Nobel Medal obverse

Significance of the Nobel Foundation's reaction to J. Schramek's acquisition of Sir James Chadwick's Nobel Prize . set: do other objects get treated with as much regard? .
In 2000, the Nobel Foundation graciously invited J. Schramek to visit its headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden, allowing him to examine the only Nobel Prize diploma in its archives.

Swedish (National) Television graciously invited J. Schramek to be interviewed about Sir James Chadwick's Nobel Prize set, in Chicago in October 2006; this interview was telecast across Sweden during the intermission of the telecast of the Nobel Prize award ceremonies, 10 December 2006; this invitation was conveyed in a (unsolicited) telephone call, from a Swedish Television representative to J. Schramek in Fall 2005. .

As the Nobel Prize award ceremonies are the Event of the Year in Sweden (if not in the whole of Europe), for Chadwick's Nobel Prize set to have been deemed a fit subject for part of the Telecast of the Year, is arguably the most significant possible gesture of regard that could have been paid to Chadwick's group, except for would-be live media coverage of a ceremony opening an exhibition of his group in a most prestigious .. public place. .

Surely most of the objects which have sold for many millions of dollars, have been subject to some sort of major media coverage (e.g. on Nightly News programs), mostly because of the large sum brought by such objects, rather than because of the intrinsic significance of the objects in question; but, have any of these objects (which have brought many millions of dollars) been anywhere treated with the regard shown to Chadwick's Nobel Prize set, i.e. being the focus of attention, for two and one-half minutes during the Telecast of the Year, precisely due to the objects' significance, regardless of sum paid?

J. Schramek at
Nobel Foundation
Headquarters
in Stockholm

November 2007:
Medal Owned by Washington, Lafayette Sold for $5.31 Million http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aksfW5CfuLrM (by Sotheby's)

May 2007:
U.S. 1913 Liberty nickel, only five minted, sold for $5 million

January 1999:
M. McGwire's 70th home run ball sold for $3 million at Guernsey's

October 2005:
the only existing plate numbered block of four 'Inverted Jenny’ stamps sold for $2,970,000, auctioned by Robert Siegel

September 2007
Honus Wagner tobacco (baseball) card, card sold for $2.8 million

June 1999:
$1.54m at Sotheby's auction for the Best Film Oscar awarded to the producer of Gone With The Wind

Big prices for other objects which were presumably
the best available within each given (sub-) genre:

with spectacular award diploma , presented
to Sir James Chadwick (1891-1974)

one of the fathers of the A-bomb, for discovering the neutron in 1932. This award is one of the most significant imaginable 20th Century historical objects likely to ever become available for private purchase for a price at all affordable to non-billionaires. It is not only of museum quality, but is of the quality that museums are built around, and is of a magnitude that could warrant the creation of a museum with this as the collection's central object. Chadwick's discovery is generally considered one of the greatest discoveries ever, and was listed by Time Magazine as one of the 100 milestones of the 20th Century.

The Nobel Prize award to Sir James Chadwick consists of gold medal, exquisite hand-painted binder-diploma , and presentation book about Alfred Nobel (from the Nobel Foundation).
Included is an archive of eight British and Continental Awards: seven medals (most in presentation case of issue) and three diplomas presented to Chadwick, 1932-1971, accompanied by impressive dossiers (in presentation folders containing hundreds of pages of research about the Nobel Prize, Chadwick, and the eight other included awards) and dozens of books (scroll down for list) about the Nobel Prize, Chadwick, and (his participation in) 20th century physics.
Also included are an official Chadwick portrait photo , and an accompanying group of other Nobel Prize-related Medals (e.g. for casting votes on Laureate nominees) struck by Royal Swedish Mint

A high price for this Chadwick Nobel Prize archive group is justified due to the rising importance of Chadwick in scholarly assessments of 20th century history, and due to the overarching prestige (and rarity on the collecting market) of the Nobel Prize.

