Alfred The Great (1969)

Fulfillment Of Lifetime Interests Of Alfred Nobel

Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 21, 1833, as the third of four sons to Immanuel and Andriette (Ahlsell) Nobel. That same year, his father, an engineer and builder who built bridges and buildings in Stockholm, went bankrupt when barges full of building materials were lost at sea. Alfred’s mother, born Andriette Ahlsell, came from a wealthy family. When Immanuel Nobel was forced into bankruptcy and left Stockholm and his family in 1837 to start a new career in Finland and in Russia, to support the family, Andriette Nobel started a grocery store which provided a modest income. Meanwhile Immanuel Nobel was successful in his new enterprise in St. Petersburg, Russia. He started a mechanical workshop which provided equipment for the Russian army and he also convinced the Tsar and his generals that naval mines could be used to block enemy naval ships from threatening the city.

Immanuel’s business was to manufacture submarine mines and torpedoes that he had designed for the Russian government. His factory flourished, especially with the manufacture and sale of naval mines of his own construction. The naval mines designed by Immanuel Nobel were simple devices consisting of submerged wooden casks filled with gunpowder. Anchored below the surface of the Gulf of Finland, they effectively deterred the British Royal Navy from moving into firing range of St. Petersburg during the Crimean war (1853-1856). Immanuel Nobel was also a pioneer in arms manufacture and in designing steam engines.

Successful in his industrial and business ventures, Immanuel Nobel was able, in 1842, to bring his family to St. Petersburg. There, his sons were given a first class education by private teachers. The training included natural sciences, languages and literature. By the age of 17 Alfred Nobel was fluent in Swedish, Russian, French, English and German. His primary interests were in English literature and poetry as well as in chemistry and physics. Alfred’s father, who wanted his sons to join his enterprise as engineers, disliked Alfred’s interest in poetry and found his son rather introverted. In order to widen Alfred’s horizons his father sent him abroad for further training in chemical engineering. During a two year period Alfred Nobel visited Sweden, Germany, France and the United States. In Paris, the city he came to like best, he worked in the private laboratory of Professor T. J. Pelouze, a famous chemist.  It was in Paris that he got in contact with nitroglycerin for the first time, an explosive liquid which was first made by an Italian scientist named Ascanio Sobrero in 1847. Nobel’s command of foreign languages was excellent; by the age of seventeen he was fluent in Swedish, Russian, French, English, and German, which aided him in his future business transactions.

In 1852 Alfred went back to Russia to work with his father as the Russian Navy had placed big orders for the Crimean War (1853-1856). After the war ended and conditions changed, Immanuel Nobel experienced another bankruptcy and moved back to Stockholm with his family. Two of his sons remained in Russia and developed very successful careers in the oil industry. Back in Stockholm, Alfred, his father and Alfred’s younger brother Emil started a laboratory in 1859 where they started to do experiments with the explosive liquid nitroglycerin. In 1863 Nobel began trying to master the process of the synthesis of nitroglycerine. His first partial success was a mixture of nitroglycerine with black gunpowder, called “blasting oil.” Alfred saw that the advantages nitroglycerin had over gun powder could be used in a commercial and technical way. The danger of working with such an unstable material was a problem. Over the years they had several explosions in the laboratory; a big one in 1864 killed his younger brother Emil and several other people. The city of Stockholm enforced laws that experiments with explosives could not be made within the city limits of Stockholm. 

This did not stop Alfred; he moved his laboratory to a barge on the Lake of Malaren. Alfred had by now realized that there were safety problems to be solved; he had to find a safe way to transport the explosive as well as a method to have control of the detonation of nitroglycerin. Nitroglycerine is an explosive liquid which was first made by Ascanio Sobrero in 1846 by treating glycerol with a mixture of nitric and sulphuric acid. The reaction which follows is highly exothermic, i.e. it generates heat and will result in an explosion of nitroglycerine, unless the mixture is cooled while the reaction is taking place. Liquid nitroglycerine is colorless if pure. It is soluble in alcohols but insoluble in water. Nitroglycerine is extremely sensitive to shock and in the early days, when impure nitroglycerine was used, it was very difficult to predict under which conditions nitroglycerine would explode.

