Alfred Nobel instituted Nobel Prize
Alfred Bernhard Nobel 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.
Nobel was the third son of Immanuel Nobel (1801-1872) and Andriette
Ahlsell Nobel (1805-1889). Born in Stockholm on 21 October 1833, he went
with his family to Saint Petersburg in 1842, where his father (who had
invented modern plywood) started a “torpedo” works. Alfred studied
chemistry with Professor Nikolay Nikolaevich Zinin.
Alfred Nobel |
When Alfred was 18, he went to the United States to study chemistry
for four years and worked for a short period under John Ericsson.[1] In
1859, the factory was left to the care of the second son, Ludvig Nobel
(1831-1888), who greatly enlarged it.
Alfred, returning to Sweden with 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 at tha University
of Torino). A big explosion occurred on the 3rd September 1864 at their
factory in Heleneborg in Stockholm, killing five people, among them
Alfred’s younger brother Emil.
The foundations of the Nobel Prize were laid in 1895 when Alfred
Nobel wrote his last will, leaving much of his wealth for its
establishment. Since 1901, the prize has honored men and women for
outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature,
for work in peace and now economics.
Though Nobel remained unmarried, his biographers note that he had at
least three loves. Nobel’s first love was in Russia with a girl named
Alexandra, who rejected his proposal.
In 1876 Bertha Kinsky became Alfred Nobel’s secretary but after only
a brief stay left him to marry her old flame, Baron Arthur Gundaccar von
Suttner. Though her personal contact with Alfred Nobel had been brief,
she corresponded with him until his death in 1896, and it is believed
that she was a major influence in his decision to include a peace prize
among those prizes provided in his will. Bertha von Suttner was awarded
the 1905 Nobel Peace prize, ‘for her sincere peace activities’.
Nobel’s third and long-lasting love was with a flower girl named
Sofie Hess from Vienna. This liaison lasted for 18 years and in many of
the exchanged letters, Nobel addressed his love as ‘Madame Sofie Nobel’.
After his death, according to his biographers - Evlanoff and Flour, and
Fant - Nobel’s letters were locked within the Nobel Institute in
Stockholm and became the best-kept secret of the time. They were
released only in 1955, to be included with the biographical data of
Nobel.
Sri Kantha has suggested that ‘ the one personal trait of Nobel that
helped him to sharpen his creativity include his talent for information
access, via his multi-lingual skills. Despite the lack of formal
secondary and tertiary level education, Nobel gained proficiency in six
languages: Swedish, French, Russian, English, German and Italian. He
also developed literary skills to write poetry in English.’
His Nemesis, a prose tragedy in four acts about Beatrice Cenci,
partly inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci, was printed while
he was dying. The entire 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 been translated to
Slovenian via the Esperanto version.
Dynamite and Gelignite
Nobel found that when nitroglycerin was incorporated in an absorbent
inert substance like kieselguhr (diatomaceous earth) it became safer and
more convenient to handle, 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.
In order to help reestablish his name and improve the image of his
business from the earlier controversies associated with the dangerous
explosives, Nobel had also considered naming the highly powerful
substance “Nobels Safety Powder”, but settled with Dynamite instead,
referring to the Greek word for ‘strength’.
Nobel later on combined nitroglycerin with various nitrocellulose
compounds, similar to collodion, but settled on a more efficient recipe
combining another nitrate explosive, and obtained a transparent,
jelly-like substance, which was a more powerful explosive than dynamite.
‘Gelignite’, or blasting gelatin, as it was named, was patented in
1876; and was followed by a host of similar combinations, modified by
the addition of potassium nitrate and various other substances.
Gelignite was stable, transportable and conveniently formed to fit
into bored holes, like those used in drilling and mining than the
previous used compounds and was adopted as the standard technology for
mining in the Age of Engineering bringing Nobel a great amount of
financial success, though at a significant cost to his health.
The Prizes
The erroneous publication in 1888 of a premature obituary of Nobel by
a French newspaper, condemning him for his invention of dynamite, is
said to have brought about his decision to leave a better legacy after
his death.[2] 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 27 November 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 10 December 1896 at
Sanremo, Italy. He left 31 million kronor to fund the prizes which,
allowing for inflation, would be hundreds of millions of US dollars
today.[citation needed]
The first three of these prizes are awarded for eminence in physical
science, chemistry and medical science or physiology; the fourth is for
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 fraternity, in the suppression or reduction of standing
armies, or in the establishment or furtherance of peace congresses.
There is no prize awarded for mathematics.[4][5]
The Formulation about the literary prize, “in an ideal direction” (i
idealisk riktning in Swedish), is cryptic and has caused much confusion.
For many years, the Swedish Academy interpreted “ideal” as “idealistic”
(idealistisk) and used it as a reason not to give the prize to important
but less romantic authors, such as Henrik Ibsen and Leo Tolstoy. This
interpretation has since been revised, and the prize has been awarded
to, for example, Dario Fo and José Saramago, who definitely do not
belong to the camp of literary idealism.
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 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 had not left instructions on how to deal with the
distinction between science and technology.
Since the deciding bodies he had chosen were more concerned with the
former, 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
(not funded by the Nobel foundation) indirectly fill this gap.
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.” |