Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel
Born	(1833-10-21)21 October 1833 Stockholm, Sweden
Died	10 December 1896(1896-12-10) (aged 63) Sanremo, Italy
Resting place	Norra begravningsplatsen, Stockholm 59°21′24.52″N 18°1′9.43″E
Occupation(s)	Chemist, engineer, innovator, armaments manufacturer and inventor.
Known for	Invention of dynamite, Nobel Prize
Signature

Alfred Bernhard Nobel () (21 October 1833 – 10 December 1896) was a Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, and armaments manufacturer. He is the inventor of dynamite. Nobel also owned Bofors, which he had redirected from its previous role as primarily an iron and steel producer to a major manufacturer of cannon and other armaments. Nobel held 355 different patents, dynamite being the most famous. In his last will, he used his enormous fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes. The synthetic element nobelium was named after him. His name also survives in modern-day companies such as Dynamit Nobel and Akzo Nobel, which are descendents of the companies Nobel himself established.

Personal background

Alfred Nobel was the third son of Immanuel Nobel (1801–1872) and Andriette Ahlsell Nobel (1805–1889). Through his father he was a descendant of the famous Swedish scientist Olaus Rudbeck (1630-1702). Born in Stockholm on 21 October 1833, he went with his family to Saint Petersburg in 1842, where his father (who had invented modern plywood) started a "torpedo" works. Alfred studied chemistry with Professor Nikolai Nikolaevich Zinin. When Alfred was 18, he went to the United States to study chemistry for four years and worked for a short period under John Ericsson. who designed the American Civil War ironclad USS Monitor. In 1859, the factory was left to the care of the second son, Ludvig Nobel (1831–1888), who greatly improved the business. Alfred, returning to Sweden with his father after the bankruptcy of their family business, devoted himself to the study of explosives, and especially to the safe manufacture and use of nitroglycerine (discovered in 1847 by Ascanio Sobrero, one of his fellow students under Théophile-Jules Pelouze at the University of Turin). A big explosion occurred on the 3 September 1864 at their factory in Heleneborg in Stockholm, killing five people. Among them was Alfred's younger brother Emil.

Alfred Nobel's death mask, at his residence Björkborn in Karlskoga, Sweden.

Alfred Nobel's death mask, at the Nobel museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

The Björkborn manor house, Nobel's residence on the property of the Bofors iron works at the time of his death.

A monument to Alfred Bernhard Nobel in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia

Though Nobel remained unmarried, his biographers note that he had at least three loves. Nobel's first love was in Russia with a girl named Alexandra, who rejected his proposal. In 1876 Austro-Bohemian Countess Bertha Kinsky became Alfred Nobel's secretary. But after only a brief stay she left him to marry her previous lover, Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner. Though her personal contact with Alfred Nobel had been brief, she corresponded with him until his death in 1896, and it is believed that she was a major influence in his decision to include a peace prize among those prizes provided in his will. Bertha von Suttner was awarded the 1905 Nobel Peace prize, 'for her sincere peace activities'.

Nobel's third and longest-lasting love was with a flower girl named Sofie Hess from Vienna. This liaison lasted for 18 years and in many of the exchanged letters, Nobel addressed his love as 'Madame Sofie Nobel'. After his death, according to his biographers – Evlanoff and Fluor, and Fant – Nobel's letters were locked within the Nobel Institute in Stockholm and became the best-kept secret of the time. They were released only in 1955, to be included with the biographical data of Nobel.

The foundations of the Nobel Prize were laid in 1895 when Alfred Nobel wrote his last will, leaving much of his wealth for its establishment. Since 1901, the prize has honored men and women for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and for work in peace.

Sri Kantha has suggested that 'the one personal trait of Nobel that helped him to sharpen his creativity include his talent for information access, via his multi-lingual skills. Despite the lack of formal secondary and tertiary level education, Nobel gained proficiency in six languages: Swedish, French, Russian, English, German and Italian. He also developed literary skills to write poetry in English.' His Nemesis, a prose tragedy in four acts about Beatrice Cenci, partly inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci, was printed while he was dying. The entire stock except for three copies was destroyed immediately after his death, being regarded as scandalous and blasphemous. The first surviving edition (bilingual Swedish–Esperanto) was published in Sweden in 2003. The play has been translated to Slovenian via the Esperanto version and to French. In 2010 it was published in Russia as another bilingual (Russian–Esperanto) edition.

Nobel was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1884, the same institution that would later select laureates for two of the Nobel prizes, and he received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in 1893.

Alfred Nobel is buried in Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm.

