On November 18, 1307, William Tell shot a crossbow bolt to pierce an apple, toppling it off his son’s head. He was forced to do this by the local Austrian authority, whose hat hung on a pole in the Altdorf town square Tell had refused to bow to when entering the village. Tell is an enduring Swiss folk hero, and the subject of a famous opera by Rossini.
In 1926, George Bernard Shaw formally refused to accept the money for his Nobel Prize, saying, “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”