In this collecting field (awards), the difference in prices between items given to minor, as opposed to monumental, persons is shown by the difference in prices brought by badges of the US Society of the Cincinnati: badges attributed to recipients of minor historical importance may or may not sell when offered for a few thousand dollars, but the badge given by George Washington's family to the Marquis de Lafayette brought (with commissions) over $5 million in a recent Sotheby's sale.
Chadwick's overall stature in 20th century world history is, if not comparable to Lafayette's stature in 18th century world history, then broadly competitive with Lafayette's stature. The climax of Chadwick's career was his central role in the making of the A-bomb, from his ground-breaking research (under the brutal conditions of Nazi bombing of his Liverpool lab in 1941) to his years in the US as head of the U.K. Mission of scientists assisting in the Manhattan Project (during which his duties took him to Chicago, New York, Los Alamos, NM, Oak Ridge, TN, and Washington, D.C.).

Normally, Nobel medals and diplomas of this magnitude are considered national treasures and remain in the hands of the recipient's family or are displayed prominently in a national museum. A good example of the treatment accorded to Nobel Prizes of this magnitude is the story of the George Marshall 1953 Nobel Peace Prize at the George C. Marshall Museum on the campus of the Virginia Military Institute. In this case, the Marshall family has temporarily lent this Nobel Prize to the H.S. Truman Presidential Museum, where this object became the most important piece around which the museum exhibit revolves, as is reflected on its web site .

The Chadwick Nobel medal is the only one for sale on the world-wide web, and would be appropriate as the backbone of a museum illustrating the history and destiny of cutting-edge science, just as the Marshall Nobel is the focal point of the Marshall WWII museum. We at Awards of Outstanding International Importance would be interested in hearing of any example of an available 20th Century object to equal this Nobel Prize in its combination of: historical importance, long-term value, name-recognition, (as a household word) rarity, (deserved) prestige, and physical and aesthetic impressiveness, (see Chadwick page for letter from Dr. B. Feldman on diploma's splendid quality) save for Master works of art selling for tens of millions of dollars.

Chadwick's Nobel set is the most important one likely to appear for sale for the foreseeable future; those more important are where they should be, in museums or other major institutional archives. All knowledgeable persons consulted by us agree that the only Nobel up for sale since WWII, which perhaps compares to Chadwick's, was Fleming's, (medal only, for discovering penicillin) which was withdrawn from a 1988 Sotheby's sale, and is now held as a state treasure in a British museum.

It should go without saying that this Nobel set is more significant than the Mark McGuire home run record baseball, which brought $2.7 million at auction, despite this ball's obvious lack of world-treasure status. (A good day for our culture it will be when a Nobel Prize is known to have sold for more than this baseball.) With us now in an era of worldwide financial crisis, with ever-greater concern that harsh realities will overcome the myopia of recent decades, now would seem to be a most likely time for a "return to basics" change in the zeitgeist, away from the emphasis on glamor which so (seemed to) characterize the phony-boom decades of the 80's, 90's, and since. The time is ripe for a return to the sort of core virtues which civilizations require to pass the harsh tests which history sometimes hurls, the sort of core virtues which Chadwick's career epitomized: discipline, modesty, trustworthiness.

