Alfred Nobel

• 1. Introduction

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  Alfred Nobel signed his last will on the 27th of November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris. He allocated 94% of his total assets to establish prizes that would annually recognize those who had "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind". His family had no idea. The man who had spent his adult life building explosives and armament factories across Europe was quietly arranging, in a single page of testament, the most consequential posthumous gift in the history of science and letters. How did a Swedish chemist with 355 patents become the unlikely patron of human progress? The answers stretch from the backstreets of Saint Petersburg to a quarry in Surrey, through an 18-year correspondence laced with affection and cruelty, and end at a villa overlooking the Mediterranean.

• 2. A Family Built on Explosions

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  Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm on the 21st of October 1833, the third son of Immanuel Nobel, an engineer who built bridges, blasted rocks, and eventually went bankrupt. That bankruptcy forced Immanuel to move to Saint Petersburg, then part of the Russian Empire, where he rebuilt his fortunes manufacturing machine tools and explosives. He also invented the veneer lathe, the device that would make modern plywood possible. When the family joined him in 1842, the now-prosperous Immanuel sent Alfred to private tutors. The boy excelled quickly. By young adulthood he was fluent in Swedish, French, Russian, English, German, and Italian, and had developed enough skill in English to write poetry. His only formal schooling lasted 18 months, from 1841 to 1842, at the Jacobs Apologistic School in Stockholm. He never attended university. The family factory supplied armaments during the Crimean War of 1853-1856, but struggled badly when that conflict ended. By 1859, Immanuel passed the factory to his second son, Ludvig Nobel, who was born in 1831 and would later co-found the oil company Branobel in Baku.

• 3. Nitroglycerin and Its Dangers

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  In Paris in 1850, Nobel encountered Ascanio Sobrero, the chemist who had synthesized nitroglycerin three years earlier. Sobrero was opposed to using it; the substance was dangerously unpredictable, detonating under variable heat or pressure. Nobel saw the problem differently. He became consumed by the question of how to harness nitroglycerin commercially, recognizing it was far more powerful than gunpowder. He had already filed his first patent, an English patent for a gas meter, in 1857. His first Swedish patent followed in 1863, covering "ways to prepare gunpowder". That same year he invented a detonator, and in 1865 he designed the blasting cap. Then disaster struck. On the 3rd of September 1864, a shed used for preparing nitroglycerin exploded at the Heleneborg factory in Stockholm, killing five people. One of them was Nobel's younger brother Emil. Stripped of his license to manufacture explosives, Nobel responded by founding a new company, Nitroglycerin AB, in the more isolated location of Vinterviken, so he could continue his research away from populated areas.

• 4. Dynamite, Gelignite, Ballistite

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  Nobel's solution to nitroglycerin's instability came from an unexpected material: kieselguhr, a type of diatomaceous earth. When nitroglycerin was absorbed into this inert, porous substance, it became far safer to handle and transport. Nobel patented this mixture in 1867 under the name "dynamite", a word he drew from the Greek for "power". He demonstrated it publicly that same year at a quarry in Redhill, Surrey, England. He had briefly considered naming it "Nobel's Safety Powder", the wording used in the patent itself, but settled on dynamite. The new explosive was adopted widely in mining and the construction of transport networks. In 1875, Nobel went further. By combining nitroglycerin with nitrocellulose compounds, he produced a transparent, jelly-like substance he named gelignite, or blasting gelatin, patented in 1876. It was more stable, more powerful, and more conveniently shaped to fit into bored drill holes than dynamite. Gelignite became the standard explosive of what historians call the Age of Engineering. A parallel line of research led in 1887 to ballistite, a smokeless powder that preceded cordite and is still used today as a rocket propellant. By his death, Nobel's businesses operated more than 90 explosives and armament factories.

