Table of Contents
NOBEL PRIZE
EARLY LIFE
- Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born on October 21, 1833, in Stockholm, Sweden, the fourth of Immanuel and Caroline Nobel’s eight children.
- Nobel was often sickly as a child, but he was always lively and curious about the world around him. Although he was a skilled engineer and ready inventor, Nobel’s father struggled to set up a profitable business in Sweden.
- When Nobel was 4 years old, his father moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, to take a job manufacturing explosives and the family followed him in 1842.
EXPLOSIVES
- Nobel’s newly affluent parents sent him to private tutors in Russia, and he quickly mastered chemistry and became fluent in English, French, German and Russian as well as his native language, Swedish.
- As a young man, Nobel studied with chemist Nikolai Zinin; then, in 1850, went to Paris to further the work. There he met Ascanio Sobrero, who had invented nitroglycerin three years before
- 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’
EXPLOSIVES
- 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.
- 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.
DYNAMITE
- On 3 September 1864, a shed used for preparation of nitroglycerin exploded at the factory in Heleneborg, Stockholm, killing five people, including Nobel’s younger brother Emil.
- 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 PRIZE
- 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.
- A French newspaper erroneously published condemned Nobel for his invention of dynamite. Provoked by the event and disappointed with how he felt he might be remembered.
NOBEL PRIZE
- Nobel set aside a bulk of his estate to establish the Nobel Prizes to honor men and women for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and for working toward peace. Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, established the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1968 in honor of Nobel.
- After taxes and bequests to individuals, Nobel’s will allocated 94% of his total assets, 31,225,000 Swedish kronor, to establish the five Nobel Prizes. In 2012, the capital was worth around SEK 3.1 billion (US$472 million, EUR 337 million).
NOBEL PRIZE
- 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.
- On December 10, 1896, Alfred Nobel succumbed to a lingering heart ailment, suffered a stroke, and died. Unbeknownst to his family, friends or colleagues, he had left most of his wealth in trust, in order to fund the awards that would become known as the Nobel Prizes.
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