Nobel, Alfred
ACHIEVEMENT(S): Explosives manufacturer and founder of Nobel Prize
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: October 21, 1833, Stockholm, Sweden
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: December 10, 1896, San Remo, Italy; Aged 63
DISCIPLINE: Chemist/Philanthropist
FIELD: Chemistry/Philanthropy
LANGUAGE: Swedish
EDUCATION: Private tutors; St. Jakob's Higher Apologist School, Stockholm
MAJOR WORK: Created the Nobel Prizes
LIFE AND TIMES:
When Nobel was nine, he moved with his family from Stockholm to St. Petersburg, where his father had set up a prosperous engineering business, and later built an ammunitions factory. Nobel studied under Swedish and Russian tutors, and early on decided he wanted to be a poet. But he also took an interest in chemistry, and by the time was 17, his tutors declared him to be a fully prepared chemist.
Nobel's father opposed his son's desire to be a poet, and came up with a proposition: if Nobel gave up poetry, he would not only pay for a study trip to Germany, France, Italy and North America, but would arrange for Nobel to work for a time with Swedish inventor Ericsson*. Nobel reluctantly agreed, but harbored regrets for the rest of his life. From 1850 to 1852, he travelled, learned five European languages, and immensely broadened his knowledge of chemistry.
During the 1853-56 Crimean War, Nobel worked so hard trying to fill orders at his father's ammunitions company, he fell ill and in 1854 had to be sent away to a spa. After the war, the Russians cancelled all orders for munitions and Nobel's father went bankrupt. In 1859, the family returned to Stockholm, where Nobel worked on two explosives: gun-cotton, invented in 1846 by the German, Schonbein*; and Dynamite / TNT*, invented in 1847 by the Italian, [Sobrero](https://app.thebrain.com/brain/f3e16344-7cd9-4fa3-ae1d-59876e128474/67a8885c-a28d-5671-8121-4b6988cc7f00)*, but thought too volatile and dangerous to handle on an industrial basis.
In 1862, Nobel's father came up with a simplified method for manufacturing nitroglycerine, and in 1863, Nobel developed a mercury fulminate detonator for igniting it. Up to this point, the explosive had been detonated by heat, but Nobel found it could be controlled better if detonated by a sharp shock. In 1863, Nobel was granted a patent for his innovation, and the Nobel family set up a factory at Helenborg, near Stockholm, to manufacture nitroglycerine.
After a year, an explosion razed the factory and took the lives of five people, including Nobel's youngest brother, Emil. In 1865, the Nobel’s opened another explosives factory, the Nitroglycerin Company, at Winterwick, near Stockholm, and then their first factory abroad, at Krommel, Germany. Because horrific accidents involving nitroglycerine were happening all over the world and some countries had banned the substance, Nobel set himself to developing a safer form of the explosive.
After many experiments, he produced dynamite, in which nitroglycerine was mixed with kieselguhr*, an absorbent, inert earth. The new explosive was still powerful, but had one quarter the force of nitroglycerine and was considerably safer to make and handle. Nobel got a patent for dynamite in 1866, and it was quickly adopted around the world. In the next five years, nitroglycerine production increased several hundred times. In the early 1870s, Nobel opened dynamite factory at Ardeer, Scotland, where a serious accident pointed up a major shortcoming of dynamite: it was liable to leak dangerous drops of nitroglycerine and Nobel set to rectifying this fault.
In 1875, he came up with blasting gelatin or gelignite, which combined a colloidal solution of gun cotton in nitroglycerine. Gelignite was even more powerful than nitroglycerine alone, and had the advantage of being much less sensitive to shock, making it less likely to explode unexpectedly. In the mid 1870s, Nobel's two brothers, Ludwig and Robert, began a petroleum business on the Caspian Sea, and turned to Nobel for financial support. In 1877, the brothers formed "The Naphtha Production Company Brothers Nobel" or "Branobel". Nobel's share was at first 10 percent, but this grew substantially as more and more capital was needed to fund expansion.
In 1887, Nobel patented ballisite, one of the first nearly smokeless explosive powders for military use in artillery missiles and torpedoes. Ballisite was composed of nitroglycerin, gun-cotton (nitrocellulose) and benzol with camphor and other additives, and burned ferociously with great precision. Nobel's final explosive innovation was progressive smokeless powder, an adaptation of ballisite.
Despite Nobel's many battles over patent rights -- particularly in the United States and Britain -- he made a gigantic fortune from his inventions, owning explosives factories in Norway, Finland, Bohemia, Scotland, France, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, and Hungary, as well as in North America, and still maintaining his interest in Branobel petroleum.
In 1886, Nobel united his all his dynamite companies into two trusts: the Nobel Dynamite Trust Company of London, for British and German interests; and the Societe Centrale de Dynamite of Paris, for French, Swiss, Italian, South American and other interests. In 1891, the French government raised a fuss when Nobel agreed to manufacture ballisite in Italy, even though France had been offered the contract, but turned it down. Offended and angry, Nobel closed down some of his French assets and left Paris where he had lived since 1873. He settled in San Remo, in Northern Italy, for the final five years of his life.
In 1893, Nobel effectively withdrew from active business. In the same year, he was awarded an honorary doctorate at Uppsala, Sweden, an honor which he cherished. Throughout his life, he had a wide range of intellectual interests, including international relations and the principal European literatures. This was reflected in his will, drawn up in 1895, which bequeathed his entire fortune to a fund that would award annual prizes to "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". In 1958, the newly discovered Element No. 102 was named "nobelium" in his honor.
ASSESSMENT: The Nobel prizes, awarded on Dec. 10 every year, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896, have become an enduring monument to a brilliant inventor, a visionary empire builder, and a humanist. The prizes are awarded independent of ideology, race, sex, or nationality
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: His work related to that of Mendeleyev*, Samuel Morse*
He built Diesel* engines in Russia
ONELINER: Alfred Nobel, founder of Nobel Prize
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fant, Kenne, Alfred Nobel, A Biography, Arcade Publishing House; New York, 1993 .
PARENTS: Immanuel Nobel; Andrietta Ahlsell
SIBLINGS: Robert; Ludwig; Emil
SPOUSE: None
CHILDREN: None