Alfred Bernhard Nobel (help·info) (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 seventeenth century scientist, Olaus Rudbeck (1630-1708), was the third son of Immanuel Nobel (1801-1872) and Andriette Ahlsell Nobel (1805-1889). Born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833, he went with his family in 1842 to St. Petersburg, where his father (who had invented modern plywood) started a "torpedo" works. Alfred studied chemistry for professor Nikolay Nikolaevich Zinin. In 1859 the factory 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.

Alfred Nobel also wrote 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 been translated to Slovenian via the Esperanto version.

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.

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