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Dynamite And Nobel Prizes
Alfred Nobel
SWEDISH INVENTOR
WRITTEN BY : The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Alfred
Nobel, in full Alfred
Bernhard Nobel, (born October 21, 1833, Stockholm, Sweden - died December
10, 1896, San Remo, Italy), Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist who
invented dynamite and other more powerful explosives and who also founded the
Nobel Prizes.
Alfred Nobel was the fourth son of Immanuel and
Caroline Nobel. Immanuel was an inventor and engineer who had married Caroline
Andrietta Ahlsell in 1827.
The couple had eight children, of whom only Alfred and three
brothers reached adulthood.
Alfred was prone to illness as a child, but he enjoyed a
close relationship with his mother and displayed a lively intellectual curiosity
from an early age.
He was interested in explosives, and he learned the
fundamentals of engineering from his father.
Immanuel, meanwhile, had failed at various business ventures
until moving in 1837 to St. Petersburg in Russia, where he prospered
as a manufacturer of explosive mines and machine tools.
The Nobel family left Stockholm in 1842 to join the father
in St. Petersburg. Alfred’s newly prosperous parents were now able to send him
to private tutors, and he proved to be an eager pupil.
He was a competent chemist by age 16 and was fluent in
English, French, German, and Russian as well as Swedish.
Alfred Nobel left Russia in 1850 to
spend a year in Paris studying chemistry and then spent four years in
the United States working under the direction of John Ericsson, the builder of
the ironclad warship Monitor.
Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Nobel worked in his
father’s factory, which made military equipment during the Crimean War.
After the war ended in 1856, the company had difficulty
switching to the peacetime production of steamboat machinery, and it went
bankrupt in 1859.
Alfred and his parents returned to
Sweden, while his brothers Robert and Ludvig stayed behind in Russia to salvage
what was left of the family business.
Alfred soon began experimenting with explosives in a small
laboratory on his father’s estate.
At the time, the only dependable explosive for use in mines
was black powder, a form of gunpowder.
A recently discovered liquid compound, nitroglycerin,
was a much more powerful explosive, but it was so unstable that it could not be
handled with any degree of safety.
Nevertheless, Nobel in 1862 built a small factory to
manufacture nitroglycerin, and at the same time he undertook research in the
hope of finding a safe way to control the explosive’s detonation.
In 1863 he invented a practical detonator consisting of a
wooden plug inserted into a larger charge of nitroglycerin held in a metal
container; the explosion of the plug’s small charge of black powder serves to
detonate the much more powerful charge of liquid nitroglycerin.
This detonator marked the beginning of Nobel’s reputation as
an inventor as well as the fortune he was to acquire as a maker of explosives.
In 1865 Nobel invented an improved detonator called a
blasting cap; it consisted of a small metal cap containing a charge of mercury
fulminate that can be exploded by either shock or moderate heat.
The invention of the blasting cap inaugurated the
modern use of high explosives.
Nitroglycerin itself, however, remained
difficult to transport and extremely dangerous to handle.
So dangerous, in fact, that Nobel’s nitroglycerin factory
blew up in 1864, killing his younger brother Emil and several other people.
Undaunted by this tragic accident, Nobel built several
factories to manufacture nitroglycerin for use in concert with his blasting
caps.
These factories were as safe as the knowledge of the time
allowed, but accidental explosions still occasionally occurred.
Nobel’s second important invention was that of dynamite in
1867.
By chance, he discovered that nitroglycerin was absorbed to
dryness by kieselguhn, a porous siliceous earth, and the resulting mixture was
much safer to use and easier to handle than nitroglycerin alone.
Nobel named the new product dynamite (from Greek dynamis, “power”) and was granted patents for it
in Great Britain (1867) and the United States (1868).
Dynamite established Nobel’s fame worldwide and was soon put
to use in blasting tunnels, cutting canals, and building railways and roads.
In the 1870s and ’80s Nobel built a
network of factories throughout Europe to manufacture dynamite, and he formed a
web of corporations to produce and market his explosives.
