Alfred Nobel
Based on Wikipedia: Alfred Nobel
In 1888, Alfred Nobel woke up to read his own obituary. A French newspaper had mistakenly reported his death instead of his brother Ludvig's, and the headline was damning: "The merchant of death is dead." The article went on to condemn the man who "became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before." Nobel was horrified. Is this how the world would remember him—as a dealer in destruction?
Whether this story is entirely true remains debated by historians. Some dismiss it as myth. But something profound shifted in Nobel's final years, leading him to redirect nearly his entire fortune—equivalent to hundreds of millions of dollars today—toward rewarding humanity's greatest achievements in science, literature, and peace.
The irony cuts deep. The man whose name now adorns the world's most prestigious peace prize spent his life perfecting explosives. The prizes that celebrate breakthroughs in medicine and chemistry were funded by weapons manufacturing. This tension between destruction and aspiration, between how Nobel lived and how he wanted to be remembered, makes his story one of the most fascinating redemption narratives in modern history.
A Childhood Forged in Failure and Flight
Alfred Bernhard Nobel entered the world on October 21, 1833, in Stockholm, Sweden, as the third son of Immanuel and Andriette Nobel. The family was distinguished but unlucky. Of eight children, only four boys survived past childhood. The Nobels traced their lineage to Olaus Rudbeck, a renowned Swedish scientist from the seventeenth century, but scientific pedigree didn't pay the bills.
Immanuel Nobel was an inventor and engineer who built bridges, constructed buildings, and experimented obsessively with methods for blasting rock. He was brilliant but terrible at business. After losing several barges full of building materials—imagine watching your livelihood literally float away—he went bankrupt.
Bankruptcy in nineteenth-century Sweden meant ruin. So Immanuel did what ambitious failures have always done: he fled to where nobody knew his name. He landed in Saint Petersburg, then part of the Russian Empire, and reinvented himself as a manufacturer of machine tools and explosives. This time, he succeeded spectacularly. He invented the veneer lathe, which made modern plywood possible, and began developing naval mines for the Russian military.
In 1842, the family reunited in Saint Petersburg, now prosperous enough to afford private tutors for young Alfred. The boy proved to be exceptional. He devoured chemistry and languages with equal appetite, eventually becoming fluent in six tongues: Swedish, French, Russian, English, German, and Italian. He even wrote poetry in English—not well, by most accounts, but fluently enough to attempt a four-act tragedy about an Italian noblewoman named Beatrice Cenci.
That play, called Nemesis, was printed while Nobel lay dying. Almost the entire print run was destroyed immediately after his death because it was considered scandalous and blasphemous. Only three copies survived. The man who would become synonymous with prestigious awards nearly had his literary legacy erased entirely.
The Dangerous Allure of Nitroglycerin
Nobel's formal education was remarkably brief—just eighteen months at a school in Stockholm. He never attended university. Instead, he learned by doing and by studying with brilliant mentors. One of these was Nikolai Zinin, a Russian chemist who introduced Nobel to a substance that would define his life: nitroglycerin.
In 1850, Nobel traveled to Paris and met Ascanio Sobrero, the Italian chemist who had synthesized nitroglycerin three years earlier. Sobrero was terrified of his own creation. Nitroglycerin was devastatingly powerful—far more potent than gunpowder—but catastrophically unpredictable. It could explode from heat, from pressure, from seemingly nothing at all. Sobrero wanted nothing to do with commercializing it.
Nobel saw opportunity where Sobrero saw only danger.
Think about what this meant. Here was a substance that could level mountains but might kill you while you were trying to move it. Nobel became obsessed with solving this problem: how do you tame something so powerful that it destroys anyone who handles it carelessly?
In 1851, at just eighteen years old, Nobel spent a year in the United States studying and working briefly with John Ericsson, the Swedish-American inventor who would later design the USS Monitor—the revolutionary ironclad warship that transformed naval warfare during the American Civil War. Nobel was already moving in circles where innovation and military application intertwined.
He filed his first patent in 1857, at age twenty-four. It was for a gas meter—mundane stuff. His first Swedish patent came in 1863, for methods of preparing gunpowder. By then, the family business was manufacturing armaments for the Crimean War, that brutal conflict between Russia and an alliance of Ottoman, French, and British forces.
When the war ended in 1856, military contracts evaporated. The Nobel family filed for bankruptcy again. Immanuel left the factory to his second son, Ludvig, and returned to Sweden with Alfred and his wife. Once more, failure scattered the Nobels across borders.
The Explosion That Changed Everything
Back in Sweden, Nobel devoted himself entirely to explosives—specifically to making nitroglycerin safe enough to use commercially. In 1863, he invented a detonator. In 1865, he designed the blasting cap. These weren't just incremental improvements; they were fundamental breakthroughs in controlling when and how explosives would detonate.
