Biography:Alfred
Nobel
Alfred Nobel is famous for the annual prizes in science, literature,
and peace awarded in his name.
Although he was born into poverty, his family members were creative and
entrepreneurial; they worked hard and became successful. Alfred was the
scientist of the family, inventing and manufacturing dynamite, the blasting
cap, gelignite and ballistite. He grew fantastically rich on the proceeds of
his explosives businesses.
In his last will and testament, he bequeathed over ninety percent of
his fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes.
Alfred Nobel: Lived 1833 – 1896.
Beginnings
Alfred Bernhard
Nobel was born in Sweden’s capital city, Stockholm, on October 21, 1833.
His father was
Immanuel Nobel, a self-made engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur who had been
formally schooled only to the age of 14. His mother was Andriette Ahlsell, an
accountant’s daughter.
Although at first
Immanuel Nobel’s business prospered, by the time Alfred was born, his father
was bankrupt. A series of business misfortunes followed by the family home
burning to the ground had left the family penniless.
Alfred was their
fourth-born child and barely survived his first few days. He suffered
ill-health for most of his life. Alfred’s mother and her sickly son formed a
strong bond through the years of constant care she gave him during his frequent
illnesses.
When Alfred was four
years old, his father left Sweden for Finland where he had been offered
business opportunities; it was a long time before he sent any money home.
Alfred’s maternal grandfather gave his daughter, Alfred’s mother, money to
start a tiny grocery store in which she worked from first thing in the morning
to last thing at night for a small profit.
Alfred began school
aged seven – a school for impoverished children called Jacob’s Parish Apologist
School. The school’s pupils and teachers were tough; there were frequent fights
in the playground and most pupils were beaten by their teachers every day for
any small mistakes in their schoolwork.
Alfred did well in
his schoolwork, which made his absent father proud.
Alfred Nobel
Russia
Immanuel, Alfred’s
father, had also been doing well, forming a company producing arms for Russia’s
military. Now wealthy, and the owner of a foundry and a factory, he sent for
his family to join him in Russia in the fall of 1842. Alfred was aged nine when
he sailed for Russia’s capital St. Petersburg. There it took him just a year to
learn Russian fluently.
Instead of going to
school, the Nobel children were taught by private tutors. Immanuel was a strong
advocate of the Protestant work ethic. He taught his children that they could
shape their own future prosperity with hard work and dedication. They were
tutored and driven to work for long hours every day.
Some children would
have found this oppressive, but Alfred prospered. He loved learning, and added
English, French and German to the languages he could speak fluently. His tutors
were of the highest quality – he was taught chemistry, his favorite subject, by
university professors.
Meanwhile,
Immanuel’s business was growing fast and he was making a wide and growing range
of arms.
European
and US Tour
Alfred Nobel at about age 16.
At about the age of
16, Alfred considered becoming a writer. After
mastering English, he had become a big fan of Shakespeare’s plays and had
started writing poetry influenced by Percy Shelley. Alfred’s father appreciated
the importance of good literature, but he did not want his son to follow this
path.
He offered Alfred
the opportunity to travel around Europe and the USA if he abandoned his
literary aspirations and concentrated on working in the family’s prospering
industrial and arms businesses.
Alfred agreed. On
his tour he spent time in place of business interest – laboratories and
factories – and spent extended amounts of time in Paris and New York. When,
aged 19, he returned to Russia in 1852, he worked in the family business: by
now it had about 1,000 employees.
Ill-health,
Nitroglycerin, and Financial Trouble
Back in Russia,
Alfred worked hard but suffered ill-health periodically.
By the time he was
25, the family business was in severe trouble. After its 1856 defeat in the
Crimean War, Russia’s government stopped paying its bills. During the Crimean
war, Immanuel had unsuccessfully tried to devise arms based on a new explosive,
much more powerful than gunpowder, called nitroglycerin, but the substance
proved difficult to detonate reliably.
Alfred had learned a
lot about nitroglycerin in Paris from Ascanio Sobrero, the chemist who had
first produced it, and he would return to experimenting with it a few years
later.
The Nobels could not
generate enough other work to compensate for the lost business from the Russian
government. They liquidated most of their business, leaving what remained in
the care of one of Alfred’s older brothers, Ludvig, who actually went on to
make a great success of it.
Alfred’s parents
returned to Sweden with a small amount of money. Alfred and his brother Robert
stayed in Russia, sharing an apartment in St. Petersburg. Alfred set up a
laboratory in the kitchen and began working on inventions.
In 1862, aged 29, he
discovered that certain mixtures of nitroglycerin mixed with gunpowder allowed
reliable detonation. His older brothers Robert and Ludvig helped him with
large-scale testing on a frozen canal outside St. Petersburg.
