The Boy Who Skipped University
Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on 21 October 1833. His father was an inventor and engineer who built bridges and tried out new ways of blasting rock. After a business failure, the father moved to Saint Petersburg in Russia and did well making machine tools and explosives. In 1842, the family joined him there.
Alfred's only time at school was 18 months in Stockholm. He never went to university. Instead, private tutors taught him, and he shone in chemistry and languages. He became fluent in six languages, Swedish, French, Russian, English, German and Italian, and even wrote poetry in English.
As a young man, he studied with the chemist Nikolai Zinin. In Paris he met Ascanio Sobrero, who had made nitroglycerin three years earlier. Nobel then spent a year in the United States and worked briefly for the inventor John Ericsson. He filed his first patent, for a gas meter, in 1857, at the age of 24.
Taming a Dangerous Explosive
Sobrero himself was against using nitroglycerin, because it could explode with small changes in heat or pressure. Nobel saw it differently. It was far more powerful than gunpowder, and he wanted to make it safe enough for real work. He invented a detonator in 1863, and in 1865 he designed the blasting cap.
The work was risky. In 1864, a shed used to prepare nitroglycerin at a factory in Stockholm exploded, and his younger brother Emil was among those who died. Nobel lost his licence to make explosives, so he moved his work to a more isolated place.
His big breakthrough came in 1867. He found that mixing nitroglycerin into an absorbent material called kieselguhr made it much safer and easier to handle. He first showed it off at a quarry in Redhill, England. He thought about calling it "Nobel's Safety Powder", but chose "dynamite", from the Greek word for power. It was soon used widely in mining and in building transport networks around the world.
355 Patents and a Business Empire
Dynamite was only the start. In 1875 Nobel invented gelignite, a clear, jelly-like explosive that was more stable and powerful than dynamite. It could be shaped to fit drilled holes, and it became the standard for mining. In 1887 he patented ballistite, the ancestor of many modern smokeless powder explosives. It is still used as a rocket propellant.
By the end of his life, Nobel held 355 patents. His company Bofors, once an iron and steel maker, became a major maker of cannons. His business set up more than 90 explosives and weapons factories, even though he seemed to have a peaceful nature. He also invested in his brothers' oil company, which worked mainly in Baku, and grew very rich.
He moved around a lot. He lived in Paris from 1873 to 1891, until he was accused of treason for selling ballistite to Italy. He then moved to Sanremo, Italy, to a villa looking out over the Mediterranean Sea. Even the chemical element nobelium is named after him.
The Obituary That Came Too Early
In 1888, Nobel's brother Ludvig died, and several newspapers supposedly mixed the brothers up and printed obituaries of Alfred instead. A famous story says one French paper ran the headline "The merchant of death is dead". In this version, Nobel was horrified to see how he would be remembered, and decided to leave a better legacy.
It is a great story, but historians have not been able to prove it. Some dismiss it completely. What does exist is a real obituary on the front page of the Figaro, printed on 15 April 1888. It said a man had died who could "only with the utmost difficulty be considered a benefactor of mankind". It named Mr. Nobel, inventor of dynamite. The paper took it back the next day.
Either way, the idea has stuck. Many people credit his prize plan to a wish to leave behind a better legacy. Whether the obituary really pushed him or not, within seven years he signed a will that would turn his fortune into prizes.
A One-Page Will and Five Prizes
On 27 November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed his final will. His family did not know what was in it. After taxes and gifts to individuals, it left 94% of his assets, 31,225,000 Swedish kronor, to create five prizes. They would go to physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace, with no regard to nationality.
The will was just one page, and some parts were unclear. The literature prize was meant for work "in an ideal direction". For years, the judges read this as idealistic, and used it as a reason not to honour great writers such as Henrik Ibsen and Leo Tolstoy. Bertha von Suttner, who briefly worked as his secretary and wrote to him until he died, probably shaped the peace prize. She won it herself in 1905.
Nobel died in Sanremo on 10 December 1896, aged 63. A prize in economics came much later, in 1968, paid for by Sweden's central bank. By 2022, the foundation held about 6 billion Swedish kronor in invested capital.
