Alfred Nobel

This year the whole world is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first Nobel Prize with symposiums and conferences, gala dinners and publications in honour of the most famous Swede through the times - Alfred Nobel.

Despite hundreds of publications about the Nobel Prize very little is known about the man behind it.

It was on November 27 1895 that Alfred Nobel penned his famous will. One year later he died alone without family or friends, surrounded only by his servants in his magnificent villa in San Remo on the Italian Riviera. In his will Alfred Nobel stipulated that the major part of his estate (31 million Swedish kronor that has grown into more than two billion today) was to be converted into a fund and invested. The income from the investments was to be “distributed annually in the form of prizes to those who during the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind”.

The short 300-word will identified five equal prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace (awarded in Oslo, as Sweden and Norway were in a union then). A prize in economics “in memory of Alfred Nobel” was added in 1969. There is also an alternative Nobel “Right Livelihood” prize awarded simultaneously, which was founded by the Swedish philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull.

Alfred Nobel did not seek professional help to write his will as he hated lawyers “who will prove to you that a straight line is actually crooked”. The will created a lot of controversy and was contested by some of his relatives. Even the Swedish King Oscar II put in his two cents worth, claiming that Alfred Nobel’s generous donation was not “patriotic”. Today it is estimated that a third of the world’s press write-ups about Sweden can be attributed to the Nobel Prize.

Had it not been for Nobel’s youngest assistant and testament executor Ragnar Sohlman, it is unlikely that the intentions of the testament would have been carried out, as Alfred Nobel’s estate was spread out in eight European countries. Armed with a gun, Engineer Sohlman rushed to Paris and St. Petersburg, with the Nobel family in hot pursuit, and managed to withdraw all funds and deposit them in a bank vault in Stockholm.

A three-year long dispute followed before the first prizes could finally be awarded in 1901, exactly one hundred years ago. The present executive director of the Nobel Foundation is Michael Sohlman.

Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833. His father, an avid inventor, moved to St. Petersburg, when Alfred was five, to start anew after a bankruptcy in Sweden. The family followed four years later after Immanuel had established a successful industry, producing mines for the Russian army. The four sons received the best tutor-led education possible and Alfred, who was groomed to take over his father’s company, was sent off on a two-year trip around Europe and to the USA when he was seventeen. He was fluent in Swedish, Russian, English, French and German.

However Immanuel Nobel’s company went bankrupt in 1850 and everything changed. Immanuel returned to Sweden with his wife and sons, Alfred and Emil. Sons Ludvig and Robert stayed on in Russia and it is through them that the Nobel family today lives on in Sweden.

Ludvig (1831-1872) developed his own industry under the name Ludvig Nobels Maskinfabrik into one of Russia’s largest industrial concerns, as is still evident in the blocks of buildings at the Viborg quay in St. Petersburg. Ludvig Nobel was a very progressive businessman who cut down the working day from 14 to 10 1/2 hours and who shared the profit with his workers. A fantastic inventor just like his father and brother, he did not believe in the ownership of ideas and only registered one patent during his life.

His younger brother Robert was an astute businessman in his own right. He went to Baku to purchase wood but realized what a great potential there was in oil and invested his money in land instead. Robert was an expert chemist and the Nobel Brothers petroleum industry quickly became one of Russia’s largest industries and the third power on the international oil market together with the Rockefellers and the Rothchilds.

It was Ludvig Nobel’s sons, Carl and Emanuel who took over the industries after their father’s death. The well-respected and admired Emanuel became a Russian deputy in 1911. When the Communists seized power in 1917, the Nobel industries were the very first to be seized by the Red Army and the family had to flee to Sweden.

Immanuel Nobel, after fleeing from Russia, had set up a laboratory to manufacture explosives on a farm in the south of Stockholm with his sons Alfred and Emil. A terrible explosion that could be heard all over the capital killed Emil and four others and led to a stroke for Immanuel.

