Alfred Nobel – His Life and WorkAlfred Nobel – His Life and WorkAlfred Nobel – His Life and WorkAlfred Nobel was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833. His father Immanuel Nobel was an engineer and inventor who built bridges and buildings in Stockholm. In connection with his construction work Immanuel Nobel also experimented with different techniques for blasting rocks.
Alfreds mother, born Andriette Ahlsell, came from a wealthy family. Due to misfortunes in his construction work caused by the loss of some barges of building material, Immanuel Nobel was forced into bankruptcy the same year Alfred Nobel was born. In 1837 Immanuel Nobel left Stockholm and his family to start a new career in Finland and in Russia. To support the family, Andriette Nobel started a grocery store which provided a modest income. Meanwhile Immanuel Nobel was successful in his new enterprise in St. Petersburg, Russia. He started a mechanical workshop which provided equipment for the Russian army and he also convinced the Tsar and his generals that naval mines could be used to block enemy naval ships from threatening the city.
The naval mines designed by Immanuel Nobel were simple devices consisting of submerged wooden casks filled with gunpowder. Anchored below the surface of the Gulf of Finland, they effectively deterred the British Royal Navy from moving into firing range of St. Petersburg during the Crimean war (1853-1856). Immanuel Nobel was also a pioneer in arms manufacture and in designing steam engines.
Successful in his industrial and business ventures, Immanuel Nobel was able, in 1842, to bring his family to St. Petersburg. There, his sons were given a first class education by private teachers. The training included natural sciences, languages and literature. By the age of 17 Alfred Nobel was fluent in Swedish, Russian, French, English and German. His primary interests were in English literature and poetry as well as in chemistry and physics. Alfreds father, who wanted his sons to join his enterprise as engineers, disliked Alfreds interest in poetry and found his son rather introverted. In order to widen Alfreds horizons his father sent him abroad for further training in chemical engineering. During a two year period Alfred Nobel visited Sweden, Germany, France and the United States. In Paris, the city he came to like best, he worked in the private laboratory of Professor T. J. Pelouze, a famous chemist. There he met the young Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero who, three years earlier, had invented nitroglycerine, a highly explosive liquid. Nitroglycerine was produced by mixing glycerine with sulfuric and nitric acid. It was considered too dangerous to be of any practical use. Although its explosive power greatly exceeded that of gunpowder, the liquid would explode in a very unpredictable manner if subjected to heat and pressure. Alfred Nobel became very interested in nitroglycerine and how it could be put to practical use in construction work. He also realized that the safety problems had to be solved and a method had to be developed for the controlled detonation of nitroglycerine. In the United States he visited John Ericsson, the Swedish-American engineer who had developed the screw propeller for ships. In 1852 Alfred Nobel was asked to come back and work in the family enterprise which was booming because of its deliveries to the Russian army. Together with his father he performed experiments to develop nitroglycerine as a commercially and technically useful explosive. As the war ended and conditions changed, Immanuel Nobel was again forced into bankruptcy. Immanuel and two of his sons, Alfred and Emil, left St. Petersburg together and returned to Stockholm. His other two sons, Robert and Ludvig, remained in St. Petersburg. With some difficulties they managed to salvage the family enterprise and then went on to develop the oil industry in the southern part of the Russian empire. They were very successful and became some of the wealthiest persons of their time.
After his return to Sweden in 1863, Alfred Nobel concentrated on developing nitroglycerine as an explosive. Several explosions, including one (1864) in which his brother Emil and several other persons were killed, convinced the authorities that nitroglycerine production was exceedingly dangerous. They forbade further experimentation with nitroglycerine within the Stockholm city limits and Alfred Nobel had to move his experimentation to a barge anchored on Lake Mдlaren. Alfred was not discouraged and in 1864 he was able to start mass production of nitroglycerine. To make the handling of nitroglycerine safer Alfred Nobel experimented with different additives. He soon found that mixing nitroglycerine with silica would turn the liquid into a paste which could be shaped into rods of a size and form suitable for insertion into drilling holes. In 1867 he patented this
-solution technique. It worked so well that his company, the Rheinmetall company, was awarded a patent on it.
When production of nitroglycerine in Sweden began in 1887 in the west of Sweden, Alfred Nobel began his life as a small businessman, using the money from his work as a hedge fund. No one involved in his business could figure out how such a success occurred, nor did he have any experience at making a product that could be used in the field.
Alfred Nobel’s patent of 1866 was later rejected by all interested parties, and his widow began a family business, which became a successful one. It is not known if this family business, which included his other sons, ever became more successful than his own production of nitroglycerine as a compound.
When The King came to take power in Sweden in 1872 the state-owned Swedish Food Bureau was renamed the Sweden Food Board, and the production of nitroglycerine increased rapidly. In this capacity, Alfred Nobel and his wife, Anna, created the Rüben, an oil producing vessel in which they produced nitroglycerine from the natural substances of the sea. A second vessel, which carried water, was built on an adjoining and more well known hill located north of the Swedish border. In 1874 the construction of Rüben was finished with a steam press having a diameter of six m. That opened a way for production in great volumes and there the Swedish government began expanding the industry there. It took Alfred Nobel five years to reach his goal in Sweden as Sweden was only two generations since its first great monarch. In 1895 Alfred Nobel was elected to the House of Representatives in Sweden. In 1912 he became President of the Swedish Parliament and in 1925 the Swedish government became the state of Denmark. He was also elected President of the Swedish House of Representatives. This victory came when, in the early nineteen-nineteenth century, the Supreme Court of Sweden decided that nitroglycerine was not an agent for human use and that such a discovery should be made only for educational purposes. His son, Alfred, took over in this direction in 1928, and his legacy, which went through five family members, is a rich testament to the quality and character of a man. Alfred Nobel has been awarded twenty-five Nobel Peace Medals and four German Peace Scholarships. He served as a private secretary to Richard Nixon as foreign minister and went on to become President of the United States for twenty years. He earned his B.A. from Dartmouth College and M.A., from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and from the University of Minnesota, both in the early stages of his career.
Alfred holds four World Titles, the most recent being the highest honour issued by Pope Pius XI in December 2009.
In the 1970’s Alfred Nobel was awarded the John Adams award for his contribution to medicine. In 1981 Alfred Nobel was elected President of the United States and the United States has only 16 Nobel Prizes by virtue of having no country’s representative elected.
As President of the United States of America, Alfred Nobel took over a number of responsibilities including, among other things, was selected President of the Federal Council of Trade Unions under the First Presidency of the United States; as well as the United States Trade Representative, as well as its Director of the International Trade Commission at the Hague, and as well as the Secretary of the National