Alfred Nobel’s Achievements
Nobel
had an extraordinarily innovative mind, from which new ideas poured.
“If I come
up with 300 ideas in a year, and only one of them is useful, I am content.”......ALFRED NOBEL
His
genius was bolstered by steely determination to succeed and a huge capacity for
hard work. These were driven by bitter memories of the poverty his family
endured when he was a young boy.
Nitroglycerin
Early in 1863, Nobel
returned from Russia to his hometown of Stockholm. Very soon he began
experimenting in a laboratory on a small industrial site his father had taken
in Heleneborg, outside the city. Although never physically strong, he worked 18
hour days, personally performing hundreds of experiments.
After learning how
to detonate nitroglycerin with a small amount of gunpowder, Nobel began
producing nitroglycerin in late 1863, with significant production beginnning in
the summer of 1864.
However, disaster
struck in September 1864. In a laboratory housed in a shed at Heleneborg,
Nobel’s younger brother Emil was working alongside a student fulfilling a
nitroglycerin order from a railroad company carving out a tunnel through rock.
An accident in the shed caused a huge explosion, killing the pair instantly.
Also killed were a young cleaner, a young boy, and a carpenter who, unluckily,
was passing the site.
Although he was
upset about the deaths, Nobel continued production of nitroglycerin. Demand for
the explosive was so strong that by the beginning of the 1870s Nobel had opened
production facilities – some of which would be blown up in accidents – all over
Europe and in the USA.
Following
nitroglycerin’s success, Nobel spent several years grappling with foreign
patent offices whose rules made it difficult for a foreigner to prove he was
entitled to a patent. He also spent precious time
and energy battling with a number of crooks and shysters who tried to profit
from his invention.
The Blasting Cap Detonator
In 1864, Nobel
patented the blasting cap. He had performed many experiments seeking the best
way to detonate explosives; in the blasting cap, he invented it.
A blasting cap is a
small amount of explosive that, when detonated, pushes a pressure wave through
the main explosive charge causing instant detonation of all of the explosive.
Variations of
Nobel’s blasting cap are still the preferred way to detonate explosives. In
fact, his blasting cap invention was used for over 50 years without
modification.
Dynamite
In
November 1863, Nobel mixed nitroglycerin with porous substances such as coal
and produced a very powerful and stable explosive that could be detonated
reliably.
In
January 1864, he applied for a Swedish patent for this mixture. He then did
nothing. He was too busy manufacturing and selling nitroglycerin and fighting
patent disputes.
As
he saw more and more nitroglycerin accidents occurring, Nobel returned to his
experiments with nitroglycerin and porous substances. These experiments resulted
in his creation of dynamite. His September 1866 Swedish patent reads:
“My new
explosive, called dynamite, is simply nitroglycerin in combination with a very
porous silicate… it is a reddish-yellow, soft and plastic mass that is pressed
into cartridges of a certain thickness and then enclosed in paper wrappers.”…..ALFRED NOBEL
Nobel
chose the word dynamite from the Greek word dynamis, which means power.
He believed it would be used mainly for peaceful purposes, because:
“My dynamite
will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men
find that in one instant whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely
will abide by golden peace.”….ALFRED NOBEL
Dynamite
was safer to handle than nitroglycerin, but not as powerful an explosive.
Gelignite
In 1866, Nobel tried
to produce an explosive gel for the first time. He was finally successful in
1875, inventing gelignite, made of gelatinized glycerol and nitrocellulose. He
invented gelignite in Paris, where he had settled permanently in 1873.
Gelignite was better
than dynamite in that it was more powerful; it could be used underwater making
it much more versatile; and it did not suffer from sweating, which happened
when nitroglycerin sometimes oozed out of dynamite rendering it dangerously
unstable.
Gelignite was very
stable, very safe to handle, and could be molded easily to any shape. It was
another great commercial success for Nobel, but success did not happen
overnight. Gelignite was more expensive than dynamite, and although it was a
safer product, its manufacturing process was actually more hazardous than
dynamite’s.
Ballistite
Nobel invented
ballistite while living in Paris. He patented it in the UK in 1887 and the USA
in 1891 as a smokeless propellant to be used, for example, in bullets and
artillery shells. Ballistite was made using nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine.
The French military
had no interest in the product, but Nobel managed to license it to Italy’s
military. This resulted in a nasty media campaign against him in France
orchestrated by the French government. The French police raided his laboratory
and confiscated materials from it.
In 1891, Nobel left
France forever, and moved to Italy.
