Nobel Laureates and their achievements via a number of platforms. The overall function of this non-profit association is to serve as an umbrella organization for the following four entities:

  • Nobel Web AB, which manages Nobelprize.org, the official website of the Nobel Prize. The new laureates are announced here in October each year.
  • Nobel Media AB, which manages and develops media rights for the Nobel Prize in connection with TV and web production, distribution, publishing and events.
  • The Nobel Museum AB, housed in Börshuset (the Old Stock Exchange Building) in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan—the Old Town—depicts a century of creativity through the Nobel Prize and the achievements of the Nobel Laureates.
  • The Nobel Peace Center Foundation, an institution whose aim is to present the Nobel Peace Prize and the work of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates. The Center is located at Rådhusplassen in Oslo, Norway.

The father of dynamite

Alfred Nobel was a chemist, engineer, inventor and entrepreneur. He was born on October 21, 1833, in Stockholm and died on December 10, 1896, in San Remo. He was devoted to the study of explosives, and his inventions include a blasting cap, dynamite and smokeless gunpowder. Nobel became famous across the world when the St. Gotthard Tunnel was built in 1882 and dynamite was used for the first time on such a large scale.

At the time of his death, Nobel held 355 patents in different countries. There were Nobel parent companies in some 20 countries and explosives of all kinds were being manufactured under his patents in some hundred factories all over the world.

Nobel lived and worked in many countries including Sweden, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy. He spoke five languages, had a passionate interest in literature and wrote poetry and drama. He could probably never have imagined how important his prize would become, or how much media attention the Nobel Laureates would generate after his death.

Alfred Nobel
Alfred Nobel. Photo: Nobelmuseet

One hundred and ten years of Nobel Prizes

Between 1901, when the first Nobel Prize was awarded, and 2010, 833 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to individuals and organizations. Together, they represent a major contribution to the cultural and scientific history of the world.

The first Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1901, went to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered X-rays, or Roentgen rays, which are used by health care providers every day around the world.

In 1905, the Austrian baroness and author Bertha von Suttner became the first female laureate, winning the Nobel Prize for Peace for her work with the peace movement in Germany and Austria.

Marie Skłodowska Curie received her second Nobel Prize in 1911 – this time in chemistry, for isolating and studying the new element radium. That discovery and her research in radioactivity, which led to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, constituted major contributions to medical science.

In 1912, the Swedish inventor and industrialist Gustaf Dalén won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions in lighthouse technology. In the early 1900s, he invented the AGA lighthouse, a type of automatic lighthouse that runs on acetylene gas. The supply of gas is controlled by a sun valve that shuts off the gas in daylight, and a revolving light apparatus that allows the beacon to flash by switching the gas supply off and on at brief, regular intervals. As a result of the two technologies, it was possible to reduce gas consumption by 90 percent compared to earlier constructions.

Innovations rewarded with the Nobel Prize.
1. The Nobel medal and a Nobel diploma. Photo: Scanpix
2. Penicillin. Photo: Shutterstock
3. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays. Photo: Shutterstock
4. The molecular structure of DNA – the double helix. Photo: Getty Images

In the fall of 1945, the Nobel Assembly of professors at Karolinska Institutet gathered to select a Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine. They chose three laureates, including Alexander Fleming, for their discovery of penicillin, which saved millions of lives in the second half of the 20th century.

In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. Gore has made a significant contribution in pushing climate change to the top of the international political agenda, primarily as a result of his book and film An Inconvenient Truth. Other Nobel Peace Prize Laureates who have influenced the world are Martin Luther King (1964), Nelson Mandela (1993) and Barack Obama (2009).

Nobel Laureates in Literature include Ernest Hemingway (1945), Toni Morrison (1993), Dario Fo (1997) and Harold Pinter (2005). Th e oldest laureate in literature is Doris Lessing, who won the prize in 2007 at the age of 87.

The Nobel Prize calendar

The Nobel Prize award ceremony in Stockholm is on December 10, the anniversary of alfred Nobel’s death. on the same day, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in the Norwegian capital of Oslo.

A number of other activities also take place during the same week, and receptions and dinners are held by the institutions awarding prizes, the Nobel Foundation and the Swedish royal family. The laureates deliver lectures and talk about their work, and panel discussions and other public appearances are usually arranged. Traditionally, the laureates and their spouses sit with the royal family at the Nobel Banquet. Th ey are also invited to a more intimate dinner at the Royal Palace, where they again meet the royal family. Visiting the Nobel Foundation is a great symbolic event.

The laureates receive a document confirming the prize amount and sign their names in a guestbook, thereby joining hundreds of their famous predecessors.

The Nobel Prize medal
© ® The Nobel Foundation

Nobel week in Stockholm

Dec 5–6
The laureates (except for the Nobel Peace laureate) arrive in Stockholm.

Dec 7–8
The laureates deliver their lectures. The institutions awarding the prizes arrange receptions and dinners.

Dec 9
The embassy of each laureate arranges a lunch. The Nobel Foundation holds a reception for all the laureates.

Dec 10
The Nobel Prize award ceremony is held in the Stockholm concert hall, where the King of Sweden presents each laureate with a Nobel Prize Medal and a Nobel Prize Diploma. a banquet is then held in the Stockholm city hall.