He also continued to experiment in search of better ones,
and in 1875 he invented a more powerful form of dynamite, blasting
gelatin, which he patented the following year.
Again by chance, he had discovered that mixing a solution of
nitroglycerin with a fluffy substance known as nitrocellulose results in a
tough, plastic material that has a high water resistance and greater blasting
power than ordinary dynamites.
In 1887 Nobel introduced ballistite, one of the first
nitroglycerin smokeless powders and a precursor of cordite.
Although Nobel held the patents to dynamite and his other
explosives, he was in constant conflict with competitors who stole his
processes, a fact that forced him into protracted patent litigation on
several occasions.
Nobel’s brothers Ludvig and Robert, in
the meantime, had developed newly discovered oilfields near Baku (now in
Azerbaijan) along the Caspian Sea and had themselves become immensely
wealthy.
Alfred’s worldwide interests in explosives, along with his
own holdings in his brothers’ companies in Russia, brought him a large fortune.
In 1893 he became interested in Sweden’s arms industry, and
the following year he bought an ironworks at Bofors, near Varmland, that became
the nucleus of the well-known Bofors arms factory.
Besides explosives, Nobel made many other inventions, such
as artificial silk and leather, and altogether he registered more than 350
patents in various countries.
Nobel’s complex personality puzzled his
contemporaries.
Although his business interests required him to travel
almost constantly, he remained a lonely recluse who was prone to fits of
depression.
He led a retired and simple life and was a man of ascetic habits,
yet he could be a courteous dinner host, a good listener, and a man of incisive
wit.
He never married, and apparently preferred the joys of
inventing to those of romantic attachment.
He had an abiding interest in literature and wrote
plays, novels, and poems, almost all of which remained unpublished.
He had amazing energy and found it difficult to relax after
intense bouts of work.
Among his contemporaries, he had the reputation of a liberal
or even a socialist, but he actually distrusted democracy, opposed suffrage for
women, and maintained an attitude of benign paternalism paternalism toward
his many employees.
Though Nobel was essentially a pacifist and hoped that the
destructive powers of his inventions would help bring an end to war, his view
of mankind and nations was pessimistic.
By 1895 Nobel had developed angina
pectoris, and he died of a cerebral hemorrage at his villa in San Remo, Italy,
in 1896.
At his death his worldwide business empire consisted of more
than 90 factories manufacturing explosives and ammunition.
The opening of his will, which he had drawn up in Paris on
November 27, 1895, and had deposited in a bank in Stockholm, contained a great
surprise for his family, friends, and the general public.
He had always been generous in humanitarian and scientific
philanthropies, and he left the bulk of his fortune in trust to establish what
came to be the most highly regarded of international awards, the Nobel Prizes.
We
can only speculate about the reasons for Nobel’s establishment of the prizes
that bear his name.
He
was reticent about himself, and he confided in no one about his decision
in the months preceding his death.
The
most plausible assumption is that a bizarre incident in 1888 may have triggered
the train of reflection that culminated in his bequest for the Nobel
Prizes.
That
year Alfred’s brother Ludvig had died while staying in Cannes, France.
The
French newspapers reported Ludvig’s death but confused him with Alfred, and one
paper sported the headline “Le marchand de la mort est mort” (“The merchant of
death is dead.”)
Perhaps
Alfred Nobel established the prizes to avoid precisely the sort of posthumous
reputation suggested by this premature obituary.
It
is certain that the actual awards he instituted reflect his lifelong interest
in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology, and literature.
There
is also abundant evidence that his friendship with the prominent Austrian
pacifist Bertha von Suttner inspired him to establish the prize for peace.
Nobel
himself, however, remains a figure of paradoxes and
contradictions: a brilliant, lonely man, part pessimist and part idealist, who
invented the powerful explosives used in modern warfare but also established
the world’s most prestigious prizes for intellectual services rendered to
humanity.
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