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Alfred Nobel
Monday, January 18, 2010
One of the most anticipated events each year -- worldwide -- is the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize, which honors a living individual who has significantly advanced peace in the world.
This year the event was particularly meaningful here in the United States, since our own president was the recipient of this prestigious award. While the Nobel prizes are familiar, we are perhaps not so familiar with the man behind the prizes.
Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1833, the third of four sons of a Swedish builder and inventor, Immanuel Nobel, who had developed the process for making what we now call plywood.
Though Nobel's plywood factory was successful, an accident, involving the loss of several barge loads of materials, forced his business into bankruptcy and the Nobel family moved to Russia, when Alfred was four years of age.
In Russia Immanuel Nobel developed a type of naval mine, which the Tsar used to protect the Gulf of Finland, and was credited with keeping the British Navy from shelling St. Petersburg, during the Crimean War (1853-1855).
As a successful industrialist, Immanuel was able to give his sons the best of educations, in Russia and abroad. By the age of 17 Alfred was fluent in Swedish, Russian, French, English and German.
Naturally, it was assumed that the all the boys would return to their father's factory as engineers. Therefore, it was something of a shock when Immanuel found that Alfred was more interested in literature and the writing of poetry then he was in helping his father in the munitions factory. To get his son back on the engineering track, and to improve his social skills, Immanuel sent Alfred on an extended study trip (four years) to the United States and to France, where he majored in chemistry and engineering studies.
In Paris, Alfred worked with a young Italian scientist, Ascanio Sobrero, who three years previously had invented the powerful, and highly volatile explosive, nitroglycerine. Although it was acknowledged that nitroglycerine was powerful, it was deemed too unstable and too dangerous to be of any commercial value.
Alfred became very interested in nitroglycerine, and saw it as a great tool for the mining industry -- if only it could be controlled and made transportable. It was to this end that he spent much of the rest of his working life. Over the course of the ensuing years Nobel obtained some 355 patents, most dealing with some phase of blasting, but some in such diverse fields as electro-chemistry, optics, biology and physiology.
In 1866 Nobel patented dynamite, which mixed nitroglycerine with silica to make a dough-like mixture. This product could be formed into shapes, like sticks, which could be placed in drilling holes for mining operations. The following year he patented a blasting cap, and another for a fuse, so that the dynamite could be ignited from a safe distance; these two inventions made dynamite very useful in industry, and relatively safe, and these proved to be the basis for Nobel's great fortune.
Getting nitroglycerine to dynamite involved many, many experiments, some of which resulted in accidents, one of which killed Nobel's own, younger brother, Emil.
The Nobels were really a remarkable family. In addition to Alfred's monumental achievements, Ludvig proved to be a very skilled manager, and was able to keep Nobel manufacturing plants producing products profitably in most of the countries of the world.
Robert Nobel handled the family's interests in the fuel business. At the time, kerosene was the fuel of choice for home lighting and heating. Robert discovered a more efficient way of refining crude oil into kerosene.
This led to oil exploration in Southern Russia, then to refinements in the transportation of oil. The Nobels became one of the wealthiest families of the world, in the days before the Bolshevik Revolution.
Alfred Nobel, naively, came to believe that his invention of dynamite would lead the world to a lasting peace. In a speech he proclaimed, "My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they will surely abide by golden peace." This was in a time of relative calm, before World Wars I and II, and before the atomic bomb.
Alfred Nobel never married; in fact, he was singularly unlucky in love. A fiancé, while he still lived in Russia, jilted him shortly before the two were to be married. In 1876 Nobel had a secretary, Bertha Kinsky, with whom he became very close. But she, too, married another. Nevertheless, Ms. Kinsky and Alfred kept up a frequent correspondence that continued to his death, in 1895. She is credited with encouraging him to use his vast fortune to advance world peace. She was rewarded for her efforts in 1905, when the committee awarded her the Nobel Peace Prize.
Finally, for many years Nobel kept up a romantic correspondence with a young woman, which began when she was still a girl. The letters between the two seem very innocent, but at the time of Nobel's death they were considered damaging to Mr. Nobel's character, and authorities chose to keep them secret for 50 years, until 1955.
In 1888, Alfred's brother, Ludvig passed away. A Paris newspaper mistakenly thought that it was Alfred who had died and published his obituary, referring to the industrialist as "The Merchant of Death."
This affected Alfred Nobel greatly. A pacifist at heart, he was beginning to feel that he and his invention were causing wars to become more devastating. This was the final event that caused Nobel to change his will, which then decreed that 94 percent of his estate (equivalent to $186 million 2008 U.S. dollars) was to be used for funding the Nobel Prizes (physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace). These dollars were invested in "safe" securities.
The Nobel Prizes have been awarded almost every year from 1901 through 2009. Although the monetary value of the prize fluctuates, the value remains substantial. In 1921 Einstein's prize was $330,000. In 2009, Barak Obama's prize was more than $1 million.
The Nobel Prize nominees have sometimes been controversial. Of the 781 prizes awarded, only 33 have been women. Madame Curie won twice -- once in chemistry, once in physics. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were all nominated for the Peace Prize. None of them won the prize, but neither did Mahatma Ghandi, who was nominated five times. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla carried on a feud for years, over AC current vs. DC current. Both were nominated for a Nobel Prize, but each let it be known that he would refuse the prize if the other were to receive the award first. Neither ever won.
Now well into a second century of awarding substantial monetary prizes and priceless world acclaim to individuals (and some organizations) who have made contributions to the betterment of mankind, it is probably safe to say that Alfred Nobel has done well in furthering civilization by his recognition of outstanding world citizens. Perhaps we have all benefitted from his efforts to salve his guilty conscience.