   All experts on Chadwick's era in physics regard him as having lived an exemplary, interesting, and historically important life. Without Chadwick's discovery in 1932, nuclear fission, and thus the A-bomb, would have been achieved too late to be used against Japan to decide the end of WWII; thus the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would probably have ended up undeterred from later waging nuclear war against each other.    Until recently, Chadwick's major contribution to the success of the Manhattan Project, including in his role as Senior British Advisor, had been obscured by his tendency to shun the limelight.   He has since been described as having been Project chief Gen. Groves' "viceroy among the scientists", and he wrote the decisive MAUD Report, which persuaded FDR to launch the Manhattan Project, in 1941.
    Chadwick's key role is aptly portrayed by: (1) the title of a major biography by Dr. Andrew Brown, The Neutron and the Bomb; (2) a chapter therein, "The scientist-diplomat" (Chadwick was the first, and greatest, as a novice); (3) a U.K. review thereof ("How the Bomb's creator learned to love the United States"); (4) a U.S. review thereof ending with "like the neutron he discovered, Chadwick moved unnoticed - but with awesome power;" and (5) numerous comments about his role in the birth of atomic power by American statesman McGeorge Bundy, in his book Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years.    Chadwick always wanted his discovery of the neutron to contribute to cancer treatments.    His preference for anonymity led him to concede iconic status as the Bomb's creator to the limelight-addicts Oppenheimer (not a Nobel Laureate, and unknown until his role at Los Alamos) and Einstein, (barred from the Manhattan Project as a security risk) despite the length and depth of Chadwick's involvement and contribution, which at minimum matched those of anyone.   That Einstein, not Chadwick, is seen as the Bomb's grandfather owes to Einstein's 1939 letter to FDR (warning that a Bomb was possible) being more famous, but less influential, than Chadwick's research. (Britons resent Americans' bent to ignore Britain's indispensable role in one of the mega-events of human history, the birth of atomic power.)
    Chadwick worked from a shoestring budget, using a cyclotron bought partly with his Nobel Prize money, while the Nazis were bombing his U. of Liverpool physics dept. and the rest of the city, in Spring 1941; conditions for Oppenheimer, etc., at Los Alamos were utterly blissful compared to those in 1941 Liverpool.    Few stories, esp. in the history of science, exceed this in its combination of high stakes and dramatic appeal.   U.S. officials delayed expenditure on a Bomb, until Chadwick, whose judgement as an important Nobel Laureate they most respected, had personally verified this investment's viability.   As supervisor of all atomic researchers in Britain since June 1940, he was designated to write the final draft of the vital MAUD Report, which held that a Bomb was "not only possible, but inevitable;" presentation of MAUD to Roosevelt in Fall 1941 led FDR to order launching of the Manhattan Project, which more than any other factor would define the U.S. to be a superpower.   Respected Bomb scholar R. Rhodes notes that Allied statesmen's real doubts, regarding this unprecedentedly-costly proposal's viability, required them to have unprecedented trust in their scientists' judgement; thus Chadwick was one of the decisive movers of the 20th Century.
    It was the expenditure of Chadwick's Nobel Prize money, toward the cyclotron used in his historic 1940-41 experiments, which probably put his daughters in the financial position which led to them selling their father's Nobel Prize medal and diploma, rather than their donating it to a museum, as is usually done with such Nobel sets; this Nobel Prize . is . unique . in . the circumstances . leading to its appearance on the world market .    Chadwick's Nobel is a world treasure, worthy of being the focus of a museum. As gilt Best-Picture Oscars bring $15,000- $1.5 million, what might the best gold & hand-painted Nobel set be worth?

    We are very interested in any information anyone might be willing to provide as to the history of transactions involving any Nobel Prize medals or diplomas, eg. in private sales or obscure auctions.

Those with information or questions can telephone J. Schramek in the U.S. at 773-539-5751; the e-mail is: buynobel@sbcglobal.net.

The Nobel Prize :Basics

We have passed the centennial year of the Nobel Prize, the world's most prestigious award almost from its inception, and the first to aim to not discriminate on the basis of nationality; 2001 saw pertinent celebrations and related exhibits around the world. Already completed, or under construction, are Nobel museums in both Stockholm and Athens. In this 100 year period, 719 Prizes were awarded, 162 to physicists. The other categories are peace, physiology or medicine, literature, economics, and chemistry. Each Laureate receives a medal, a diploma, and, today, over $1 million if one person is the sole winner in a category; as many as three persons can split this money if, unlike Chadwick, it is decided to honor more than one person in a category. The results for each category are determined by a separate committee of five persons, subject to ratification by a relevant Swedish institution; in the case of physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, some 300 strong, have this final say.

