The first Nobel Prize ceremony was held in 1901.
The inaugural prizes were awarded on 10 December 1901, the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. Nobel, a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, and industrialist, had directed in his 1895 will that most of his fortune should fund prizes for people whose work benefited humanity.
The original prize fields were Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. The ceremonies for the first four fields took place in Stockholm, Sweden, while the Peace Prize was presented in Kristiania, now Oslo, Norway. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Karolinska Institute, and the Swedish Academy helped administer the relevant awards.
The economics prize was added much later, in 1969, and is officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. It was not part of Nobel’s original will, so references to six original Nobel categories are inaccurate.