Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on 21 October 1833. He was the third son of Immanuel Nobel (1801–1872), an inventor and engineer, and Andriette Nobel (née Ahlsell; 1805–1889). The couple married in 1827 and had eight children. The family was impoverished, and only Alfred and his three brothers survived beyond their childhood. Through his father, Alfred Nobel was a descendant of the Swedish scientist Olaus Rudbeck (1630–1702). Nobel's father was an alumnus of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and was an engineer and inventor who built bridges and buildings and experimented with different ways of blasting rocks. He encouraged and taught Nobel from a young age.

Following various business failures caused by the loss of some barges of building material, Immanuel Nobel was forced into bankruptcy. Nobel's father moved to Saint Petersburg, then part of the Russian Empire, and grew successful there as a manufacturer of machine tools and explosives. He invented the veneer lathe, which made possible the production of modern plywood, and started work on the naval mine. In 1842, the family joined him in the city. Now prosperous, his parents were able to send Nobel to private tutors, and the boy excelled in his studies, particularly in chemistry and languages, achieving fluency in English, French, German, and Russian. For 18 months, from 1841 to 1842, Nobel attended the Jacobs Apologistic School in Stockholm, his only schooling; he never attended university.

Nobel gained proficiency in Swedish, French, Russian, English, German, and Italian. He also developed sufficient literary skill to write poetry in English. His Nemesis is a prose tragedy in four acts about the Italian noblewoman Beatrice Cenci. It was printed while he was dying, but the entire stock was destroyed immediately after his death, except for three copies, being regarded as scandalous and blasphemous. It was published in Sweden in 2003 and has been translated into Slovenian, French, Italian, and Spanish.

Scientific career

As a young man, Nobel studied with chemist Nikolai Zinin; then, in 1850, he went to Paris to further the work. There he met Ascanio Sobrero, who had synthesized nitroglycerin three years before. Sobrero strongly opposed the use of nitroglycerin because it was unpredictable, exploding when subjected to variable heat or pressure. But Nobel became interested in finding a way to control and use nitroglycerin as a commercially usable explosive; it had much more power than gunpowder. In 1851 at age 18, he went to the United States for one year to study, working for a short period under Swedish-American inventor John Ericsson, who designed the American Civil War ironclad, USS Monitor. Nobel filed his first patent, an English patent for a gas meter, in 1857, while his first Swedish patent, which he received in 1863, was on "ways to prepare gunpowder". The family factory produced armaments for the Crimean War (1853–1856), but had difficulty switching back to regular domestic production when the fighting ended and they filed for bankruptcy. In 1859, Nobel's father left his factory in the care of the second son, Ludvig Nobel (1831–1888), who greatly improved the business. Nobel and his parents returned to Sweden from Russia, and Nobel devoted himself to the study of explosives, and especially to the safe manufacture and use of nitroglycerin. Nobel invented a detonator in 1863, and in 1865 designed the blasting cap.

On 3 September 1864, a shed used for preparation of nitroglycerin exploded at the factory in Heleneborg, Stockholm, Sweden, killing five people, including Nobel's younger brother Emil. He was then deprived of his license to produce explosives. Fazed by the accident, Nobel founded the company Nitroglycerin AB in Vinterviken so that he could continue to work in a more isolated area. Nobel invented dynamite in 1867, a substance easier and safer to handle than the more unstable nitroglycerin. Dynamite was patented in the US and the UK and was used extensively in mining and the building of transport networks internationally. In 1875, Nobel invented gelignite, more stable and powerful than dynamite, and in 1887, patented ballistite, a predecessor of cordite.

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. Nobel's brothers Ludvig and Robert founded the oil company Branobel and became hugely rich in their own right. Nobel invested in these and amassed great wealth through the development of these new oil regions. It operated mainly in Baku, Azerbaijan, but also in Cheleken, Turkmenistan. During his life, Nobel was issued 355 patents internationally, and by his death, his business had established more than 90 explosives and armament factories, despite his apparently pacifist character.

Health issues and death

In his letters to his mistress, Hess, Nobel described constant pain, debilitating migraines, and "paralyzing" fatigue, leading some to believe that he suffered from fibromyalgia. However, his concerns at the time were dismissed as hypochondria, leading to further depression.

By 1895, Nobel had developed angina pectoris.

On 27 November 1895, he finalized his will and testament, leaving most of his wealth in trust, unbeknownst to his family, to fund the Nobel Prize awards.

On 10 December 1896, he suffered a stroke/intracerebral hemorrhage and was first partially paralyzed and then died, aged 63. He is buried in Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm.

Based on his experimentation with explosives, his strenuous work habits, and the decline in his health at the end of the 1870s, some hypothesize that nitroglycerine poisoning was a contributing factor to his death.

Criticism of Nobel usually focuses on his leading role in the manufacture and sale of arms and ammunitions. Some people question his motives for his creation of the Nobel Prize, suggesting that he created it in an attempt to improve his reputation. For example, the 1984 public artwork Nobel Metamorphoses in Troisdorf, Germany – at the time the location of the Dynamit Nobel headquarters – contrasts war death statistics to peace prize recipients since the latter's inauguration in 1901 through a critical lens.

Antisemitism

Nobel made antisemitic statements in letters to his mistress Sofie Hess. During the late 19th and early 20th century, much of Europe was swept up by a strong current of virulent antisemitism. Within Nobel's letters are examples of his negative view of people of Jewish ancestry such as Hess's family. For example, he writes: "In my experience, [Jews] never do anything out of goodwill. They act merely out of selfishness or a desire to show off... among selfish and inconsiderate people, they are the most selfish and inconsiderate... all others exist to be fleeced."