But nitroglycerin itself remained treacherous.
On September 3, 1864, a shed at the Nobel factory in Heleneborg, Stockholm, exploded. Five people died. One of them was Emil Nobel, Alfred's younger brother.
The Swedish government revoked Nobel's license to produce explosives. Most people would have walked away from the work that had just killed their brother. Nobel did the opposite. He founded a new company, Nitroglycerin AB, in Vinterviken—a more isolated location where he could continue experimenting away from populated areas.
Three years later, in 1867, he finally solved the problem that had haunted him. The solution was almost absurdly simple: he mixed nitroglycerin with kieselguhr, a chalkyite made from fossilized algae. The resulting paste was stable enough to handle, ship, and store without spontaneous detonation. You could drop it, heat it moderately, jostle it during transport. It wouldn't explode until you wanted it to.
Nobel considered calling it "Nobel's Safety Powder." Instead, he chose a name derived from the Greek word for power: dynamis. Dynamite.
Building the World with Controlled Destruction
Dynamite transformed the nineteenth-century world. To understand why, consider what construction and mining looked like before its invention. Moving rock meant either painstaking manual labor or the terrifying uncertainty of black powder charges. Building a tunnel through a mountain, excavating a mine shaft, clearing land for railroads—all of this was slow, expensive, and deadly.
Dynamite changed the economics of everything. Suddenly, you could blast through obstacles that had seemed permanent. The expansion of railroads across continents, the digging of canals, the extraction of minerals from deep underground—dynamite accelerated all of it.
Nobel demonstrated his invention in 1867 at a quarry in Redhill, Surrey, England. The demonstration was a success, and patents followed in the United States and Britain. Within years, dynamite had become essential infrastructure technology across the industrialized world.
But Nobel didn't stop there. In 1875, he invented gelignite, also called blasting gelatin. This was even more powerful than dynamite and more stable too. It could be molded into shapes that fit perfectly into drilled holes, making it ideal for mining operations. Gelignite became the standard technology for excavation during what historians call the "Age of Engineering."
In 1887, Nobel patented ballistite, a smokeless powder that became a precursor to modern propellants. Unlike traditional gunpowder, which produced thick clouds of smoke that revealed a shooter's position, smokeless powders burned cleanly. Ballistite and its descendants would transform both military firearms and rocketry.
By the time Nobel died, he held 355 patents and had established more than ninety factories producing explosives and armaments across the world. His business empire spanned continents. His brothers Ludvig and Robert had founded Branobel, an oil company operating primarily in Baku (now in Azerbaijan), and Nobel invested heavily in their ventures too.
The Nobel family had gone from bankruptcy to building an industrial dynasty in a single generation.
The Merchant of Death
There's an uncomfortable truth about Nobel's fortune: much of it came from weapons. His company Bofors—originally an iron and steel producer—became a major manufacturer of cannons and armaments under his ownership. The same explosives that tunneled through mountains also propelled shells into enemy fortifications.
Nobel seems to have been genuinely conflicted about this. He described himself as having pacifist inclinations, yet he spent his career perfecting instruments of destruction. He maintained that powerful weapons might actually prevent wars by making them too terrible to contemplate—an argument that would resurface a century later during the nuclear age.
Whether the notorious obituary actually existed remains uncertain. But something clearly troubled Nobel about his legacy. The man who would establish the world's most famous peace prize was also the man who made industrial-scale killing more efficient.
His personal life offered little comfort. Nobel never married, though he had three significant romantic relationships. The first, with a Russian woman named Alexandra, ended when she rejected his marriage proposal. The second was with Bertha von Suttner, an Austro-Bohemian countess who worked briefly as his secretary in 1876 before leaving to marry her previous lover. She would go on to become a prominent peace activist and likely influenced Nobel's decision to include a peace prize in his will. She won the Nobel Peace Prize herself in 1905.
His longest relationship lasted eighteen years—with Sofija Hess, a woman he met in 1876 at a flower shop in Baden bei Wien that catered to wealthy clients. Nobel was forty-three; she was twenty-six. Their correspondence, preserved in 221 letters, reveals a complicated dynamic. The relationship ended when Hess became pregnant by another man, though Nobel continued to support her financially.
Those letters also reveal darker aspects of Nobel's character, including antisemitic remarks that Hess—herself Jewish—inexplicably tolerated. She eventually converted to Protestantism in 1894. Human beings, even visionary ones, contain multitudes, and not all of them are admirable.
