The Nobel Prize is a big deal. Want to know how I know? Because the Nobels are constantly invoked to signal the importance of other awards: The Turing Award is the "Nobel Prize of Computers," the Pritzker Prize is the "Nobel Prize of Architecture," and geography's "Nobel" is named after the guy who named America after Amerigo Vespucci. In mathematics, the Abel Award and the Fields Medal compete over which is more worthy of a Nobel comparison. The Nobel Prize might as well be called the "Nobel Prize of Comparisons for Other Awards." But how did it get this status?

Like the winner of a decathlon, the Nobel Prize stands out for its superiority on a combination of factors, beginning with its unique origins, says Harriet Zuckerman, sociology professor emerita of Columbia University and author of Scientific Elite, a history of the Nobel Prizes.

From the beginning, the Nobel Prize attracted public attention in a way that no other scientific award had.

It all began with a journalistic error. In 1888, a French newspaper mistakenly wrote that Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, had died. It was actually his brother, Ludvig, who had passed. But, in addition to lackluster fact checking, the paper commemorated the event with defamatory prose: "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday," it wrote. Nobel, it is said, was crushed by the idea that he'd be remembered as a "merchant of death." In order to regain control of his legacy, he willed his fortune to create an award that would recognize people who had made positive contributions to mankind.

Alfred Nobel was a celebrity, famous not only for his destructive invention, but also his reclusiveness. His will was made public a year after his death. The surprise announcement sparked a lot of interest from the outset, says Gustav Källstrand, senior curator at the Nobel Museum. "The fact that the inventor of dynamite had entrusted his money to create a peace prize, among other things, got a lot of people interested in the prize," he said.

The Nobel also attracted a lot of attention because of its huge cash prize. Scientists had been awarded medals, money, and even titles (How about a knighthood, Sir Isaac?) since at least the early Renaissance. But none of those awards came close to the Nobel's purse. In the early days, it was worth about 20 years of an academic salary, and was the prototypical "genius award" that allowed scholars to freely pursue their interests.

The prize money also gave the public a concrete way to comprehend what were (and still are) esoteric scientific discoveries, says Källstrand, who wrote a dissertation on how the Nobel became a bridge between science and society. The money showed the public that these prizes were important, he says, and that the people who won them must also be important and worth attention.

From its initial buzz through its gilded sheen, the prize eventually earned a reputation for selecting notable awardees. That prestige was earned due to the methodology established by the first Nobel panels of judges in 1901. Källstrand says that the members of the academy at that time were nervous to be the center of international attention. In 1897, after Nobel's will had been made public, the New York Times predicted that the prize would bring Sweden more trouble than glory, as the country would be resigned to the politics of picking favorites. In order to protect themselves from the ridicule of choosing the wrong people, the judges decided to solicit recommendations from the international scientific community.

That year, and every year following, a 5-member committee for each prize solicited and reviewed thousands of nominations. "It is very clear that they do careful research, and that they get an enormous amount of information from those who make the nomination," said Zuckerman. After rigorous culling, the committee handed the selection over to either the Swedish Royal Society of Sciences (for chemistry and physics), or the Karolinska Institute (for medicine), who make the final determination for the year's winner.

The system gives the committee a strong sense of what the scientific community thinks. Another strength is that the committee members are allowed to be as honest as they need to be in their selection criteria. "The evaluations are secret for 50 years, so they also can write what they really think without anyone finding out ," said Agneta Wallin Levinovitz, editor in chief of Nobelprize.org, the prize's official website.

Obviously, they don't always get it right. Even barring esoteric disciplinary quibbles, the committee has made mistakes that are pretty obvious in hindsight—like the time the medicine award went to the guy who invented lobotomies, or when the physics panel thought innovations in lighthouse design warranted science's highest award.

But, for the most part, Nobel-winning discoveries have been tentpoles in the scientific circus. "The very, very good choices they made early on lent a luster to the awards, so they were able to transfer to people whose reputations might not be so stellar," said Zuckerman. This is also due to the fact that the selection committees typically leave a long time after a discovery is made before awarding it a prize. The only limit is that the award must go to living recipients. This gives the committees the luxury of observing how influential a discovery actually is, and whether it is able to survive past any initial hype.

Zuckerman and Källstrand point out that there are, of course, other minor contributing factors. These include the scientific prize's association with the Nobels for peace and literature. And the fact that the prizes are awarded by Sweden and Norway, countries that have, for the most part, been on the periphery of scientific discovery.

"If you look at the factors that have made the prize important, I think that tradition has now replaced money, and tradition is based on decisions that have held up throughout the century," said Källstrand. But that doesn't mean that there is any less pressure on the Nobel committee to select worthy winners. "In the past, you had committee members who gave Einstein and Heisenberg the prizes. Today, they have to hold up that responsibility to give away the prize to equally deserving people," said Källstrand.