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Alfred Nobel

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Chemists

   CAPTION: Alfred Nobel

      Born    October 21, 1833
              Stockholm, Sweden
      Died    December 10, 1896
              Sanremo, Italy
   Occupation Chemist, engineer, innovator, armaments manufacturer and the
              inventor of dynamite.

   Alfred Bernhard Nobel  ( October 21, 1833, Stockholm, Sweden— December
   10, 1896, Sanremo, Italy) was a Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator,
   armaments manufacturer and the inventor of dynamite. He owned Bofors, a
   major armaments manufacturer, which he had redirected from its previous
   role as an iron and steel mill. In his last will, he used his enormous
   fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes. The synthetic element Nobelium
   was named after him.

Personal background

   Nobel, a descendant of the 17th century scientist, Olaus Rudbeck
   (1630-1708), was the third son of Immanuel Nobel (1801-1872). Born in
   Stockholm, he went with his family in 1842 to St. Petersburg, where his
   father (who had invented modern plywood) started a "torpedo" works. In
   1859 this was left to the care of the second son, Ludvig Nobel
   (1831-1888), by whom it was greatly enlarged, and Alfred, returning to
   America with his family and his father after the bankruptcy of their
   family business, devoted himself to the study of explosives, and
   especially to the safe manufacture and use of nitroglycerine
   (discovered in 1847 by Ascanio Sobrero, one of his fellow-students
   under Théophile-Jules Pelouze at the University of Torino). Several
   explosions were reported at their family-owned factory in Heleneborg,
   and a disastrous one in 1864 killed Alfred's younger brother Emil and
   several other workers.

   Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been honoring men and women from all
   corners of the globe for outstanding achievements in physics,
   chemistry, medicine, literature, and for work in peace. The foundations
   for the prize were laid in 1895 when Alfred Nobel wrote his last will,
   leaving much of his wealth to the establishment of the Nobel Prize.

   Less well known is that Alfred Nobel also wrote a book. His only book,
   Nemesis, a prose tragedy in four acts about Beatrice Cenci, partly
   inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley's blank verse tragedy in five acts The
   Cenci, was printed when he was dying, and the whole stock except for
   three copies was destroyed immediately after his death, being regarded
   as scandalous and blasphemous. The first surviving edition (bilingual
   Swedish-Esperanto) was published in Sweden in 2003. The play has not
   yet (May 2003) been translated into any language other than Esperanto.

   Alfred Nobel is buried in Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm.

Dynamite

   Nobel found that when nitroglycerin was incorporated in an absorbent
   inert substance like kieselguhr (diatomaceous earth) it became safer
   and more convenient to manipulate, and this mixture he patented in 1867
   as dynamite. Nobel demonstrated his explosive for the first time that
   year, at a quarry in Redhill, Surrey, England.

   He next combined nitroglycerin with another explosive, gun-cotton, and
   obtained a transparent, jelly-like substance, which was a still more
   powerful explosive than dynamite. Gelignite, or Blasting gelatin as it
   was called, was patented in 1876, and was followed by a host of similar
   combinations, modified by the addition of potassium nitrate, and
   various other substances.

The Prizes

   The erroneous publication in 1888 of a premature obituary of Nobel by a
   French newspaper, condemning his invention of dynamite, is said to have
   made him decide to leave a better legacy to the world after his death.
   The obituary stated Le marchand de la mort est mort ("The merchant of
   death is dead") and went on to say, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich
   by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died
   yesterday."

   On November 27, 1895 at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel
   signed his last will and testament and set aside the bulk of his estate
   to establish the Nobel Prizes, to be awarded annually without
   distinction of nationality. He died of a stroke on December 10, 1896 at
   Sanremo, Italy. The amount set aside for the Nobel Prize foundation was
   31 million kronor (4,223,500.00 USD).

   The first three of these prizes are for eminence in physical science,
   in chemistry and in medical science or physiology; the fourth is for
   the most remarkable literary work "in an ideal direction" and the fifth
   is to be given to the person or society that renders the greatest
   service to the cause of international brother/sisterhood, in the
   suppression or reduction of standing armies, or in the establishment or
   furtherance of peace congresses.

   The formulation about the literary prize, "in an ideal direction"
   (Swedish i idealisk riktning), is cryptic and has caused much
   consternation. For many years, the Swedish Academy interpreted "ideal"
   as "idealistic" (in Swedish idealistisk), and used it as a pretext to
   not give the prize to important but less romantic authors, such as
   Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and Leo Tolstoy. This interpretation
   has been revised, and the prize given to, for example, Dario Fo and
   José Saramago, who definitely do not belong to the camp of literary
   idealism.

   When reading Nemesis in its original Swedish and looking at his own
   philosophical and literary standpoint, it seems possible that his
   intention might have been rather the opposite of that first believed -
   that the prize should be given to authors who fight for their ideals
   against such authorities as God, Church and State.

   There was also quite a lot of room for interpretation by the bodies he
   had named for deciding on the physical sciences and chemistry prizes,
   given that he had not consulted them before making the will. In his
   one-page testament he stipulated that the money should go to
   discoveries or inventions in the physical sciences and to discoveries
   or improvements in chemistry. He had opened the door to technological
   awards, but he had not left instructions on how to do the split between
   science and technology. Since the deciding bodies he had chosen in
   these domains were more concerned with science than technology it is
   not surprising that the prizes went to scientists and not to engineers,
   technicians or other inventors. In a sense the technological prizes
   announced recently by the World Technology Network are an indirect (and
   thus not funded by the Nobel foundation) continuation of the wishes of
   Nobel, as he set them out in his testament.

   In 2001, his great-grandnephew, Peter, asked the Bank of Sweden to
   differentiate its award to economists given "in Alfred Nobel's memory"
   from the five other awards. This has caused much controversy whether
   the prize for Economics is actually a "Nobel Prize" (see Bank of Sweden
   Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel).

Nobel Prize rumors

   There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics (the Fields Medal is often
   considered to be the equivalent in terms of prestige). A common legend
   states that Nobel decided against a prize in mathematics because a
   woman - said to be either his fiancé, wife, or mistress - rejected him
   for or cheated on him with a famous mathematician, often claimed to be
   Gösta Mittag-Leffler. There is no historical evidence to support the
   story, and Nobel was never married.
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