History Book - Nobel’s change of heart

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, December 6th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Next up, the WORLD History Book. Today, a holiday fish dish with historical origins, opening day for spycraft training, and a dynamite awards ceremony. Here’s senior correspondent Katie Gaultney.

KATIE GAULTNEY, SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: What do Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein, and Martin Luther King, Jr. have in common? It’s not the set-up for a bad joke. All three are Nobel Prize recipients. And the Nobel Committees selected the first Nobel laureates 120 years ago, on December 10th, 1901.

Alfred Nobel was something of a polymath, excelling at poetry and languages as well as chemistry and other sciences. He held 355 patents in his lifetime, among them, the patent for dynamite.

That invention paved the way for mining and infrastructure advancements, and made Nobel a wealthy man. He invested much of his wealth into weapons manufacturing. When his brother Ludwig died in 1888, newspapers erroneously announced Alfred’s death, calling him a war profiteer. Simon Whistler of Biographics on YouTube shares more.

WHISTLER: As a result, Novel had the rare experience of reading his own obituary. What he read, it shocked him to his core. Virtually every newspaper that he looked at seemed to glory in his supposed demise. One French headline announced, “The merchant of death is dead.”

Nobel—very much still alive—determined to change that legacy. He bequeathed his fortune to establish the Nobel Prize, honoring those who benefited humankind in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Winners receive a gold medal, a diploma, and a cash award that in 2020 amounted to just over a million dollars.

The first Nobel Prizes were awarded five years after Nobel’s actual death of a stroke at age 63.

SOT: The Norwegian Nobel committee has decided...

To date, Nobel committees have handed out awards 609 times to 975 people and organizations.

Moving from awards to wars.

Eighty years ago, on December 6th, 1941, Camp X opened in Canada, on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario, to begin training Allied secret agents for World War II. Officially dubbed Special Training School Number 103, it’s the most important spy incubator you’ve never heard of. David Stafford is an author who has written on Camp X.

STAFFORD: The British needed the Americans to join in the secret war, and the hook was Camp X.

Britain and Canada jointly ran the camp. The work was so secret, even Canada’s prime minister didn’t know about the facility. Part of its purpose was to train U.S. spies—even though at the time it opened, the Neutrality Act prohibited the United States from direct involvement in the war.

The camp opened one day before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. In early 1942, American agents began training at the highly classified facility. They learned tricks of the trade, like fighting armed and unarmed, killing silently, and sowing chaos through espionage, sabotage, and subversion. Colonel Frank Gleason was among those early U.S. secret agents trained by British operatives.

GLEASON: I’m sure the British intelligence really looked down their noses at us in the beginning, and it was true!

But, they caught on. By war's end, Camp X personnel had trained between 500 and 2,000 Allied agents for overseas missions, behind enemy lines.

The camp closed at the end of the war, and the buildings came down in 1969. But, beyond its direct wartime impact, Camp X made an impact on culture… Children’s book author Roald Dahl was stationed at Camp X for a period. Screenwriter Paul Dehn, who wrote spy movies like Goldfinger and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold served as a British officer there. And, James Bond creator Ian Fleming allegedly trained at Camp X, later saying he modeled the character of Bond after Canadian Camp X director William Stephenson.

MUSIC: KLARA SOLEN PÅ HIMMELEN DEN LYSER

For our final entry, a brief look at an unusual Christmas tradition. December 9th is Anna’s Day in Sweden, Finland, and Norway. And since the most popular female name in Sweden is Anna, plenty of people are celebrating.

But, what does any of this have to do with Christmas? Well, Anna’s Day is also known as Lutefisk Day. It marks the start of the preparation process of the lutefisk—a whitefish, pickled in lye, traditionally eaten on Christmas Eve. It’s dehydrated, then rehydrated, and the result is a gelatinous, fishy dish full of Christmas cheer… ?

And Scandinavians have their Viking forebears to thank for it. Legend goes: Vikings burned down a fishing village—including shelves of drying cod. When the villagers returned, ash covered the fish. It rained, and the rainwater and ash resulted in a lye slurry. The surprised villagers saw that the dried fish looked like fresh fish. They rinsed the cod, boiled it, and were brave enough to eat it. Waste not, want not, I guess.

It’s fairly popular in Wisconsin and Minnesota, too. An old joke says about half the Norwegians who immigrated to America did so to flee the dreaded lutefisk, and the other half came to evangelize about how wonderful lutefisk is.

SONG: LUTEFISK

That’s this week’s History Book. I’m Katie Gaultney.

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