Miss World 2003, Ireland's Rosanna Davison (L) receives a hug and a kiss from her father, singer Chris de Burgh, after arriving back home at Dublin Airport December 11, 2003. Davison, 19, won the Miss World title during the competition held on China's tropical island of Hainan.

PHOTO - REUTERS

STOCKHOLM - The Nobel prizes for medicine, chemistry, physics, economics, literature and peace, awarded in Stockholm and Oslo last Wednesday, are world-famous accolades. But few people know about their mishap-ridden history.

The prizes originate in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel and have been awarded since 1901, except for a few years around World War One and World War Two. Nobel, born in 1833, is also famous for his invention of dynamite. But it is less well known that his younger brother Emil and four other people died in 1864 when a laboratory blew up during an experiment with the explosive.

More than a tenth of the capital of the Nobel Foundation, which writes a check now worth 10 million crowns ($1.37 million) for each prize, originated in an oil discovery made by Alfred Nobel's older brother Robert in Azerbaijan in 1873. The Nobel Brothers' Oil Producing Company was established in1879 and became the largest oil producer in the region with an output of more than 30 million barrels per year by 1913.

The first Nobel prizes in 1901 were worth 150,000 Swedish crowns each. This year's prizes are worth two thirds more in dollar terms than the centenary Nobels in 2001 due to the combined impact of an increase in the nominal value of the prizes and the dollar's steep fall.

Nobel laureates and their companions -- this year each winner can bring 16 friends or relatives -- stay at Grand Hotel on the waterfront in downtown Stockholm. Concierge Leif Hjorter says the atmosphere is usually friendly but excited. „For some people it is the biggest event in their lives. It has happened that prize winners have been so nervous that they have left the hotel without their wives when going to the ceremony," he told Reuters. Nobel prizes come with medals engraved with the laureate's name. In 1975 the economics prize winners' medals got mixed up, and Russian Leonid Kantorovich and American Tjalling Koopmans got each others' medals. It took four years of delicate Cold War diplomacy to rectify the mishap.

Nxumalo Street in Soweto, South Africa, is the only street in the world to be home to two Nobel peace prize winners. President Nelson Mandela, who won in 1993, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 winner, both have houses there.

American John Bardeen is the only person to have won the Nobel physics prize twice. He shared it in 1956 for work on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect, and again in 1972 for developing the theory of superconductivity. Marie Curie of France also won two Nobel prizes, for physics in 1903 and for chemistry in 1911. Curie, who discovered radium, died of leukemia as a result of over-exposure to radioactivity.

Dublin is the only city in the world to have produced three Nobel prize laureates for literature. William Butler Yeats, who won in 1923, George Bernard Shaw (1925) and Samuel Beckett (1969) were all Dubliners.

Nobel prize winners become instantly famous and are swamped by invitations to give speeches and lectures. According to Stanford University in the United States, laureates average 100,000 air miles per year. Americans have won more than a third of all Nobel chemistry prizes, half the physics and medicine prizes and three-quarters of all economics prizes. The economics prize is not in Alfred Nobel's will but was founded by the Bank of Sweden in 1968 and awarded for the first time in 1969. Reuters