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.
M. and Mme. Joseph Prudhomme M. and Mme. Joseph Prudhomme Monsieur and Madame Prudhomme were a pair of French caricature characters of the 19th century, created by Henry Monnier. They were a bourgeois couple. Monsieur Prudhomme first appeared in 1830 in the first version of the "Scènes de province", then in the play "Grandeur et décadence de M. Joseph Prudhomme" (1852) then in two volumes of collected drawings "Mémoires de Monsieur Joseph Prudhomme" (1857), then in "Monsieur Prudhomme chef de brigands" (1860). Plump, foolish, conformist and sententious, Joseph was called by Honoré de Balzac “l’illustre type des bourgeois de Paris” (the classic example of the