Alfred Nobel Some Called Him the Merchant of Death

A bankrupt father and a rich childhood

Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm in 1833, the year his father, the engineer Immanuel Nobel, went bankrupt. The family later followed the father to Saint Petersburg, where he built naval mines for the Russian army and navy and grew rich.

Alfred never went to university. Private tutors taught him chemistry, literature and languages; he became fluent in six. In Paris he met the Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, who had discovered nitroglycerin, an explosive far more powerful than gunpowder. Its problem was that it was unstable: a small shock could set it off. Nobel was convinced he could tame it.

The explosion at Heleneborg

On 3 September 1864 an explosion at the family's works at Heleneborg in Stockholm killed five people. One of them was his younger brother Emil, who was twenty. Stockholm banned the experiments within the city, and for a time Nobel continued his work on a barge on a lake outside town.

Dynamite

In 1866 he found the answer: he mixed nitroglycerin into a fine, absorbent earth called kieselguhr and shaped the paste into sticks. It was powerful but safe enough to transport and handle. He called it dynamite and patented it in 1867.

Dynamite changed the world. It blasted tunnels through mountains and cleared the way for canals, railways, roads and mines. Nobel built factories in more than twenty countries and registered 355 patents. He became one of the richest men in Europe. But dynamite was also used in war, and he later developed a smokeless military gunpowder.

A lonely man and a friend for peace

Nobel never married, lived alone for much of his life and called himself a misanthrope. One of his closest friends was the Austrian writer Bertha von Suttner, who became one of the leaders of the European peace movement. He reportedly told her that his factories might put an end to war sooner than her congresses.

The obituary

In April 1888 Alfred's brother Ludvig died. According to a famous story, a French newspaper confused the brothers and printed an obituary of Alfred instead, under the headline "The merchant of death is dead", and seeing it made Alfred think about how he would be remembered.

It is a powerful story, but the obituary itself has never been found, and Nobel never wrote about it. That is why our episode tells it as a story, not as a fact.

The will

On 27 November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed his last will. About 94 per cent of his fortune was to go to a fund, whose interest would be awarded every year as prizes to those who had brought the greatest benefit to mankind: in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.

Nobel died in San Remo, Italy, on 10 December 1896, at the age of 63. His relatives contested the will, and it took several years of legal battles before the first Nobel Prizes were awarded, in 1901.

In 1905 his old friend Bertha von Suttner received the Nobel Peace Prize. Today the Nobel Prize is the most famous award in the world, and the man who made his money from explosives is remembered for it.