31-year old Alfred continued with the dangerous experiments one day after the explosion and eventually he found a safe method for blasting called “dynamite”. It is thanks to this invention that the St Gothard Tunnel and the Panama Canal could become realities. Alfred Nobel was accused of being the “salesman of death”, even though 90 percent of dynamite use was for non-violent purposes. Alfred Nobel himself knew that “there was nothing that could not be abused”. He never tried to defend his revolutionary invention.

After inventing dynamite in 1866, Alfred Nobel left Sweden and in a short period of time he had established factories in several countries in Europe and the U.S.

355 registered patents at the time of his death bear witness to the fact that Alfred Nobel had a wide range of interests in many fields of technology. There were experiments with imitation leather, artificial rubber and synthetic silk. Nobel tried to improve the electrical battery, the electric bulb and the phonograph. He also photographed from the air, using rockets and parachutes.
Alfred Nobel had 93 factories around the world when he died. Many of the leading industries in the chemical field today like ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) emanate from companies established by Nobel.

Described as “the wealthiest vagabond in Europe”, he had homes in six countries complete with laboratories as he also was a workaholic. He said himself that “my home is where I work and I work everywhere.” He spent a great part of his adult life in his beautiful home at Rue Malakoff in Paris that he bought in 1873. Towards the end of his life, after he had bought the Bofors company in Sweden, he also bought the Björkborn manor in Karlskoga. He had electricity, running water and drainage installed and brought Russian stallions to pull his landau. He lived at Björkborn for only two years before he died. Today the manor and the laboratory have been converted into a museum dedicated to the inventor, as is his San Remo residence. In Stockholm Nobelmuseet is dedicated to his prize.

The successful businessman was less successful with his personal life. When he was forty, and at the height of his success, Alfred Nobel advertised for “a secretary and hostess” for his Paris home in a Vienna newspaper. The successful applicant was an aristocratic, but poor, thirty-three year old lady who Nobel fell head over heels in love with. He handed her a poem from his youth already on her second day at work and later he asked her if “the heart was free”. Tactfully she had to explain that she was already engaged to be married and had taken the job as a guarantee for her economic independence. She and Nobel remained friends for the rest of his life and Baroness Bertha von Sutt-ner, who was a pioneer in the peace movement and author of Down with Weapons was later (in 1905) to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, for which she probably was the original source of inspiration.

Alfred Nobel never got over his unrequited love for Bertha but he later set up a beautiful 20-year old Viennese flower girl as a “kept woman”. The arrange-ment lasted for 18 years until Sofie Hess got pregnant by another man.

The romance was a sad one for Nobel who always hoped like a “Pygmalion” that he would be able to elevate the simple girl to his intellectual and social standing. He showered “Trollet”, as he called her, with gifts that he pedantically recorded - “hats and wine, Trollet 900 francs”, and below that “gloves ego, 3.75 francs”.

Alfred Nobel was a big letter writer just like August Strindberg, sometimes writing as many as 30 letters a day. “Trollet” kept 218 of the letters from “Din brumbjörn” (Your bear) that she threatened to publish after Nobel’s death. But Ragnar Sohlman bought the letters so as not to blemish the memory and image of Alfred Nobel. According to Kenne Fant who wrote the biography Alfred Bernhard Nobel (that was made into a film by Vilgot Sjöman with Sven Wollter in the title role and declared a flop by film critics) “the tone of the letters is so intimate that the reader sometimes feels like a voyeur.”

It was not only letters that Alfred Nobel wrote. A year before his death he published the sad novel Nemesis, that was performed as a play in Stockholm.

Nobel was full of paradoxes. He was successful yet felt inadequate. He made fortunes out of war but fought for peace. He was a staunch patriot, yet spent relatively little time in Sweden. He was an accomplished scientist and inventor, yet had only one year of formal schooling and no university degree. He loved family life but had none of his own.

Alfred Nobel was an idealist and a realist who did not really like what he saw around him and that he hoped he could do something about through a reward to be paid for “the greatest benefit to mankind.”