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 des erreurs, des fautes et des crimes commis pendant la Révolution française" (6 volumes), work seized by the police. Then, from June–October 1799, he published 105 issues of a daily newspaper, "le Voyageur". In 1799, Prudhomme became director of the hospitals of Paris, but continued to work as a printer, publisher, and writer-compiler. Hostile to the First French Empire, he welcomed the Bourbon Restoration and in 1825 published "L’Europe tourmentée par la Révolution de France, ébranlée par dix-huit années de promenades meurtrières de Napoléon Bonaparte", in two volumes. In the year of his death he published a two-volume dictionary of