Alfred Nobel was the fourth son of Immanuel and
Caroline Nobel. Immanuel was an inventor and engineer who had married Caroline
Andrietta Ahlsell in 1827.
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The couple had eight children, of whom only Alfred
and three brothers reached adulthood. Alfred was prone to illness as a child,
but he enjoyed a close relationship with his mother and displayed a lively
intellectual curiosity from an early age. He was interested in explosives, and
he learned the fundamentals of engineering from his father.
Immanuel,
meanwhile, had failed at various business ventures until moving in 1837 to St.
Petersburg in Russia, where he prospered as a manufacturer of explosive mines
and machine tools. The Nobel family left Stockholm in 1842 to join the father
in St. Petersburg. Alfred’s newly prosperous parents were now able to send him
to private tutors, and he proved to be an eager pupil. He was a competent
chemist by age 16 and was fluent in English, French, German, and Russian as
well as Swedish.
Alfred Nobel left Russia in 1850 to spend a year
in Paris studying chemistry and then spent four years in the United States
working under the direction of John Ericsson, the builder of the ironclad
warship Monitor. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Nobel worked in his
father’s factory, which made military equipment during the Crimean War. After
the war ended in 1856, the company had difficulty switching to the peacetime
production of steamboat machinery, and it went bankrupt in 1859.
Alfred and his parents returned to Sweden, while
his brothers Robert and Ludvig stayed behind in Russia to salvage what was left
of the family business. Alfred soon began experimenting with explosives in a
small laboratory on his father’s estate. At the time, the only dependable
explosive for use in mines was black powder, a form of gunpowder. A recently
discovered liquid compound, nitroglycerin, was a much more powerful explosive,
but it was so unstable that it could not be handled with any degree of safety.
Nevertheless, Nobel in 1862 built a small factory to manufacture nitroglycerin,
and at the same time he undertook research in the hope of finding a safe way to
control the explosive’s detonation. In 1863 he invented a practical detonator
consisting of a wooden plug inserted into a larger charge of nitroglycerin held
in a metal container; the explosion of the plug’s small charge of black powder
serves to detonate the much more powerful charge of liquid nitroglycerin. This
detonator marked the beginning of Nobel’s reputation as an inventor as well as
the fortune he was to acquire as a maker of explosives. In 1865 Nobel invented
an improved detonator called a blasting cap; it consisted of a small metal cap
containing a charge of mercury fulminate that can be exploded by either shock
or moderate heat. The invention of the blasting cap inaugurated the modern use
of high explosives.
Nitroglycerin itself, however, remained difficult
to transport and extremely dangerous to handle. So dangerous, in fact, that
Nobel’s nitroglycerin factory blew up in 1864, killing his younger brother Emil
and several other people. Undaunted by this tragic accident, Nobel built several
factories to manufacture nitroglycerin for use in concert with his blasting
caps. These factories were as safe as the knowledge of the time allowed, but
accidental explosions still occasionally occurred. Nobel’s second important
invention was that of dynamite in 1867. By chance, he discovered that
nitroglycerin was absorbed to dryness by kieselguhr, a porous siliceous earth,
and the resulting mixture was much safer to use and easier to handle than
nitroglycerin alone. Nobel named the new product dynamite (from Greek dynamis,
“power”) and was granted patents for it in Great Britain (1867) and the United
States (1868). Dynamite established Nobel’s fame worldwide and was soon put to
use in blasting tunnels, cutting canals, and building railways and roads.
In the 1870s and ’80s Nobel built a network of
factories throughout Europe to manufacture dynamite, and he formed a web of
corporations to produce and market his explosives. He also continued to
experiment in search of better ones, and in 1875 he invented a more powerful
form of dynamite, blasting gelatin, which he patented the following year. Again
by chance, he had discovered that mixing a solution of nitroglycerin with a
fluffy substance known as nitrocellulose results in a tough, plastic material
that has a high water resistance and greater blasting power than ordinary
dynamites. In 1887 Nobel introduced ballistite, one of the first nitroglycerin
smokeless powders and a precursor of cordite. Although Nobel held the patents
to dynamite and his other explosives, he was in constant conflict with
competitors who stole his processes, a fact that forced him into protracted
patent litigation on several occasions.
Nobel’s brothers Ludvig and Robert, in the
meantime, had developed newly discovered oilfields near Baku (now in
Azerbaijan) along the Caspian Sea and had themselves become immensely wealthy.
Alfred’s worldwide interests in explosives, along with his own holdings in his
brothers’ companies in Russia, brought him a large fortune. In 1893 he became
interested in Sweden’s arms industry, and the following year he bought an
ironworks at Bofors, near Varmland, that became the nucleus of the well-known
Bofors arms factory. Besides explosives, Nobel made many other inventions, such
as artificial silk and leather, and altogether he registered more than 350
patents in various countries.
Nobel’s complex personality puzzled his
contemporaries. Although his business interests required him to travel almost
constantly, he remained a lonely recluse who was prone to fits of depression.
He led a retired and simple life and was a man of ascetic habits, yet he could
be a courteous dinner host, a good listener, and a man of incisive wit. He
never married, and apparently preferred the joys of inventing to those of
romantic attachment. He had an abiding interest in literature and wrote plays,
novels, and poems, almost all of which remained unpublished. He had amazing
energy and found it difficult to relax after intense bouts of work. Among his
contemporaries, he had the reputation of a liberal or even a socialist, but he
actually distrusted democracy, opposed suffrage for women, and maintained an
attitude of benign paternalism toward his many employees. Though Nobel was
essentially a pacifist and hoped that the destructive powers of his inventions
would help bring an end to war, his view of mankind and nations was
pessimistic.
By 1895 Nobel had developed angina pectoris, and
he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his villa in San Remo, Italy, in 1896. At
his death his worldwide business empire consisted of more than 90 factories
manufacturing explosives and ammunition. The opening of his will, which he had
drawn up in Paris on November 27, 1895, and had deposited in a bank in
Stockholm, contained a great surprise for his family, friends, and the general
public. He had always been generous in humanitarian and scientific
philanthropies, and he left the bulk of his fortune in trust to establish what
came to be the most highly regarded of international awards, the Nobel Prizes.
We can only speculate about the reasons for
Nobel’s establishment of the prizes that bear his name. He was reticent about
himself, and he confided in no one about his decision in the months preceding
his death. The most plausible assumption is that a bizarre incident in 1888 may
have triggered the train of reflection that culminated in his bequest for the
Nobel Prizes. That year Alfred’s brother Ludvig had died while staying in
Cannes, France. The French newspapers reported Ludvig’s death but confused him
with Alfred, and one paper sported the headline “Le marchand de la mort est
mort” (“The merchant of death is dead.”) Perhaps Alfred Nobel established the
prizes to avoid precisely the sort of posthumous reputation suggested by this
premature obituary. It is certain that the actual awards he instituted reflect
his lifelong interest in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology, and
literature. There is also abundant evidence that his friendship with the
prominent Austrian pacifist Bertha von Suttner inspired him to establish the
prize for peace.
Nobel himself, however, remains a figure of
paradoxes and contradictions: a brilliant, lonely man, part pessimist and part
idealist, who invented the powerful explosives used in modern warfare but also
established the world’s most prestigious prizes for intellectual services
rendered to humanity.
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