Established in 1929, the Noble Prize commemorates a nineteenth-century civil engineer, Alfred Noble (no relation to Alfred Nobel). Unlike the prestigious Swedish prize that usually acknowledges lifetime achievements, the five-hundred-dollar award requires that recipients be under thirty years old and present a paper for publication by one of the five main American engineering societies — the American Institute of Mining and Metallical Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, or the Western Society of Engineers.

Source:

F. D. McHugh, "The Scientific American Digest," Scientific American, 148 (February 1933): 117.