Alfred Nobel - Biography, Facts and Pictures
Alfred Nobel
Lived 1833 – 1896.
Alfred Nobel is famous for the annual prizes in science, literature, and peace awarded in his name.
Although he was born into poverty, his family members were creative and entrepreneurial; they worked hard and became successful. Alfred was the scientist of the family, inventing and manufacturing dynamite, the blasting cap, gelignite and ballistite. He grew fantastically rich on the proceeds of his explosives businesses.
In his last will and testament, he bequeathed over ninety percent of his fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes.
Advertisements
Beginnings
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born in Sweden’s capital city, Stockholm, on October 21, 1833.
His father was Immanuel Nobel, a self-made engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur who had been formally schooled only to the age of 14. His mother was Andriette Ahlsell, an accountant’s daughter.
Although at first Immanuel Nobel’s business prospered, by the time Alfred was born, his father was bankrupt. A series of business misfortunes followed by the family home burning to the ground had left the family penniless.
Alfred was their fourth-born child and barely survived his first few days. He suffered ill-health for most of his life. Alfred’s mother and her sickly son formed a strong bond through the years of constant care she gave him during his frequent illnesses.
When Alfred was four years old, his father left Sweden for Finland where he had been offered business opportunities; it was a long time before he sent any money home. Alfred’s maternal grandfather gave his daughter, Alfred’s mother, money to start a tiny grocery store in which she worked from first thing in the morning to last thing at night for a small profit.
Alfred began school aged seven – a school for impoverished children called Jacob’s Parish Apologist School. The school’s pupils and teachers were tough; there were frequent fights in the playground and most pupils were beaten by their teachers every day for any small mistakes in their schoolwork.
Alfred did well in his schoolwork, which made his absent father proud.
Russia
Immanuel, Alfred’s father, had also been doing well, forming a company producing arms for Russia’s military. Now wealthy, and the owner of a foundry and a factory, he sent for his family to join him in Russia in the fall of 1842. Alfred was aged nine when he sailed for Russia’s capital St. Petersburg. There it took him just a year to learn Russian fluently.
Instead of going to school, the Nobel children were taught by private tutors. Immanuel was a strong advocate of the Protestant work ethic. He taught his children that they could shape their own future prosperity with hard work and dedication. They were tutored and driven to work for long hours every day.
Some children would have found this oppressive, but Alfred prospered. He loved learning, and added English, French and German to the languages he could speak fluently. His tutors were of the highest quality – he was taught chemistry, his favorite subject, by university professors.
Meanwhile, Immanuel’s business was growing fast and he was making a wide and growing range of arms.
European and US Tour
At about the age of 16, Alfred considered becoming a writer.
Alfred Nobel at about age 16.
After mastering English, he had become a big fan of Shakespeare’s plays and had started writing poetry influenced by Percy Shelley. Alfred’s father appreciated the importance of good literature, but he did not want his son to follow this path.
He offered Alfred the opportunity to travel around Europe and the USA if he abandoned his literary aspirations and concentrated on working in the family’s prospering industrial and arms businesses.
Alfred agreed. On his tour he spent time in place of business interest – laboratories and factories – and spent extended amounts of time in Paris and New York. When, aged 19, he returned to Russia in 1852, he worked in the family business: by now it had about 1,000 employees.
Ill-health, Nitroglycerin, and Financial Trouble
Back in Russia, Alfred worked hard but suffered ill-health periodically.
By the time he was 25, the family business was in severe trouble. After its 1856 defeat in the Crimean War, Russia’s government stopped paying its bills. During the Crimean war, Immanuel had unsuccessfully tried to devise arms based on a new explosive, much more powerful than gunpowder, called nitroglycerin, but the substance proved difficult to detonate reliably.
Alfred had learned a lot about nitroglycerin in Paris from Ascanio Sobrero, the chemist who had first produced it, and he would return to experimenting with it a few years later.
The Nobels could not generate enough other work to compensate for the lost business from the Russian government. They liquidated most of their business, leaving what remained in the care of one of Alfred’s older brothers, Ludvig, who actually went on to make a great success of it.
Alfred’s parents returned to Sweden with a small amount of money. Alfred and his brother Robert stayed in Russia, sharing an apartment in St. Petersburg. Alfred set up a laboratory in the kitchen and began working on inventions.
In 1862, aged 29, he discovered that certain mixtures of nitroglycerin mixed with gunpowder allowed reliable detonation. His older brothers Robert and Ludvig helped him with large-scale testing on a frozen canal outside St. Petersburg.
Alfred Nobel’s Achievements
Nobel had an extraordinarily innovative mind, from which new ideas poured.
“If I come up with 300 ideas in a year, and only one of them is useful, I am content.”
Alfred Nobel
 
His genius was bolstered by steely determination to succeed and a huge capacity for hard work. These were driven by bitter memories of the poverty his family endured when he was a young boy.
Nitroglycerin
Early in 1863, Nobel returned from Russia to his hometown of Stockholm. Very soon he began experimenting in a laboratory on a small industrial site his father had taken in Heleneborg, outside the city. Although never physically strong, he worked 18 hour days, personally performing hundreds of experiments.
After learning how to detonate nitroglycerin with a small amount of gunpowder, Nobel began producing nitroglycerin in late 1863, with significant production beginnning in the summer of 1864.
However, disaster struck in September 1864. In a laboratory housed in a shed at Heleneborg, Nobel’s younger brother Emil was working alongside a student fulfilling a nitroglycerin order from a railroad company carving out a tunnel through rock. An accident in the shed caused a huge explosion, killing the pair instantly. Also killed were a young cleaner, a young boy, and a carpenter who, unluckily, was passing the site.
Although he was upset about the deaths, Nobel continued production of nitroglycerin. Demand for the explosive was so strong that by the beginning of the 1870s Nobel had opened production facilities – some of which would be blown up in accidents – all over Europe and in the USA.
Following nitroglycerin’s success, Nobel spent several years grappling with foreign patent offices whose rules made it difficult for a foreigner to prove he was entitled to a patent. He also spent precious time and energy battling with a number of crooks and shysters who tried to profit from his invention.
The Blasting Cap Detonator
In 1864, Nobel patented the blasting cap. He had performed many experiments seeking the best way to detonate explosives; in the blasting cap, he invented it.
A blasting cap is a small amount of explosive that, when detonated, pushes a pressure wave through the main explosive charge causing instant detonation of all of the explosive.
Variations of Nobel’s blasting cap are still the preferred way to detonate explosives. In fact, his blasting cap invention was used for over 50 years without modification.
Dynamite
In November 1863, Nobel mixed nitroglycerin with porous substances such as coal and produced a very powerful and stable explosive that could be detonated reliably.
In January 1864, he applied for a Swedish patent for this mixture. He then did nothing. He was too busy manufacturing and selling nitroglycerin and fighting patent disputes.
As he saw more and more nitroglycerin accidents occurring, Nobel returned to his experiments with nitroglycerin and porous substances. These experiments resulted in his creation of dynamite. His September 1866 Swedish patent reads:
“My new explosive, called dynamite, is simply nitroglycerin in combination with a very porous silicate… it is a reddish-yellow, soft and plastic mass that is pressed into cartridges of a certain thickness and then enclosed in paper wrappers.”
Alfred Nobel