As Dr. B. Feldman has pointed out, (in his comprehensive critical history, The Nobel Prize: a History of Genius, Controversey, and Prestige) the prestige of the Nobel Prize is in large measure due to its emphasis on science, which, after all, has accomplished so many dramatic results in the last 100 years. Since physics is the science which has had the most stupendous achievements in this period, the Physics Prizes have particularly brought fame to the Nobel institution. Thus the Physics Prizes are the most highly regarded; the decisions as to who should become Literature laureates have received much more criticism by serious students of these issues.

Locations of Nobel Prize Medals of the most significant Laureates

Neils Bohr......................   Danish Historical Museum, Fredriksborg , Denmark
Jimmy Carter.................   (still living) Carter Library ,................ Atlanta, USA
Sir Winston Churchill.....   Chartwell (Churchill's home) ........... ......... ........ UK
Marie Curie..................... (both at) Curie Museum ,............... Warsaw, Poland
Dalai Lama, XIV............. (still living)
Albert Einstein................. Hebrew University ,....................... Jerusalem, Israel
Enrico Fermi..................... University of Chicago ..................................... USA
Sir Alexander Fleming..... National War Museum of Scotland, Edinburg, UK
Mikhail Gorbachev.......... (still living)
Martin Luther King Jr......M.L. King Center ............................. Atlanta, USA
Mother Teresa..................Mother House ................................. Calcutta, India
George C. Marshall..........Virginia Military Institute .............................. USA
Theodore Roosevelt.........The White House ............................................ USA
Earl Bertrand Russell.......McMaster University,        Hamilton, ON, Canada Lord Ernest Rutherford....Nelson Museum ..................... Nelson, New Zealand
George Bernard Shaw......National Museum of Ireland ,........... Dublin, Ireland
Woodrow Wilson...............Woodrow Wilson House, Washington, D.C., . USA

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Sources include:

Brown, Andrew, The Neutron and the Bomb: A Biography of Sir James Chadwick (Oxford, 1997)

English, James, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard, 2005)

Feldman, Burton, The Nobel Prize: a History of Genius, Controversey, and Prestige (Arcade, 2000)

Marcou, Giorgio, Alfred Nobel: His life and works ( Hellenic Nobel Museum, Athens, 2003)

ManadsJournalen, Alfred Nobel (Bonniers Specialtidningsforlag AB, 1998) color illus.

Nobel Foundation, Nobel Foundation Directory, published each year by Sturytreckeriet-AB, Stockholm
.
Nobel Prize Annual, 1988- (various publishers)

Ohlmarks, Åke, Nobel-pristagarna (Stureforlaget Aktiebolag, 1969) # 746 of 999, inscr. to Agda Berglund

Royal Coin Cabinet, Nobel Medals (Stockholm, 2001)

Shalev, Baruch H., 100 Years of Nobel Prizes (Americas Group, 2002)

Other books included (about Chadwick and his milieu):

Atomic Heritage Foundation, Symposium on the Manhattan Project: Preliminary Proceedings -- . April 27, 2002 (also incl. is VHS tape of C-SPAN coverage)

Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society 22 (1976) including:
Massie, Harrie, & Feather, Norman, "James Chadwick," 66 pages

Brown, Anthony Cave, etc., ed. The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb (Dial Press, 1977) incl. Smyth, Henry DeWolf, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, (Official U.S. Govt. report, 1945)

Bundy, McGeorge, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (Random . House, 1988)

Cathcart, Brian, The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)

Chadwick, James, Radiativity and Radioactive Substances, 3rd. ed. (Pitman, 1931) inside page inscribed in pencil "A.H. Woodcock 1932". [Alfred H. Woodcock was a U.S. Navy and U. of Hawaii oceonographer whose career culminated in him being a recipient of the American Meteorological Society's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. See http://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ua902.028.htm ]

