Nobel Born: Dynamite Inventor Who Founded World's Top Prize

Alfred Nobel patented 355 inventions over his lifetime. Dynamite was just the most famous. Born in Stockholm in 1833, the son of an engineer and inventor, he grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father manufactured armaments for the Russian military. He was educated by private tutors, spoke five languages fluently, and studied chemistry in Paris before returning to work in his father's nitroglycerin laboratory. The substance was devastatingly powerful but lethally unstable, and an 1864 explosion at the factory killed his younger brother Emil and four others. Nobel spent years trying to stabilize nitroglycerin, eventually discovering that mixing it with diatomaceous earth produced a substance that could be handled safely and detonated on command. He patented it as dynamite in 1867, and the invention transformed construction, mining, and warfare. He held factories in ninety locations across twenty countries and amassed an enormous fortune. When a French newspaper mistakenly ran his obituary in 1888, confusing him with his dead brother Ludvig, the headline read "The Merchant of Death Is Dead." He read it. He was still alive, but the words stuck. Three years later he wrote a will leaving his entire fortune, approximately thirty-one million Swedish kronor, to fund annual prizes for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. The executors of his estate fought with his family over the will's validity for several years before the first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901. The prizes have since become the most prestigious international awards in their fields, carrying a current prize amount of approximately eleven million Swedish kronor each. Nobel died on December 10, 1896, in San Remo, Italy. He never married.