In April 1888 Alfred Nobel opened a French newspaper and read his own obituary. His brother Ludvig had died in Cannes, the press had confused the two, and the notice that appeared was not kind. The version usually quoted has the headline Le marchand de la mort est mort, the merchant of death is dead, and goes on to say that the man who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before had died.
The story is told everywhere and the original cutting has never been produced, so it should be handled with some care. What is not in doubt is that when Nobel signed his final will seven years later, he left almost his entire fortune to fund prizes for people who confer the greatest benefit on mankind, and told nobody in his family beforehand.
The Family Business Was Explosives
Nitroglycerin was discovered in 1847 by the Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, who was so alarmed by it that he kept it secret for a year and spent the rest of his life regretting that it had been developed at all. It releases enormous energy and it detonates if handled roughly, warmed, or occasionally for no discernible reason.
Immanuel Nobel and his sons set out to make it usable. The first breakthrough was Alfred’s, in 1863, and it is not the one he is remembered for: the blasting cap, a small charge of mercury fulminate that sets off the main charge reliably. Controlled detonation is what turns an unstable liquid into an engineering tool, and Nobel considered it his most important invention.
The following year the family laboratory at Heleneborg in Stockholm exploded, killing five people including Alfred’s youngest brother Emil, who was twenty one. The city banned further experiments inside its limits, and Nobel moved his work onto a barge on a lake.
In 1867 he found that nitroglycerin absorbed into kieselguhr, a porous diatomaceous earth, becomes a plastic solid that can be shaped into sticks, transported, dropped and drilled into rock, and detonated only by a cap. He called it dynamite, from the Greek for power.
What It Was Actually For
Dynamite is remembered as a weapon and was overwhelmingly used for civil engineering. The second half of the nineteenth century is the age of tunnels, canals, mines, railway cuttings and harbours, and all of it had previously been done with black powder, which is far weaker, or with hand tools.
The St Gotthard tunnel, the Corinth canal and the clearing of Hell Gate in New York all depended on it. So did the mining boom that supplied the metals for everything else.
Nobel built ninety odd factories in twenty countries and held 355 patents. He later developed ballistite, a smokeless propellant, which took him into a long patent dispute in Britain and which was unambiguously military. The family fortune also came from the Baku oil fields, where his brothers Ludvig and Robert built the largest oil company in Russia, so a substantial part of the money behind the prizes is petroleum rather than explosives.
He described himself, without much self pity, as a misanthrope and a superlatively good machine. He never married, wrote poetry in English, and kept a laboratory wherever he lived.
The Woman Who Argued With Him
In 1876 Nobel advertised for a secretary and housekeeper and hired an Austrian countess, Bertha Kinsky. She left after a week to marry Arthur von Suttner, but the acquaintance became a correspondence that lasted twenty years.
She became one of the leading figures of the European peace movement and wrote Die Waffen nieder, Lay Down Your Arms, a novel that did for the anti war argument something like what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for abolition. She pressed Nobel repeatedly on the subject.
His replies are worth reading because they are not simple pacifism. He argued at one point that his factories might end war sooner than her congresses, since on the day two armies could annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations would recoil from war and disband their troops. It is the deterrence argument in its earliest form, from a man who made the weapons.
Bertha von Suttner received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905, the first woman to do so.
The Will
The document is short, handwritten, and was signed at the Swedish Norwegian Club in Paris in November 1895 without a lawyer. Nobel died thirteen months later, alone except for his servants, at his house in San Remo.
It left about 94 percent of his estate, some 31 million Swedish kronor, to a fund whose interest would be distributed annually in five parts: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. It specified that no consideration be given to nationality, and that the awards go to work done during the preceding year, a clause that has been quietly ignored ever since.
Almost everything about it was a problem. The family contested it. The institutions named in it had not been asked and were not enthusiastic. Nobel’s legal residence was unclear, which mattered enormously for probate, and the assets were scattered across several countries with different rules.
The will was rescued by Ragnar Sohlman, his 26 year old assistant, named as executor. Sohlman spent years liquidating holdings, at one point moving securities across Paris by horse cab with a revolver in his pocket to get them out of French jurisdiction before the estate could be frozen. The first prizes were awarded in 1901.
The Two Standard Questions
Why does Norway award the peace prize? The will gives the other four to Swedish institutions and the peace prize to a committee of five appointed by the Norwegian parliament. Nobel left no explanation. Norway was in union with Sweden at the time, its parliament had shown early interest in international arbitration, and it had no foreign policy of its own, which may have appealed to him. The arrangement survived the dissolution of the union in 1905.
Why is there no prize in mathematics? The persistent legend is that Nobel’s wife had an affair with the mathematician Gösta Mittag Leffler. Nobel had no wife, which disposes of it. The likelier explanation is that he was a practical chemist and engineer who endowed prizes for work that confers a tangible benefit, and pure mathematics did not fit the description. Mathematicians have the Fields Medal from 1936 and the Abel Prize from 2003.
Mittag Leffler was, incidentally, the man who had secured Sofia Kovalevskaya’s chair in Stockholm a few years earlier, which is a small illustration of how few people were involved in Swedish science at the time.
One more common misconception: the economics prize is not a Nobel. It was established in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in Nobel’s memory, is funded separately, and is a source of continuing irritation to some of his descendants.
What the Prizes Did
They created something that had not existed: an international, cross national marker of scientific achievement, awarded by a small country with limited stakes in the outcome, at a moment when science was organising itself along fiercely national lines.
They also introduced distortions that are now permanent features of the landscape. The limit of three recipients per prize fits badly with modern collaborative research. The bias towards discoveries that can be attributed to individuals has written a good many collaborators out of the history, Lise Meitner among the most conspicuous. And the requirement that recipients be living has meant that the timing of an award sometimes depends on how long somebody survives.
Marie Curie was nearly left off the 1903 physics prize entirely, and was included after Pierre Curie insisted. She went on to become the only person to win in two different sciences.
Nobel’s own summary of what he wanted, in the will, is one sentence long: the prizes should go to those who have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. It is a vague criterion, and it has held up better than most precise ones would have.
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