A Body Worn Out by Its Own Inventions
Nobel's health deteriorated throughout his later years. He suffered from constant pain, debilitating migraines, and what he described as "paralyzing" fatigue. Some modern analysts speculate he may have had fibromyalgia, though his contemporaries dismissed his complaints as hypochondria—which only deepened his depression.
There's also the grim possibility that his own inventions were killing him. Nitroglycerin, when absorbed through the skin or inhaled, causes severe headaches and can damage the cardiovascular system. Nobel spent years working directly with the substance. By 1895, he had developed angina pectoris—chest pain caused by reduced blood flow to the heart.
The cruel irony wasn't lost on him. Nitroglycerin, in small doses, was actually used as a treatment for angina. The chemical that might have been slowly killing him was also the only thing that could ease his symptoms.
On November 27, 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed his final will. He left most of his wealth—94 percent of his total assets, amounting to 31,225,000 Swedish kronor—to establish a foundation that would award annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine or physiology, literature, and peace.
His family knew nothing about this decision until after his death.
The Will That Shocked Everyone
Nobel's will created immediate controversy. He had essentially disinherited his relatives, leaving them only modest bequests while directing his fortune toward strangers who had "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." The Swedish establishment was skeptical. Some questioned whether such a foundation was even legally viable.
The will itself was only one page long and frustratingly vague. Nobel specified that prizes should go to "discoveries or inventions" in the physical sciences and to "discoveries or improvements" in chemistry. This opened the door to technology awards, but the institutions he'd chosen to administer the prizes—the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Karolinska Institute, the Swedish Academy, and the Norwegian Parliament—were more interested in pure science than applied engineering. As a result, scientists have won far more often than inventors.
The literary prize came with its own puzzles. Nobel stipulated it should recognize work "in an ideal direction"—i idealisk riktning in Swedish. What did that mean? For decades, the Swedish Academy interpreted "ideal" as "idealistic," which they used to justify excluding important but unsentimental writers like Henrik Ibsen and Leo Tolstoy. This interpretation has since been revised, allowing the prize to go to less romantic laureates like Dario Fo and José Saramago.
The peace prize remains the most contentious. Administered by the Norwegian Parliament rather than Swedish institutions—a choice that still generates speculation about Nobel's reasoning—it has gone to both celebrated peacemakers and controversial figures whose qualifications for the honor seem debatable in hindsight.
In 1968, Sweden's central bank added a sixth prize for economics, funded by a large donation to the Nobel Foundation in honor of their three hundredth anniversary. This "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences" has generated ongoing controversy about whether it truly belongs among Nobel's original five. Alfred Nobel's great-great-nephew, Peter Nobel, publicly asked in 2001 that the economics prize be differentiated from the others.
Legacy and Contradiction
Alfred Nobel died on December 10, 1896, from a stroke and brain hemorrhage. He was sixty-three years old. He's buried in Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm, and his death anniversary—December 10—is now the date when Nobel Prizes are awarded each year.
The foundation he created has grown enormously. By 2022, it held approximately six billion Swedish kronor in invested capital, generating the funds that continue to support prizes worth millions of dollars annually. The synthetic element nobelium, discovered in 1958, bears his name. Companies descended from his business ventures—Dynamit Nobel, AkzoNobel—still operate today.
What would Nobel make of his legacy? The man who worried about being remembered as a merchant of death is now synonymous with humanity's highest aspirations. His prizes have honored discoveries that eliminated diseases, revealed the structure of the universe, and advanced human understanding in countless directions. The peace prize, despite its controversies, has recognized individuals and organizations working to reduce violence and promote cooperation.
Yet the tension never fully resolves. Nobel's fortune came from explosives and weapons. His prizes celebrate achievement, but they were funded by destruction. He wanted to be remembered for something better than efficient killing—and he succeeded, spectacularly. But the story of how he got there remains complicated.
Perhaps that's the most human thing about Alfred Nobel. He was brilliant and depressive, innovative and antisemitic, a pacifist who manufactured cannons, a man who never married but fell in love repeatedly. He built an industrial empire on controlled explosions and then, in his final act, tried to redirect that fortune toward celebrating human greatness.
Whether he was seeking redemption or simply managing his legacy, the Nobel Prizes have become something larger than their founder. They've shaped how we recognize achievement, influenced careers and funding decisions, and created a global vocabulary for excellence. The merchant of death became the patron of human progress—not because he transformed himself, but because he transformed his money into something that would outlast his contradictions.
Every December, when the prizes are announced, we're reminded that even the most complicated legacies can be redirected. Nobel couldn't undo the weapons he'd built or the destruction they'd caused. But he could decide what his name would mean to future generations. In that sense, his final invention might have been his most significant: a mechanism for celebrating humanity that has now operated for over a century, funded by explosives and dedicated to peace.