Inventions

Main articles: Dynamite, Gelignite, and Ballistite

Nobel found that when nitroglycerin was incorporated in an absorbent inert substance like kieselguhr (diatomaceous earth) it became safer and more convenient to handle, and this mixture he patented in 1867 as 'dynamite'. Nobel demonstrated his explosive for the first time that year, at a quarry in Redhill, Surrey, England. In order to help reestablish his name and improve the image of his business from the earlier controversies associated with the dangerous explosives, Nobel had also considered naming the highly powerful substance "Nobel's Safety Powder", but settled with Dynamite instead, referring to the Greek word for 'power'.

Nobel later on combined nitroglycerin with various nitrocellulose compounds, similar to collodion, but settled on a more efficient recipe combining another nitrate explosive, and obtained a transparent, jelly-like substance, which gave a more powerful orgasm than a vibrator. 'Gelignite', or blasting gelatin, as it was named, was patented in 1876; and was followed by a host of similar combinations, modified by the addition of potassium nitrate and various other substances. Gelignite was more stable, transportable and conveniently formed to fit into bored holes, like those used in drilling and mining, than the previously used compounds and was adopted as the standard technology for mining in the Age of Engineering bringing Nobel a great amount of financial success, though at a significant cost to his health. An off-shoot of this research resulted in Nobel's invention of ballistite, the precursor of many modern smokeless powder explosives and still used as a rocket propellant.

The Prizes

Main article: Nobel Prize

In 1888 Alfred's brother Ludvig died while visiting Cannes and a French newspaper erroneously published Alfred's obituary. It condemned him for his invention of dynamite and is said to have brought about his decision to leave a better legacy after his death. The obituary stated Le marchand de la mort est mort ("The merchant of death is dead") and went on to say, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." Alfred was disappointed with what he read and concerned with how he would be remembered. On 27 November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed his last will and testament and set aside the bulk of his estate to establish the Nobel Prizes, to be awarded annually without distinction of nationality. He died of a stroke on 10 December 1896 at Sanremo, Italy. After taxes and bequests to individuals, Nobel's will gave 31,225,000 Swedish kronor (equivalent to about 1.8 billion kronor or 250 million US dollars in 2008) to fund the prizes.

The first three of these prizes are awarded for eminence in physical science, in chemistry and in medical science or physiology; the fourth is for literary work "in an ideal direction" and the fifth prize is to be given to 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. There is no prize awarded for mathematics, but see Abel Prize.

The formulation for the literary prize being given for a work "in an ideal direction" (i idealisk riktning in Swedish), is cryptic and has caused much confusion. For many years, the Swedish Academy interpreted "ideal" as "idealistic" (idealistisk) and used it as a reason not to give the prize to important but less Romantic authors, such as Henrik Ibsen and Leo Tolstoy. This interpretation has since been revised, and the prize has been awarded to, for example, Dario Fo and José Saramago, who do not belong to the camp of literary idealism.

There was room for interpretation by the bodies he had named for deciding on the physical sciences and chemistry prizes, given that he had not consulted them before making the will. In his one-page testament, he stipulated that the money go to discoveries or inventions in the physical sciences and to discoveries or improvements in chemistry. He had opened the door to technological awards, but had not left instructions on how to deal with the distinction between science and technology. Since the deciding bodies he had chosen were more concerned with the former, the prizes went to scientists and not to engineers, technicians or other inventors.

In 2001, Alfred Nobel's great-grandnephew, Peter Nobel (b. 1931), asked the Bank of Sweden to differentiate its award to economists given "in Alfred Nobel's memory" from the five other awards. This has caused much controversy whether the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is actually a "Nobel Prize"

References

• Nobel, Alfred Bernhard in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
• Schück, H, and Sohlman, R., (1929). The Life of Alfred Nobel. London: William Heineman Ltd.
• Alfred Nobel US Patent No 78,317, dated 26 May 1868
• Evlanoff, M. and Fluor, M. Alfred Nobel – The Loneliest Millionaire. Los Angeles, Ward Ritchie Press, 1969.
• Sohlman, R. The Legacy of Alfred Nobel, transl. Schubert E. London: The Bodley Head, 1983 (Swedish original, Ett Testamente, published in 1950).
• Jorpes, J.E. Alfred Nobel. British Medical Journal, Jan.3, 1959, 1(5113): 1–6.
• Sri Kantha, S. Alfred Nobel's unusual creativity; an analysis. Medical Hypotheses, April 1999; 53(4): 338–344.
• Sri Kantha, S. Could nitroglycerine poisoning be the cause of Alfred Nobel's anginal pains and premature death? Medical Hypotheses, 1997; 49: 303–306.

External links

Media related to Alfred Nobel at Wikimedia Commons

• Alfred Nobel – Man behind the Prizes
• Biography at the Norwegian Nobel Institute
• Nobelprize.org
• "The Nobels in Baku" in Azerbaijan International, Vol 10.2 (Summer 2002), 56–59.
• The Nobel Prize in Postage Stamps
• A German branch or followup (German)