Nobel Prizes
Throughout his adult
life, Nobel lived with an internal conflict. He saw himself as an honest,
hardworking scientist, inventor and businessman. He remembered his impoverished
roots, and gave a lot of his money to help the poor.
Yet, because of the
huge amount of money he made from arms, he knew he was regarded by many people
as villainous. In fact, soon after the death of his brother Ludvig in 1888,
Alfred turned to the newspaper obituaries. There he discovered his own obituary
had been published in error. He read: “The Merchant of Death is Dead.”
This could hardly
have been comforting reading!
It calls to mind the
image of Scrooge transported by the Ghost of Christmas Future to see that
nobody was grieving at his funeral.
Having glimpsed one
possible future, Nobel, like Scrooge, decided to use his money to shape a
better world.
Nobel bequeathed 94
percent of his enormous wealth to fund five annual prizes in:
·
chemistry
·
physics
·
medical science or
physiology
·
literature
·
the person or
society that renders the greatest service to the cause of international
fraternity, in the suppression or reduction of standing armies, or in the
establishment or furtherance of peace congresses
The first Nobel
Prizes were awarded in 1901.
And, of course, we
must remember that Nobel’s explosives were frequently used for peaceful
purposes, creating, for example, hydroelectric dams and transport links,
without which our societies would be much less prosperous than they are.
A stick of dynamite placed in a drillhole to blast bedrock
Rock blasted to clear a path for the Panama Canal
Dynamite was used in the creation of Mount Rushmore’s sculptures
Dynamite plays a big part in clearing rock for dam building
Some
Personal Details and the End
By the early 1870s,
Nobel was wealthy and spending most of his life on trains traveling around
Europe to his factories and business meetings.
In 1873, aged 40, he
moved from Stockholm to Paris. He had enjoyed the time he spent there when he
was younger and Paris was closer than Stockholm to most of his business
interests. Also, Paris was a more culturally sophisticated city. He could
afford a large, prestigious house in one of the city’s best neighborhoods.
Language wasn’t a problem – he spoke French fluently. Nobel’s Paris home became
a sort of business headquarters, where he invited businessmen and financiers
for discussions.
Nobel enjoyed a
fine, large home in Paris. It was equipped with an extensive private library
and its own stables for the thoroughbred horses he enjoyed riding. Although he
lived in a grand style, he remembered his own humble start and frequently gave
money to the poor.
One day, he asked
one of his servants what gift she would like from him for her forthcoming
wedding. The clever young woman replied, “as much as you earn in one day
master.” Nobel admired her canny response and gave her what she asked for. His
gift, valued in today’s US dollars, was a six-figure sum.
Despite his wealth,
Nobel was a shy, reserved, and lonely man who found it difficult to make
friends, particularly with women; he believed women found him unattractive.
As a young man in
St. Petersburg, he proposed marriage to a young woman called Alexandra, who
turned him down.
In Paris, in 1876,
he employed the Austrian Countess Bertha Kinsky as his personal assistant. He
quickly fell in love with her. It seems she had a lot of affection for him too,
but she was already engaged to be married. She left Paris to be married. Nobel
and the Countess kept in touch by letter for the rest of Nobel’s life. Nobel
was impressed by her high ideals, including her pacifism: she might have been
the inspiration behind the Nobel Peace Prize. The Countess was awarded the 1905
Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the peace movement.
In 1876, possibly on
the rebound from his doomed relationship with the Countess, the 43 year-old
Nobel began a relationship with a 20-year-old Austrian shop assistant by the
name of Sophie Hess. He was embarrassed about their age difference and the fact
that she was not very well educated. She also had no interest whatsoever in
improving her education and her tastes in all things struck him as brash. She
lived in Austria, and he would travel from Paris to see her. He did not
introduce her to his acquantances in Paris. In 1891, Sophie had another man’s
baby. Nobel continued to send her money until finally breaking off with her
when she married the father of her child in 1894.
After the witch hunt
he suffered in France for selling ballistite to Italy, Nobel left Paris forever
in 1891, aged 57. He settled in the small coastal resort city of San Remo in
Italy.
In his final years,
Nobel suffered from heart disease, which, ironically, was treated with small
doses of nitroglycerin.
Alfred Nobel died
aged 63 in San Remo on December 10, 1896 following a stroke.
Most of his fortune
went to fund the Nobel Prizes. He did not approve of inherited wealth. He
thought parents and wealthy relatives should only bequeath money to provide
their children with a first-class education and the basics in life; all other
accumulated wealth should be fed back into society in some beneficial way.
Although at one time
he had stated that his body should be turned into plant fertilizer using acid,
in the end he was cremated. His ashes were deposited in Stockholm’s Northern
Cemetery.
Alfred Nobel Museum