1 Won Wilhelm Röntgen

North Korea issued a series of commemorative brass pieces around the turn of the millennium honoring foreign scientists, and Röntgen appears in that group on the strength of his 1895 discovery of X-rays — work that earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901, exactly a century before this coin's issue date. Whether that centenary was the deliberate trigger for the denomination is plausible but unconfirmed.

KM#159b distinguishes this from related varieties in the same series struck in different metals for the hard-currency export market, pieces never intended to circulate domestically.