The famous merchant of death obituary may never have been printed
The tale goes that a French paper mistook his brother's death for Alfred Nobel's in 1888 and branded him the merchant of death, shaming him into founding the prizes. Historians cannot verify that line. A real Figaro notice did appear that April, grudgingly doubting he benefited mankind, and was retracted the following day.
Nobel was born in Stockholm on 21 October 1833, the third son of Immanuel Nobel, an engineer who experimented with blasting rock. Of eight children, only four brothers survived childhood. After bankruptcy, Immanuel rebuilt his fortunes in Saint Petersburg making machine tools and explosives, and the family followed in 1842. Alfred's only formal schooling was 18 months in Stockholm; he never attended university. Private tutors did the rest, and he became fluent in six languages and wrote poetry in English.
In Paris he met Ascanio Sobrero, who had made nitroglycerin and considered it far too unpredictable to use. Nobel wanted to tame it, since it was much stronger than gunpowder. The cost was personal: in 1864 an explosion at a shed in Stockholm killed five people, among them his younger brother Emil. Three years later he found that soaking nitroglycerin into kieselguhr, a porous earth, made it far safer to handle. He toyed with calling it Nobel's Safety Powder before choosing dynamite, from the Greek for power. Gelignite and ballistite followed, the latter an ancestor of smokeless powders.
By his death he held 355 patents and had founded over 90 explosives and arms factories, despite an apparently pacifist temperament. He owned Bofors and grew rich from his brothers' oil company in Baku. His only play, a tragedy about Beatrice Cenci, was judged so scandalous that nearly every copy was destroyed after he died; just three survived.
In November 1895, at a club in Paris, he signed a one-page will leaving 94 percent of his assets, 31,225,000 kronor, to five annual prizes open to any nationality. Its wording caused trouble. The literature prize was meant for work in an ideal direction, a phrase the Swedish Academy long read as idealistic, a reason to pass over Tolstoy and Ibsen. And because the science judges favoured discovery over invention, the prizes went to scientists far more often than to engineers.
Source: Alfred Nobel
