Alfred Nobel

Swedish inventor and philanthropist

• Born: October 21, 1833
• Birthplace: Stockholm, Sweden
• Died: December 10, 1896
• Place of death: San Remo, Italy

Nobel invented dynamite and blasting caps and held patents for more than 350 inventions, but he is remembered mostly for the provision he made in his last will for the distribution of the income from the bulk of his estate to provide annual prizes to those who confer upon humankind the greatest benefits in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace.

Early Life

Alfred Bernhard Nobel spent his life in one sort of pursuit yet is enshrined in history for something quite different. He was the fourth son of Immanuel and Andriette Nobel. His father was a visionary, an inventor whose fortunes swung from one extreme to another. When the family’s fortunes were reduced, his mother operated a food shop to supplement their income. Shortly before Alfred’s birth, Immanuel’s business in Sweden foundered. In 1837, Immanuel made an attempt to reestablish himself in Finland but failed. By 1842, however, he was a modestly successful manufacturer of mechanical devices in St. Petersburg, Russia. He flourished there until 1858, when the Russian government canceled its contracts, creating for him a new round of financial difficulties.

During his time in Russia, Immanuel had become fascinated with the explosive qualities of nitroglycerin, realizing that if the substance could be controlled it would have tremendous potential as military weaponry as well as for use in heavy industry and mining. Alfred, frail, colorless, and thin, was a sickly child with a spinal defect, who early shared this interest in nitroglycerin with his father. Often he was too ill to attend school, and, in Russia, he was taught exclusively by tutors. He showed a natural gift for languages, acquiring them as he traveled. He had lived in Finland and Russia, and he spoke Swedish at home. Between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, Nobel traveled in Germany, France, and the United States, learning languages as he went. Nobel, always dedicated to work, was a perfectionist, always demanding more of himself than more healthy people do.

Nobel and his brothers Ludvig and Robert worked in their father’s plant in St. Petersburg. When it faced an impending financial disaster in 1858, Nobel, because of his fluency in English, was sent to England to try to negotiate financing for the business. He failed in this attempt, however, and his defeated father returned to Sweden. Nobel and his brothers remained in Russia, but in 1863, Nobel returned to Sweden to work with his father. Granted his first patent in 1857, Nobel was now on the way to discovering how to control nitroglycerin for commercial use. His invention of the blasting cap changed forever the way mining, massive construction, and war would be conducted.

Life’s Work

Liquid nitroglycerin is among the world’s most volatile substances. Nobel’s device for igniting it, the blasting cap, consisted of a charge of gunpowder that could be ignited by a fuse and was attached to liquid nitroglycerin. This blasting cap gave workers who set the device time to seek shelter from the ensuing explosion. So revolutionary was this invention that Nobel gained fame in a matter of months, but his life was not free from sorrow, difficulty, and loneliness.

Just a year after the blasting cap was invented, Nobel’s younger brother, Emil, a twenty-one-year-old student who worked in his brother’s laboratory making detonators, was in the laboratory when it caught fire and exploded, killing five people who were working there, including Emil. The loss of this young son was so devastating to Immanuel that he soon suffered a paralytic stroke, from which he never recovered. Nothing, however—not even Emil’s death—could shake Nobel’s belief in what he was doing, and he proceeded to open explosives factories across Europe and in the United States.

So great was his confidence that Nobel yielded his patent rights when he opened foreign factories, agreeing that instead of receiving royalty payments he would receive a substantial share of the proceeds from each factory. It is this arrangement that caused him to be numbered among the world’s wealthiest people by the time he died.

Nitroglycerin is a dangerous substance because it decomposes quickly; this decomposition inevitably leads to explosions. Few people realized during the 1860’s and 1870’s just how dangerous nitroglycerin was to work with. Two years after Nobel’s laboratory exploded in 1864, a ship carrying nitroglycerin exploded and capsized near Panama, killing seventy-four people. Within months of that explosion, a San Francisco warehouse, in which liquid nitroglycerin was stored, exploded, killing another fourteen people. Nobel’s factory near Hamburg, Germany, was completely destroyed by an explosion less than a year after it opened.

Continuing disasters impelled Nobel to find a safe way to store and ship nitroglycerin. Ever the inventor and thinker, Nobel knew that he had to find a way to turn nitroglycerin into a solid substance. He realized that he had to combine the liquid with something that could absorb it, and he finally settled on a siliconlike substance, kieselguhr, which was porous and would not add anything chemically to the substance with which it was mixed. After nitroglycerin was mixed with kieselguhr, it could be formed into shapes, wrapped in paper, then transported or stored. The result was dynamite, so named by Nobel from the Greek word for power, dunamis.

With this advance in the latter part of the 1860’s, Nobel was able to establish factories all over the world to mass-produce one of the world’s most destructive substances. The production of his plants increased from a mere 11 tons in 1867 to more than 3,000 tons in 1874, and to almost 67,000 tons produced by ninety-three factories—in all of which he had a financial interest—by the year of his death. Everyone connected with the production of dynamite was becoming rich; Nobel, however, because he shared in the profits of every dynamite factory in the world, was quickly gaining a financial position unheard of in Europe since the days of the Medicis.

