Introduction
My home town is Todmorden in West Yorkshire, England and throughout all of my childhood we were proud to say that Todmordian John Douglas Cockcroft had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951: it was a joint award and he won it with Ernest Walton of Dungarvan, Ireland. We are told they were the first to have split the atom!
In 1973 another Todmordian, Geoffrey Wilkinson won the Chemistry prize along with Ernst Otto Fischer for their work on sandwich compounds: they were working independently of one another, it seems.
This put us in the stratosphere: which other town or city on the planet could boast TWO Nobel Prize Winners? Moreover, in spite of the 24 year age gap between them, Cockcroft and Wilkinson shared the same science teacher at Todmorden Grammar School.
This article sets out to answer a series of questions I have never seen answered before which includes, is Todmorden unique in respect of it Nobel Prize achievements? Is Todmorden at the top of any Nobel list? Has any other town or city produced more than two Nobel Prizes. Has any town of the size of Todmorden or less produced two, or more, Nobel Prize winners? … all low level stuff but I could not find anywhere THE source that would tell me everything I wanted to know.
Yes, the Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize, https://www.nobelprize.org, contains a massive amount of detail but it didn’t tell me, for example, if Todmorden is the smallest town to produce two Laureates and so on.
My File
I have produced an Excel file that contains all of the basic details of every Nobel Prize there has been: from 1901 to 2017. My list includes every Laureate, date of the award, dates of birth, dates of death, male or female and more.
Since I was trying to make Todmorden the centre of attention, I had said in a Todmorden based Facebook forum last week that I felt it is probably unique in producing two Laureates relative to its population size! I had long since given up the notion that Todmorden was top of the pile in all respects, of course; because we must expect the University cities of Oxford, Cambridge (UK and USA), Paris, Bonn … to outshine little old Todmorden!
By the way, Todmorden is not a University town so Cockcroft and Wilkinson belong to us by rght of birth: they are Tod Lads!
I went to various sources to find the populations of the cities for which there are two Nobel Laureates. I did not look for the populations of cities that had 1 or 3 or 4 or more Laureates since Todmorden is not competing with them by my reckoning!
You can download my file from the link at the end of this article (ths link will appear in the final version of this article) and for Excel warriors, you will find that I have used a wide range of techniques in there that includes various functions and formulas as well as Get & Transform/Power Query, including some programming in M.
How Many Prizes?
Todmorden has claimed two prizes: how many other towns and cities have claimed the same or more or less? Examples
New York is top of the pile by a long way, London is third and as you can see, Todmorden is there with two Laureates. Overall, the number of cities by number of prizes is as follows:
Todmorden, then, is one of 44 cities around the world to have claimed two Nobel Prizes: one of just 91 cities to have claimed more than one Nobel Prize.
Ages of Laureates
John Cockcroft was 54 years old when he won his prize and Geoffrey Wilkinson was 52 years old. For a Physics Laureate, Cockcroft was almost two years younger than the average and for a Chemistry Laureate, Wilkinson was over six yearsyounger than the average.
By the way, the first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, a relatively modern institution; but take a look at the dates of birth of the first Laureates, from 1901 and 1902:
The second ever Nobel Literature Laurate, Theodor Mommsen, was born on 30th November 1817: there was no other Laureate born before Theodor Mommsen!
By the same token, the first 20th century born Laureate did not appear until Frederic Joliot-Curie was awarded the Chemistry Prize in 1935. Frederic was born on 19th March 1900 and was part of the famous Curie family! For interest, here is the Curie family Nobel history:
To date, the youngest ever Laureate is Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan who was a mere 17 years old when she won the 2014 Peace Prize: Malala was born 180 years after Theodor Mommsen! Until then, the youngest ever Laureate had been the 25 year old Australian William Lawrence Bragg who won the Physics Prize in 1915. The oldest prize winner to date is Russian born Leonid Hurwicz, who was 90 years old when he was awarded the 2007 Economics Prize.
Sex of Prize Winners
Up until the end of 2017, women have won just 49 Nobel Prizes, men have scooped the other 847: almost 30 prizes have been awarded to Organisations, so they are gender neutral!
Marie Curie’s award in 1903 was the first by a woman and in the first 20 years in which the Prizes were awarded, only four went to women. In the 20 years to the end of 2017, women have been awarded 21 Prizes.
I will attempt no answer to suggest why more women have not earned Nobel Prizes and I have to say that over the last 20 or so years, women have been actively lobbying for more women Laureates. Since they clearly cannot create scientific achievement out of thin air, the majority of prizes for women have been the Peace and Literature Prizes with a further 12, Physiology or Medicine, Prizes having been awarded to women!
Please note, the relatively small number of Prizes for Economics reflects the fact that the first Economics Prizes were not awarded until 1969. Moreover, the title of this Prize is, in full: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
Populations and the Final Answer
For me, this is the big question: person for person, is a Todmorden Nobel Prize worth more than anywhere else on the planet? In other words, is Todmorden the smallest town in the world to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes?
Please note, I have not gone back to the dates of the award of the Prizes to find the populations of the cities concerned: in some cases that would be impossible anyway. What I have done is to take the latest figure I can find on the internet as at 8th January 2018 for all of the cities of interest.
Well, a two Prize city has a mean population of over 960,000 and a median of almost 388,000 inhabitants. Yay! Tiny Todmorden has around 15,500 inhabitants. The largest two Prize city is Mexico City with 8.9 million people, Halifax, 12 miles from Todmorden also has two Prize winners and has a population of 88,000 or thereabouts.
So, the smallest two Prize city is … Rendcombe in Gloucestershire with a population of just 354 people. More than that, their two Prizes came from one man, Frederick Sanger who won the Chemistry Prize outright in 1958 and outright again in 1980. Hats off to Frederick!
Conclusions
There you are: good news, bad news! Todmorden is in the elite Nobel Prize World by having two Nobel Prize winners in its history. It is the smallest town to have two Prize winners. Alas, it is not the smallest village! Let’s give due credit to Frederick Sanger and Rendcombe (or Rendcomb) for not only winning two Prizes but winning them both outright: a very rare achievement.
Sanger helped to answer another of the questions that was raised on the Facebook page I mentioned earlier and that is: is Todmorden Grammar the only school to have produced two Nobel Prizes? Again, no! However, let’s find a winning angle for Todmorden: Sanger won two prizes but he is only one Laureate, albeit Laureate and bar! So, for having two Laureates from the same school, Tod is Tops!
E&OE
Finally, this article took me several days both to research and for me to carry out the analysis in my Excel file: I humbly apologise if there are any errors here and if you do find something amiss, please let me know and I will correct it! I have made very few changes to the basic data but I have had to make a very small number of minor tweaks to place names/locations to prevent misrepresentation.
Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Nobel Prize organisation for making their database freely available and for the various sites that provided me with population and other data: in that regard, mainly www.wikipedia.com
Duncan Williamson
9th January 2018
Excel file for download: the link will appear here in the final version of this article
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