______________, (with E. Rutherford and C.D. Ellis) Radiations from Radioactive Substances . (Cambridge, 1930)

Clark, Ronald W., The Birth of the Bomb: the revealing history of the international race to develop the weapon that changed the world (Horizon, 1961)

Crawford, Elizabeth, The Nobel Population 1901-1937 (U.C. Berkeley, 1987)

Feldman, Anthony, and Ford, Peter, Scientists and Inventors (Facts on File, 1986)

Goldhaber, Maurice, “Reminisces of the Cavendish Lab in the 1930’s”, 16 March 1998 Physics Colloquium, U.C. Berkeley (VHS tape)

Gowing, Margaret, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945 (Macmillan, 1965) the official history

Groueff, Stefane, The Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb (Little Brown, 1967)

Groves, Gen. Leslie, Now It Can Be Told (Harper, 1962)

Hendry, John, Cambridge Physics in the Thirties (Adam Hilger Ltd., 1984)

Nobel Foundation, Les Prix Nobel en 1935 (P.A. Norstedt & Söner, 1937)

Pais, Abraham, Inward Bound: of matter and forces in the physical world (Clarendon, 1986)

Preston, Diana, Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima (Walker, 2005)

Rhodes, Richard, The Making of the Atomic Bomb ( Simon & Schuster, 1988)

Shamos, Morris H., Great Experiments in Physics (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1959)

Stocker, Mark, Golden Atoms: The Ernest Rutherford Medals (Canterbury U., 1999)

Szasz, Ferenc, British Scientists and the Manhattan Project, (St. Martin's, 1992) w/ bookplate indicating it as a donation (to Keele University) from the library of U.K official Atomic Energy historian Margaret Gowing

Weinberg, Steven, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (Scientific American Library, 1983)

Wilhelm, Peter, The Nobel Prize (Teknowledge,1983)

and some perspective

Awards of Outstanding International Importance to Statesmen and Heroines

Wouldn't the medal be a nice display ... in Oak Ridge? .... The good news is, it's still up for sale....
.
"Chadwick's Nobel is a world treasure, worthy of being the focus of a museum," the Shramek Web site proclaims. "As gilt Best-Picture Oscars bring $15,000-$1.5 million, what might the best gold and hand-painted Nobel set be worth?"
...
Answer: a lot.
........................... -- . FRANK MUNGER, Senior science columnist, Knoxville News Sentinel, November 5, 2003
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Knoxville is near Oak Ridge (Tennessee) National Laboratory, where uranium-235 was first produced. Chadwick inspected this lab in late 1943, being duly impressed.

"... Chadwick holds up very well against anyone's Prize except those everyone looks up to: Einstein, Bohr, Rutherford, and few of that sort...." -- Dr. Burton Feldman, author of the comprehensive critical history, The Nobel Prize: a History of Genius, Controversey, and Prestige

The Ultimate "Collectible" (Nobel Prize Medal, obverse)

See Economic Times (India) April 7, 2004 article by Vikram Doctor, "Nobel Price: way over Rs 10 lakh" quoting extensively (and fairly: " Schramek , a Chicago-based dealer, has the only Nobel for sale in world") and describing J. Schramek and his position, esp. about the appeal of the Nobel Prize, in an analysis of the Indian Government's offer of (a measly) $22,000 for return of the stolen 1913 Nobel medal of Rabindranath Tagore, an Indian national hero.

Aruna Srinivasan on her blog " THE WAVES ," reacted (on Thursday, April 8, 2004 in "Different strokes" ) to Mr. Doctor's article by agreeing with J. Schramek's assessment of the Tagore medal situation, concluding:
"There can be no prize tags for such treasures. Nor is India a rich country .... But then, even in plain speak of economic calculations, do you get a fair idea of what we lost?
.
... Or what we failed to preserve?"

