Alfred Nobel: Biography of the Inventor of Dynamite

Biography of Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel was born into a family of engineers. When he was nine years old, his family moved to Russia, where he and his brothers received an excellent education in natural sciences and humanities. He spent much of his youth in St. Petersburg, where his father installed an arms factory, which went bankrupt in 1859.

He returned to Sweden in 1863, completing the investigations there that had begun in the field of explosives: in 1863, he created a detonator controlled by the explosions of nitroglycerin (invented in 1846 by the Italian Ascanio Sobrero). In 1865, he perfected the system with a detonator of mercury, and in 1867, he created dynamite, a plastic explosive resulting from nitroglycerin absorbed in a porous solid material (diatomaceous earth or kieselguhr), which reduced accidents. Accidental explosions of nitroglycerin, one of which had killed his brother Emilio Nobel and four other people, had aroused strong criticisms of Nobel and his works.

He produced still other inventions in the field of explosives, such as gelignite (1875) or ballistite (1887). Nobel patented his invention and founded companies to manufacture and market it since 1865 (first in Stockholm and Hamburg, then also in New York and San Francisco). Its products were of great importance for construction, mining, and engineering, but also for the military industry (for which some of them had been expressly designed, like ballistite or smokeless powder), and with them, he laid the foundations of a fortune that increased investment in oil wells in the Caucasus.

For all the above, Nobel accumulated enormous wealth, but also some sense of guilt for the evil and destruction that his inventions could have caused humanity in the fields of battle. The combination of these reasons led him to bequeath the bulk of his fortune to a philanthropic society, the Nobel Foundation, established in 1900 with the task of giving a series of annual awards to people who have done more for the benefit of mankind in the fields of:

• Physics
• Chemistry
• Medicine or Physiology
• Literature
• World Peace

From 1969, it also included the field of Economics (which is awarded by the Central Bank of Sweden).

In his will, signed on November 27, 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel established a fund with his fortune that would reward the best examples in Literature, Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Peace. A heart attack killed him when he was at his home in San Remo, Italy, on December 10, 1896, at the age of 63.

His fortune at the time of his death was estimated at 33 million crowns, of which he bequeathed only 100,000 crowns to his family. The rest was assigned to the Nobel Prizes. An asteroid is named (6032) Nobel in his honor.