Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833–96) was a Swedish chemist and industrialist, and the inventor of dynamite and other powerful explosives. However, he is best remembered for the Nobel Prizes, which he endowed with the bulk of his fortune.
Born in Stockholm, Nobel was raised in St. Petersburg. He was taught chemistry by his tutors and spoke fluent English, French, German, Swedish, and Russian. In 1850, he went to Paris to study chemistry and then went on to America for four years, before returning to work in his father’s factory in St. Petersburg.
In 1859, Nobel returned to Sweden and set up a factory there to make nitroglycerin, a liquid explosive. He invented dynamite in 1866 and patented a more powerful explosive, gelignite, in 1876. With the considerable fortune he made from the manufacture of these explosives and his oil fields in Russia, he endowed the annual prizes that bear his name.
Ragnar Sohlman, one of Nobel’s closest associates, established the Nobel Foundation. The first Nobel Prizes for peace, literature, physics, chemistry, and psychology or medicine awarded in 1901. The Swedish National Bank introduced the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in Nobel’s honor in 1969. A Nobel Prize is one of the most prestigious prizes that a person can receive for intellectual services rendered to humanity.
The synthetic transuranic element Nobelium (chemical symbol No) is named after Nobel.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Alfred Nobel
If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.
—Alfred Nobel
Topics: Satisfaction, Ideas
Hope is nature’s veil for hiding truth’s nakedness.
—Alfred Nobel
Topics: Hope
Second to agriculture, humbug is the biggest industry of our age.
—Alfred Nobel
For my part, I wish all guns with their belongings and everything could be sent to hell, which is the proper place for their exhibition and use.
—Alfred Nobel
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