Dec 11
The festivities conclude with dinner at the royal Palace.

The Invention of Velcro - George de Mestral

The Invention of Velcro - George de Mestral
The Invention of VELCRO ® - George de Mestral

velcro

Microscopic view of VELCRO

One lovely summer day in 1948, a Swiss amateur-mountaineer and inventor decided to take his dog for a nature hike. The man and his faithful companion both returned home covered with burrs, the plant seed-sacs that cling to animal fur in order to travel to fertile new planting grounds. The man neglected his matted dog, and with a burning curiosity ran to his microscope and inspected one of the many burrs stuck to his pants. He saw all the small hooks that enabled the seed-bearing burr to cling so viciously to the tiny loops in the fabric of his pants. George de Mestral raised his head from the microscope and smiled thinking, "I will design a unique, two-sided fastener, one side with stiff hooks like the burrs and the other side with soft loops like the fabric of my pants. I will call my invention 'velcro' a combination of the word velour and crochet. It will rival the zipper in its ability to fasten."

Mestral's idea met with resistance and even laughter, but the inventor 'stuck' by his invention. Together with a weaver from a textile plant in France, Mestal perfected his hook and loop fastener. By trial and error, he realized that nylon when sewn under infrared light, formed tough hooks for the burr side of the fastener. This finished the design, patented in 1955. The inventor formed Velcro Industries to manufacture his invention. Mestral was selling over sixty million yards of Velcro per year. Today it is a multi-million dollar industry.

Not bad for an invention based on Mother Nature.



Today you cannot buy velcro because VELCRO is the registered trademark for the Velcro Industries' product. You can purchase all of the VELCRO brand hook and loop fasteners you need. This illustrates a problem inventors often face. Names can become generic terms. Many words used frequently in everyday language were once trademarks, for example: escalator, thermos, cellophane and nylon. All were once trademarked names and only the trademark owners could use the name with a product. When names become generic terms, the U.S. Courts can deny exclusive rights to the trademark

Who invented the Zip? - Yahoo! Answers India

Who invented the Zip? - Yahoo! Answers India

Who invented the Zip?

Whitcomb L. Judson 1893

In 1851, Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, developed what he called an automatic continuous clothing closure. It consisted of a series of clasps united by a connecting cord running or sliding upon ribs. Despite the potential of this ingenious breakthrough, the invention was never marketed.

Another inventor, Whitcomb L. Judson, came up with the idea of a slide fastener, which he patented in 1893. Judson's mechanism was an arrangement of hooks and eyes with a slide clasp that would connect them. After Judson displayed the new clasp lockers at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he obtained financial backing from Lewis Walker, and together they founded the Universal Fastener Company in 1894.

The first zippers were not much of an improvement over simpler buttons, and innovations came slowly over the next decade. Judson invented a zipper that would part completely (like the zippers found on today's jackets), and he discovered it was better to clamp the teeth directly onto a cloth tape that could be sewn into a garment, rather than have the teeth themselves sewn into the garment.

Zippers were still subject to popping open and sticking as late as 1906, when Otto Frederick Gideon Sundback joined Judson's company, then called the Automatic Hook and Eye Company. His patent for Plako in 1913 is considered to be the beginning of the modern zipper. His "Hookless Number One," a device in which jaws clamped down on beads, was quickly replaced by "Hookless Number Two", which was very similar to modern zippers. Nested, cup-shaped teeth formed the best zipper to date, and a machine that could stamp out the metal in one process made marketing the new fastener feasible.

The first zippers were introduced for use in World War I as fasteners for soldiers' money belts, flying suits, and life-vests. Because of war shortages, Sundback developed a new machine that used only about 40 percent of the metal required by older machines.

Zippers for the general public were not produced until the 1920s, when B. F. Goodrich requested some for use in its company galoshes. It was Goodrich's president, Bertram G. Work, who came up with the word zipper, but he wanted it to refer to the boots themselves, and not the device that fastened them, which he felt was more properly called a slide fastener.

The next change zippers underwent was also precipitated by a war—World War II. Zipper factories in Germany had been destroyed, and metal was scarce. A West German company, Opti-Werk GmbH, began research into new plastics, and this research resulted in numerous patents. J. R. Ruhrman and his associates were granted a German patent for developing a plastic ladder chain. Alden W. Hanson, in 1940, devised a method that allowed a plastic coil to be sewn into the zipper's cloth. This was followed by a notched plastic wire, developed independently by A. Gerbach and the firm William Prym-Wencie, that could actually be woven into the cloth.

After a slow start, it was not long before zipper sales soared. In 1917, 24,000 zippers were sold; in 1934, the number had risen to 60 million. Today zippers are easily produced and sold in the billions, for everything from blue jeans to sleeping bags.

The origin of the safety pin dates back to the Mycenaeans during the 14th century B.C. (Late Mycenaean III era). They are known as fibulae (singular fibula) and were used in the same manner as modern day safety pins. In fact, the very first fibulae of the 14th and 13th centuries B.C. looked remarkably like the safety pin. The origin of the fibulae is detailed in Chr. Blinkenberg's 1926 book Fibules grecques et orientales.

The safety pin was reinvented in July 1849 by American inventor Walter Hunt. The rights to the invention were sold for $400.