Chadwick's Nobel set could be appropriately exhibited in
• the Nobel Museum, Stockholm, Sweden
• the Vatican Historical Museum (he was a member of the Vatican's Pontificia Academia Scientiarum)
• the Museum of the Hellenic Nobel Collection, Athens, Greece

• the Cambridge U. Museum at the Cavendish Laboratory's section "James Chadwick and the Neutron" (Microsoft Research Cambridge is at the site of the Cavendish Lab, where Chadwick discovered the neutron, in West Cambridge, U.K.)
• the Bradbury Science Museum, and the Los Alamos Historical Museum, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA.

Chadwick's Nobel set, compared to other objects (which were presumedly the best available within the given genre, see list above) all of which brought between $1.5 million and $90 million:

a baseball, a baseball card, a plate numbered block of stamps, a nickel, (trivial objects all) an Oscar, a work of contemporary art.
Who would dare call any Nobel Prize trivial?

Chadwick's Nobel set, vs. those of the other Laureates working on (or otherwise seen as crucial to) the Manhattan Project, (widely considered the most monumental American achievement to which a Nobel could be related): all other American-related Nobels of similar stature are likewise unavailable.

Chadwick’s Nobel set is by far the most significant among those of the Manhattan Project Nobel Laureates which are likely to ever become available. The Nobel medals of those Project Laureates (Fermi, Bohr) who are generally ranked as being above him, are in museums or university archives. Likewise with physicists who, though not working on the Project, are nonetheless regarded as being pantheon-level precursors (Curie, Einstein, Rutherford).

Only those mentioned above, and Chadwick, Feynman, and Lawrence, belong in the Manhattan Project pantheon and appear on the list of the 75+ physicists (throughout all of human history) deemed by worthy of inclusion by readers of the Yahoo! Directory (as of April 2009, at http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Physics/Physicists/ ); Chadwick is ranked 20th in the popularit y of physicists listed, behind such living ones as Michio Kaku & Hawking, and major Nobel Laureates Einstein, Rutherford, and Bohr.

The other 17 Manhattan Project Laureates do not appear on that Yahoo list.

Even if one could hope Feynman's Nobel would ever be available, he was in his mid-20s when he started at Los Alamos, so his role there, while interesting (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman ) was dwarfed by that of Chadwick throughout the bomb saga, whenever one wants to consider that Saga to have started.

Lawrence's Nobel medal is at U. Berkeley.

Chadwick's Nobel set, compared to other objects associated with the success of the Manhattan Project, each of which brought at least $150,000:
a log book, a log in pencil (2 large folios), a uniform with a medal (unnamed):

Sold for $391,000 by Christie's, March 2002: Robert A. Lewis, Co-pilot of the B-29 bomber "Enola Gay", Autographed logbook, entitled "Bombing of Hiroshima Aug. 6, 1945."

Sold for $358,500 by Heritage Auctions, October 2007: Navigator Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk's Enola Gay Log, in pencil, 2 large folios.

Sold for $150,000 by Alexander Autographs, November 2008: flight suit worn by pilot Paul W. Tibbets when his plane, the Enola Gay, dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

May 2008:
"Triptych, 1976″ sold for $86.3 million, the most expensive
work of contemporary art ever sold at auction

July 2002:
1933 $20 Double Eagle coin (Gem Brilliant Uncirculated) sold for $7,590,020 by Sotheby's and Stack's

June 2007:
When the Italian artist Piero Manzoni put his excrement into tin cans in the early 1960s and offered it as art, he said that he was exposing “the gullibility of the art-buying public”.

Collectors and galleries that paid high prices for the tins — including the Tate — appeared even more gullible yesterday when it emerged that they contained not feces, but plaster.