In 1864 the company Nitroglycerin AB was founded and a mass production of nitroglycerin started, and the following year, 1865, he opened up the first factory abroad in Hamburg. Alfred still worked on the safety issue of the explosive, and in 1866 he successfully mixed nitroglycerin with silica which turned the liquid into a paste. This paste, which could be formed and shaped as desired, made it possible for safe transportation. The new material was patented in 1867 under the name “dynamite.” He also invented a blasting cap (detonator) which could be ignited by lighting a fuse and was also patented. The market for dynamite and blasting caps grew very rapidly and over the years Alfred founded factories in over 20 countries in 90 different locations. In 1893 he bought the Bofors-Gullspang company in Sweden, today a world known munitions and firearm factory.

In 1868 Nobel and his father were awarded the Letterstedt Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Nobel highly valued this award, which was the only prize he ever received, and which was perhaps the source of his idea for a similar prize he later established. Nobel, one of the wealthiest men of his time, constantly moved between his factories and his houses equipped with laboratories. He was both an industrialist and an administrator, handling his business without a secretary. As he wrote in a letter: “My home is where I work, and I work everywhere.”

Intensive work and travel did not leave much time for a private life. At the age of 43 he was feeling like an old man. At this time he advertised in a newspaper “Wealthy, highly-educated elderly gentleman seeks lady of mature age, versed in languages, as secretary and supervisor of household.” The most qualified applicant turned out to be an Austrian woman, Countess Bertha Kinsky. After working a very short time for Nobel she decided to return to Austria to marry Count Arthur von Suttner.  Over the years Bertha von Suttner became increasingly critical of the arms race. She wrote a famous book, Lay Down Your Arms and became a prominent figure in the peace movement. No doubt this influenced Alfred Nobel when he wrote his final will which was to include a Prize for persons or organizations who promoted peace.  Since Nobel’s prodigious activities had a negative effect on his health, which had been poor since his youth, after 1890 he preferred to stay at his home in San Remo, Italy.   

Alfred was a great inventor and had 355 patents overall. Others to mention, besides dynamite, include synthetic rubber and leather, and artificial silk. Many of the companies founded by Nobel have developed into industrial enterprises that still play a prominent role in the world economy, for example Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), Great Britain; Société Centrale de Dynamite, France; and Dyno Industries in Norway.   Besides interest in his business, Alfred was very interested in social and peace-related issues; he also had a great interest in literature and poetry and even wrote some of his own works. On November 27, 1895, Nobel wrote his last will, in which he generously bequeathed his wealth to his relatives and friends. The second part of his will, however, is more famous, for it is here that he established the Nobel Prizes. Nobel’s property that was designated for the fund was worth seventy million Swedish crowns, and has continued to grow since then.

The executors of his will were two young engineers, Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist. They set about forming the Nobel Foundation as an organization to take care of the financial assets left by Nobel for this purpose and to coordinate the work of the Prize-Awarding Institutions. This was not without its difficulties since the will was contested by relatives and questioned by authorities in various countries. Nobel Prizes are awarded in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. The Nobel Prize ceremony is held in Stockholm on December 10 each year and the king of Sweden is the person in charge of handing over the prize to the awarded in each category. The ceremony for the Nobel Prize for peace, however, is held in Oslo, Norway.

Since 1969, a Nobel Prize, funded by the Swedish Bank, has also been awarded for outstanding achievements in economy. Nobel died on December 10, 1896, in San Remo. Shortly before his death he wrote: “It sounds like the irony of fate that I should be ordered to take nitroglycerin internally,” which had been prescribed to him as a treatment for angina pectoris. The Nobel Foundation, established in accordance with his will, awarded the first Nobel Prizes in 1901. Alfred Nobel’s greatness lay in his ability to combine the penetrating mind of the scientist and inventor with the forward-looking dynamism of the industrialist. Nobel was very interested in social and peace-related issues and held what were considered radical views in his era. The Nobel Prizes became an extension and a fulfillment of his lifetime interests.

About the Author

Dr. Badruddin Khan teaches Chemistry in the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, India.

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