Corbin T. Eddy, assistant professor and head of the department of physical metallurgy at the Michigan College of Mining and Technology was awarded the first Alfred Noble prize for Science in the newly established Junior division for men under the age of thirty. Corbin's paper was "Arsenic Elimination in the Reverberatory Refining of Native Copper," delivered at the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers meeting in February, 1931. Alfred Noble (1844-1914) was an able civil engineer, a builder of one of the five Sault Ste. Marie Canal locks, a builder of bridges across the Harlem and Mississippi rivers, and an adviser on the construction of the Panama Canal. After the death of Noble, five engineering societies (American Society of Civil Engineers, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and the Western Society of Engineers) became the trustees of a fund, from which, to perpetrate and honor his memory, an award was to be made yearly to the man under thirty who wrote the best technical paper for one of their journals.