Nobel’s interest in invention never waned. After he invented dynamite, he invented an explosive gelatin more powerful than nitroglycerin, virtually impervious to shock and unaffected by moisture, which predated the sophisticated plastic explosives now available. Before Orville and Wilbur Wright flew their airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, Nobel was experimenting with aerial photography as an expedient and accurate means of cartography, mounting his cameras on rockets. He was involved with experiments to find ways of synthesizing silk, rubber, and leather far in advance of the synthetic production of nylon, synthetic rubber, and vinyl a half century after his death. His smokeless gunpowder, balliste, first patented in 1887, was in great demand by armies throughout the world and added considerably to Nobel’s coffers.

Through all this time, Nobel wandered from one place to another, buying houses in Paris, where he spent a considerable amount of time; at San Remo, Italy, where he bought the villa in which he eventually died; and in Sweden at Bofors, where he spent the last summer of his life. Nobel never married and his romantic involvements were never notably fulfilling, although he had a long, quite distant relationship with an Austrian, Sofie Hess, much his junior, to whom he wrote nearly daily and whom he supported during the later years of his life even though she had been married to someone else.

Significance

In his final years, Alfred Nobel speculated that he would die alone, unattended by anyone who loved him; his prediction was accurate. He spent the summer of 1896 at his home, Björkborn in Bofors, after which he went to his home in Paris, and then to San Remo. His health was failing, but he continued to work, write to his friends, and plan. On December 10, 1896, Nobel collapsed in his laboratory, and that evening, with only his servants present, Nobel died of heart failure.

On November 27, 1895, Nobel had drafted a holograph will, replacing one that left his vast fortune essentially to relatives, servants, and friends. The new will, for which Nobel will be forever remembered, substantially reduced his personal bequests. It directed that his residual estate be invested conservatively and that the income from these investments be used to establish annual prizes to be awarded with no reservations regarding nationality to those people whose activities are deemed to be of the greatest benefit to humankind in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace.

Nobel’s will was contested and was in litigation for more than three years. Afterward, however, a system was established for the distribution of the income in the form of Nobel Prizes, the first set of which were awarded in 1901. As the income from the Nobel trust has increased, the size of each award has grown to the point that in 2005 the typical prize was worth over $1.3 million, more than thirty times what the same award had been worth fifty years earlier.

The list of Nobel laureates, which has now been expanded to include a sixth field, economics, contains the names of international giants in their fields: scientists of the stature of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Linus Pauling; writers such as William Faulkner and T. S. Eliot; physicians and physiologists such as Ivan Pavlov and Sir Alexander Fleming; and advocates of world peace such as Woodrow Wilson and Albert Schweitzer. The Nobel legacy is great because of the endowment he established to recognize those who contribute most to the benefit of humankind.

Bibliography

Bergengren, Erik. Alfred Nobel: The Man and His Work. New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962. This brief overview of Nobel’s life is supplemented by a list of Nobel institutions and of the awards that have been granted. It is particularly valuable for its discussion of Nobel’s inventions and for its detail about the growing use and sales of dynamite. The research is extremely careful.

Evlanoff, Michael, and Marjorie Fluor. Alfred Nobel: The Loneliest Millionaire. New York: Ward Ritchie Press, 1969. This book is a study of Nobel’s personal isolation and of his attempts to escape from his loneliness. It relates his establishing the Nobel Prizes to his guilt about the destructive effects of dynamite. Nobel is portrayed as a sensitive man with few roots, one whose intellect was a chief and isolating concern. Contains a list of all Nobel laureates from 1901 to 1968.

Fant, Kenne. Alfred Nobel: A Biography. Translated from the Swedish by Marianne Ruuth. New York: Little, Brown, 1993. Portrays Nobel as an isolated and melancholy misanthrope, convinced of life’s absurdities.

Jackson, Donald Dale. “The Nobility of Alfred Nobel.” Smithsonian 19 (November, 1988): 201-224. This substantial article, both meticulously researched and extremely well written, focuses on Nobel’s pessimism and loneliness and on their causes, relating these conditions to his establishing the Nobel Prizes. Jackson has intriguing notions concerning Hess, the young woman in Nobel’s life.

Nobelstiftelsen. Nobel: The Man and His Prizes. Rev. ed. New York: Elsevier, 1962. This authorized biography has chapters by eminent representatives from the five fields in which the awards were originally granted as well as a biographical chapter by Henrick Schück and a chapter on Nobel and the Nobel Foundation by Ragnar Sohlman. This book is a good starting point for those wishing to know more about Alfred Nobel.

Sohlman, Ragnar. The Legacy of Alfred Nobel: The Story Behind the Nobel Prizes. Translated by Elspeth Harley Schubert. London: Bodley Head, 1983. This book was published originally in Swedish under the title Ett Testamente in 1950. Sohlman was Nobel’s assistant in the last three years of his life and served as one of the executors of his will, giving him a significant role in establishing the Nobel award mechanism. Sohlman knew intimately the details of Nobel’s business and life, and he presents these details clearly and directly in this excellent book, which also contains a copy of Nobel’s will.