From Stockholm to Saint Petersburg
Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm on 21 October 1833. His father Immanuel was an engineer and builder who, in the 1840s, moved the family to Saint Petersburg to pursue contracts with the Russian imperial government. Alfred spent his early teenage years in Russia, tutored privately in chemistry and literature. By the end of his teens, he is said to have read and written Swedish, Russian, French, English, and German.
That multilingual foundation mattered more than it might sound. Nobel became an unusually international entrepreneur, running patents and factories across Germany, France, Italy, the United States and Sweden. He was a traveler, not a recluse, reading contracts in three languages and stitching together a business empire that no single nation could contain. When his father's Russian venture collapsed in 1863, Alfred returned to Sweden and began work as an independent researcher.
Nitroglycerin and a Brother's Death
His subject was nitroglycerin, first synthesized by the Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero in 1847: a liquid so sensitive to shock that using it safely seemed nearly impossible. Nobel set out to find a way to transport it and detonate it on command.
In September 1864, a large explosion tore through the family's experimental shed at Heleneborg, on the edge of Stockholm. Five people died, including Alfred's younger brother Emil. Neighbors forced the testing to move out onto a barge in the nearby lake. The tragedy did not end the research. Three years later, in 1867, Nobel found that nitroglycerin absorbed into diatomaceous earth could be handled almost like a brick, and he patented the mixture as dynamite. Tunnels, mines and railways suddenly advanced at a new speed. The business spread across Europe and America, and eventually into the supply lines of the French and British militaries.
The "Merchant of Death" Obituary
In 1888, when Alfred's brother Ludvig died in Cannes, several European newspapers confused the two men and printed an obituary for Alfred by mistake. A French-language headline, "Le marchand de la mort est mort" ("The merchant of death is dead"), is widely quoted from this episode. A popular version of the story has Alfred reading his own obituary over breakfast and resolving to recast his legacy.
The exact newspaper has never been conclusively identified, however. Some biographers treat the headline itself as an apocryphal flourish rather than a verified clipping, and Nobel's own letters show that he had been thinking about how to return his wealth to society well before 1888. A cautious reading is that the mistaken obituary was a catalyst rather than a cause. What holds up regardless is the question it crystallized: what name did the inventor of dynamite want to leave behind?
The Paris Will, 1895
Nobel never married and had no children. On 27 November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, he signed his third and final will. Four Swedish witnesses co-signed the handwritten document, and its content was enough to surprise his family.
- Physics
- Chemistry
- Physiology or Medicine
- Literature
- Peace
In these five fields, the will directed that annual prizes be given to "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Nationality was not to be a factor. Roughly 94 percent of the estate, about 31 million Swedish kronor at the time, was committed to the endowment. A little over a year later, on 10 December 1896, Nobel died of a stroke at his home in Sanremo, Italy, aged 63.
The will produced predictable turmoil. Relatives contested it, tax authorities in France and Sweden argued over where the estate legally lived, and it took years to execute. The first prizes were awarded on 10 December 1901, the fifth anniversary of Nobel's death. That date, falling at the turn of the twentieth century, became fixed as the Nobel Foundation's ceremonial day.
Economic Sciences, the "Sixth" Prize
Today we speak of six Nobel categories, but one of them has a different legal character. The full name is "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel," established in 1968 by Sweden's central bank on its 300th anniversary. It is not part of Alfred Nobel's will. The first award was given in 1969 to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen.
The Nobel Foundation administers the prize alongside the original five, yet distinguishes it in official materials. Whether the Economics Prize "really counts" as a Nobel Prize is a debate that has been running ever since its creation, and some members of the Nobel family have opposed the arrangement from the start. The existence of a sixth prize at all is, in its way, a measure of how much weight the Nobel name has come to carry.
The Legacy Today
More than 120 years after its founding, the Nobel Prize remains a summit for researchers and writers worldwide. At the same time, the three-laureate cap, the living-person rule, and the individual-honoring framework sit uneasily with the collaborative, interdisciplinary shape of much modern science. Overlooked contributors, injustices visible only in retrospect, delays stretching across decades: each year the prize's shine is accompanied by a new round of these arguments.
Even so, the founding sentence bears rereading. "Conferred the greatest benefit to humankind" is the closing instruction left by a man who built his fortune on dynamite. The inventor and the peace-prize founder, the man who armed and the man who tried to return his wealth to humanity: these two faces, hard to reconcile, may be exactly what Alfred Nobel left behind.