ALFRED NOBEL

Meet the man behind the prestigious Nobel Prize and discover its explosive origins

- SCOTT DUTFIELD

ALFRED NOBEL WAS BORN ON 21 OCTOBER 1833 IN STOCKHOLM, Sweden, to engineer Immanuel Nobel and his wife Andriette. In 1842, Alfred and his mother moved to St Petersburg to join his father, who had moved to Russia to pursue a string of successful ventures in engineering. This included providing the materials for Russian military underwater mines. Once there, the boy received a first-class education from private educators and showed an aptitude for the sciences, languages and literature.

To discourage a growing interest in poetry and literature, Nobel Senior sent him to travel across Europe and the US in the early 1850s to further his studies in chemical engineering. While in France, he spent time at the Paris laboratory of chemist Théophile-Jules Pelouze beside an Italian chemist named Ascanio Sorero, who had been working with an explosive chemical called nitroglycerin. During Nobel’s travels, the Crimean War had caused his father’s business to boom, but once the war ended it quickly went into bankruptcy, driving Immanuel to move his enterprise back to Sweden.

Continuing with the family’s proven aptitude for working with explosives and bringing with him knowledge of a new explosive compound, Alfred moved back to Sweden in 1863 and began producing nitroglycerin for use in the building industry. Then, a tragic explosion in one of the nitroglycerin factories killed a number of workers, including his brother Emil.