The tin at the Tate, for which the gallery paid £22,300 in 2000, is labelled Merda d’Artis-ta (Artist’s Dung) 1961. Described by the Tate as a seminal work, it was No 4 of 90 cans made by Manzoni, each supposedly containing 30 grams of his excrement. A buyer paid €124,000 (£84,000) at an auction in Milan last month for tin No 18.

Manzoni once said that he hoped that the cans would explode, and about half are reported to have done so. But none of the owners have revealed the contents. The cans, owned by the Tate, the Pompidou museum in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, are intact.

The Tate said yesterday that its can remained valid as a work of art. “Keeping the viewer in suspense is part of the subversive humour of the work,” a spokesperson said.

From http://arbroath.blogspot.com/2007_06_10_archive.html

From Bulletin .. of .. the .. Atomic .. Scientists , .. May/Jun1998, Vol. .. 54 .. Issue .. 3, .. p. .. 9: ." Going for the Gold"

When James Chadwick, a British member of the Manhattan Project team and a 1935 Nobel Prize winner, died in 1995, the event received little attention. His biographer, oncologist Andew Brown. says one reason may be that Chadwick, who he describes as extremely shy, retreated into the laboratory after World War II. As for Chadwick's Nobel. his daughters simply sold the medal and the award certificate that went with it. They are now in the hands of a Chicago collector, Jeffrey Schramek, .. who .. is .. offering .. them .. for .. resale…
VENDOR’S NOTE: Chadwick died, not in 1995 as stated .. above, .. but .. in .. 1974. -----------------------------------------------------------

Jon Van and Jon Bigness., “NEW TOLL-FREE NUMBER, 877, COULD ADD TO CALLER CONFUSION THIS SPRING”, Chicago Tribune, March 16, 1998, . Section .. 3 .. (BUSINESS) .. p. .. 2:
Historic prize: Getting a Nobel Prize is the dream of most scientists, and a few have been known to go to great lengths in their efforts to win one, grabbing credit for research mostly done by others or stretching the importance of one's own research to make it appear more .. worthy.
The one thing they don't do is try to buy one outright, which may be too bad for Chicagoan Jeffrey Schramek, because he has one to sell. A few years ago, Schramek, a collector, bought the Nobel Prize medal and award certificate given to Sir James Chadwick of Liverpool University in 1935 when he won the prize in physics for discovering .. the .. neutron.
"His two daughters decided to sell it," said Schramek. "It's very rare to hear of a Nobel being for sale. I have heard of rumors,….”

Exhibit of Nobel Prize medal, George C.
Marshall museum, Lexington, Virginia, USA.

23 K gold
66 mm. ” diameter

206.8 grams

Telephone 773-539-5751
FAX 773-304-0131
Postal address
P.O. Box 300791, Chicago, IL 60630, USA
Electronic mail
General Information: buynobel@sbcglobal.net
Prices available upon request.

Together with Chadwick's Nobel Prize diploma, the Nobel presentation book and the Chadwick portrait photo; the accompanying archive of related books and research dossiers; and the accompanying group of other Nobel Prize Medals struck by Royal Swedish Mint, the Chadwick Nobel package constitutes a ready-made museum exhibit.

The Sir James Chadwick Nobel Prize Archive

Books about neutrons, with frontispiece portraits of Chadwick

An Interview about Sir James Chadwick's Nobel Prize group, with J. Schramek, was shown on Swedish Television, during (the intermission of) the nationawide telecast of the Nobel Prize ceremonies, on 10 December 2006. Your computer will probably need Macromedia Flash player; t o play , click on the photo above. If audio starts when page first loads, it will be replaced (if you click on the rectanglar photo above) after c. 30 seconds, by a new window which plays video. If your browser does not play the clip in the rectangle above, click on the arrow (to the left) in the web studio player to the right. These complications stem from the exotic format into which the interview was put before the disk was sent from Sweden to J. Schramek.

Neither Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, nor George Soros are known to own any Nobel Prize medals, despite the massive wealth of each man.