Nobel’s will, though clear enough, was technically defective. Some members of his family tried to break it for ostensibly high-minded reasons and had to be bought off by the executors. Perhaps as a cover for this, the family insisted on further restrictions upon the terms of award. The awarding bodies themselves, once the prize-giving got under way, inevitably built up a body of common-law interpretations of the mandate that Nobel and his relatives had given.

The result has been that severe limitations have diminished the quality and scope of the Nobel Prizes. Three of the limitations were imposed by Nobel himself: that literature had to be “idealistic” to qualify; that science meant a discovery, invention, or improvement, with the narrow definition of “discovery” implied by his coupling it with the other terms; that all prizes should be for the work of the preceding year. In practice, the awarding bodies loosened up the last requirement by making the award for “recent” contributions, or for contributions of which the full significance had only recently been grasped. In itself, this policy was a great gain for flexibility; but combined with another perfectly sensible rule, it lent itself to grave injustices. The scientific juries early saw the wisdom of waiting till discoveries were proved to be sound. Yet by the time a discovery was thoroughly authenticated, it might have lost the magical attribute of being “recent” and be out of the running unless newly appreciated at some later date. But this meant that an absolutely fundamental discovery which had gone on slowly but surely building itself into the very fabric of modern science might never experience any sensational “re-discovery” or sudden burst of new relevance, because it was relevant everywhere and all the time.

Some of the greatest discoveries fell between the stools of soundness and recency. As a corollary to this, the scientific juries have consistently enforced the principle that a man cannot accumulate “credit” towards a Nobel Prize by making a number of unrelated discoveries. If any one of them is important enough, it can be rewarded on its merits, but a really notable discovery that has been passed over will do nothing to eke out the claims of another contribution by the same man. The system is loaded against the versatile or ranging intellect.

Two other major restrictions were imposed by Nobel’s relatives: that no prize should be shared by more than three persons, and that no prize should be conferred upon a dead man unless he had been recommended for the award before his death.

Apart from these standing rules, the history of the prizes has been affected by two specific problems. In the first dozen years or so, the awarding bodies were confronted with a backlog of famous writers, peace agitators, and scientists who had made their names in the nineteenth century but lived on into the twentieth in a state of some vitality and productivity. Here, of course, the rule about recency was a big help in enabling the juries to set certain legendary figures gently aside. Even so, both the juries and the general public boggled at discarding the giants who had been at the height of their powers as late as 1885 or 1890. The result was that there were far too many towering senior figures still in the running for all of them to be squeezed into the first dozen years, even if there had been any way to space them out in the order of their more or less impending deaths.