Nobel Prize Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-rays and Philipp Lenard's work on cathode rays. The Academy of Sciences selected Röntgen for the prize. In the last decades of the 19th century, many chemists had made significant contributions. 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 20 nominations, eleven of them for Jacobus van 't Hoff. Van 't Hoff was awarded the prize for his contributions in chemical thermodynamics. The Swedish Academy chose the poet Sully Prudhomme for the first Nobel Prize in Literature.
Louis-Marie Prudhomme Louis-Marie Prudhomme Louis-Marie Prudhomme, (1752, Lyon, France - April 20, 1830, Paris, France) was a French journalist and historian. A bookseller in Lyon, then in Paris, Prudhomme settled in Meaux as a bookbinder. He returned in Paris, and was stopped several times for his writings: between 1787 and 1789, he is thought to have written about 1,500 lampoons. Among them, <nowiki>"</nowiki>"Résumé général, ou Extrait des cahiers de pouvoirs, instructions, demandes ou doléances remis par divers bailliages, sénéchaussées et pays d’État du royaume", written in collaboration with Laurent de Mezières and Jean Rousseau () and published in three volumes in 1789,