• 5. The Reluctant Merchant

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  In 1888, Nobel's brother Ludvig died, and a widely repeated story holds that several French newspapers mistakenly published obituaries for Alfred instead. One obituary was said to have declared, in French, "The merchant of death is dead", followed by the line, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." Historians have not been able to verify this story, and some dismiss it as a myth. What does appear to be real is an obituary published on the first page of the Figaro on the 15th of April 1888, which described Nobel as someone who "can only with the utmost difficulty be considered a benefactor of mankind", noting that he was the inventor of dynamite. It was retracted the following day. Whether or not Nobel saw the disputed obituary, his pacifist character stood in visible tension with his business. On the 27th of November 1895, he signed his will and set aside 31,225,000 Swedish kronor, representing 94% of his assets, to fund five prizes awarded without distinction of nationality. In 1891, he had already left Paris after being accused of high treason against France for selling ballistite to Italy, and moved to Villa Nobel in Sanremo, overlooking the Mediterranean.

• 6. The Prizes He Designed

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  Nobel's one-page testament specified prizes for physical science, chemistry, medicine or physiology, literary work "in an ideal direction", and service to international peace. The phrase "in an ideal direction" comes from the Swedish "i idealisk riktning", and its meaning proved contentious. For many years the Swedish Academy interpreted "ideal" as meaning "idealistic", a reading that was used to exclude significant authors including Henrik Ibsen and Leo Tolstoy. That interpretation was eventually revised, and the prize went to writers such as Dario Fo and José Saramago. Nobel had not consulted the scientific bodies he named before writing the will, and he had not clearly drawn a boundary between science and technology. Since those bodies were oriented toward pure science, the prizes tended to go to scientists more often than to engineers or inventors. In 1968, Sweden's central bank Sveriges Riksbank donated a large sum to the foundation to fund a sixth prize in economics, in honor of Nobel. In 2001, Alfred Nobel's great-great-nephew Peter Nobel, born in 1931, asked the bank to formally distinguish this economics award from the original five, adding to debate about whether it qualifies as a genuine Nobel Prize. By 2022, the Nobel Foundation held approximately 6 billion Swedish kronor in invested capital.

• 7. Private Life and Private Letters

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  Nobel never married. His first love was a Russian woman named Alexandra, who rejected his marriage proposal. In 1876, Austro-Bohemian Countess Bertha von Suttner became his secretary briefly before leaving to marry her previous companion, Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner. She and Nobel corresponded until his death in 1896, and she is believed to have influenced his decision to include a peace prize in the will. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 for her peace activities. His longest relationship was with Sofija Hess of Celje, whom he met in 1876 in Baden bei Wien when he was 43 and she was 26. She was working in a flower shop that served wealthy clients. Their correspondence extended to 221 letters over 15 years. Nobel described her in those letters as his "great devourer of banknotes". The letters also document his antisemitism. He wrote that Jews "never do anything out of goodwill" and made repeated derogatory remarks about Hess's Jewish family. The newspaper Haaretz later criticized him for these statements. Hess eventually converted to Protestantism in 1894. The relationship ended after she became pregnant by another man, though Nobel continued to support her financially until she married the child's father. In letters to Hess, Nobel described his own health as marked by constant pain, debilitating migraines, and what he called "paralyzing" fatigue. By 1895 he had developed angina pectoris, and on the 10th of December 1896 he died of a stroke at Villa Nobel in Sanremo, aged 63.

• 8. Name and Legacy

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  Nobel was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1884, the same body that today selects laureates in Physics and Chemistry under the terms of his will. Uppsala University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1893. He is buried at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. A monument to him stands in Saint Petersburg along the Bolshaya Nevka River on the Petrogradskaya Embankment, near the street where his family lived until 1859. The abstract metal sculpture, designed by local artists Sergey Alipov and Pavel Shevchenko, was dedicated in 1991 to mark the 90th anniversary of the first Nobel Prize presentation. Nobel's name survives in the companies Dynamit Nobel and AkzoNobel, both descended from mergers involving firms he founded. The synthetic element nobelium was named in his honor. His literary work, a prose tragedy in four acts titled Nemesis about the Italian noblewoman Beatrice Cenci, was printed while he was dying. The entire print run was destroyed after his death, judged scandalous and blasphemous, except for three surviving copies. It was finally published in Sweden in 2003 and has since been translated into Slovenian, French, Italian, and Spanish.