Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 21, 1833. His father, Immanuel Nobel (1801–1872), was an engineer and inventor who built bridges and buildings in Stockholm; he later developed naval mines that played a role in the defense of Sveaborg and also invented machine tools for the mechanical industry. His mother, Andriette Nobel (née Ahlsell), came from a wealthy family.⁠[1][2]

Alfred Nobel’s brothers were his older brother Robert, Ludvig, and his younger brother Emil.⁠[3][4][5]

When Alfred was five, his father moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, set up an engineering factory there and won a contract with a Russian general, Ogarev, who was interested in his designs for sea and land mines. In 1842 Immanuel brought his family to St. Petersburg. His business grew into a large mechanical engineering company, Fonderies & Ateliers Mécaniques Nobel & Fils, which made torpedos (naval mines) for the Russian government during the Crimean War.⁠[3][1]

In St. Petersburg the Nobel brothers were educated by private tutors: the Swedish tutor Lars Santesson taught Swedish and history, and the Russian teacher Ivan Peterov taught mathematics, physics and chemistry. By the age of 17 Alfred was fluent in Swedish, Russian, French, English and German.⁠[3][1]

After his tutoring ended in 1850, the 17-year-old Alfred was sent abroad on educational travels, first to Paris, where he worked in the private laboratory of the renowned chemist Professor Théophile-Jules Pelouze. In Paris he met the Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, who had invented nitroglycerine three years earlier. He later traveled to the United States, where he visited the Swedish-American engineer John Ericsson. He became very interested in nitroglycerine and how it could be put to practical use in construction work.⁠[3][1]

Facing bankruptcy for the second time, Immanuel Nobel left Russia in the summer of 1859 with his wife and youngest son, Emil, and returned to Stockholm. Robert and Alfred stayed on with Ludvig in St. Petersburg; Ludvig revived part of the business as the Ludvig Nobel Mechanical Factory.⁠[3]

In 1863 Alfred left St. Petersburg and moved to Stockholm to join his parents, working in his father’s laboratory. That year he obtained British and Swedish patents relating to gunpowder, and he patented the blasting cap, a detonator that could be set off by lighting a fuse.⁠[3][6][4][1]

In 1864 Alfred Nobel began mass production of nitroglycerine. On September 3 of that year an accidental explosion at Heleneborg in Stockholm killed his younger brother Emil and several other people. Nitroglycerine manufacture was subsequently banned within Stockholm city limits. Shortly after the explosion Immanuel Nobel suffered a stroke from which he never fully recovered.⁠[1][2][4]

Shortly after the accident, on November 28, 1864, Alfred Nobel, together with his father, the wealthy Stockholm businessman J. W. Smitt and Carl Wennerström, established Nitroglycerin Aktiebolaget, the first company in the world to produce nitroglycerine commercially and Nobel’s first company. Production began on an old barge on Lake Mälaren; in 1865 the company received permission to build a factory at Vinterviken outside Stockholm, which began producing dynamite immediately after its invention.⁠[4]

In 1915 the company bought its competitor Gyttorps Sprängämnes AB, and production gradually moved to Gyttorp near Nora; dynamite production at Vinterviken ceased in the summer of 1921. The company was renamed Nitro Nobel in 1965 and later became part of the Norwegian-based Dyno Industrier.⁠[4]

In June 1865 Alfred Nobel registered Alfred Nobel & Company in the Hamburg trade register, his first foreign company. Later that year he left Sweden, never to return except for visits. The company’s factory at Krümmel near Hamburg began producing blasting oil (nitroglycerine) on April 1, 1866, with a workforce of about 50, many of them Swedes; it was destroyed by an explosion on July 12, 1866.⁠[7][8]

In 1866 Nobel went to the United States, mainly to defend his patent rights there; the United States Blasting Oil Company was formed, but its factory at Little Ferry was destroyed by explosions after three years.⁠[8]

After the 1866 Krümmel explosion, Nobel tested stabilizing materials on a raft on the Elbe and found the answer in sand from the Krümmel dunes containing kieselguhr, which absorbed nitroglycerine and made it safer to handle. In 1867 he patented this material under the name of dynamite, including British patent no. 1345 and Swedish patent no. 102 (“Dynamite or Nobel’s gunpowder”).⁠[7][1][6]

In 1869 Nobel met Paul Barbe, a graduate of the École Polytechnique, in France; Barbe led the introduction of dynamite in France, where explosives were a state monopoly. The British Dynamite Company Ltd. was founded in 1871 with a share capital of £24,000, in which Nobel held a large stake, and he consistently acted as a spokesman for the company. The Krümmel works were destroyed by an explosion again in 1870.⁠[8][7]

In 1873 the German company was renamed Deutsch-Österreich-Ungarische Dynamit A/G (DAG), reflecting its growing Austro-Hungarian customer base. Within ten years, 16 explosives factories in 14 countries had been founded with Nobel as a shareholder or co-owner.⁠[7][8]

In 1873 Nobel left Hamburg and moved to Paris, closer to the center of his growing industrial empire. He bought a mansion on Avenue Malakoff near the Arc de Triomphe and set up a small, well-equipped laboratory in its courtyard. In Paris he established close contact with Victor Hugo and other writers. Although he lived in Paris much of his life, he was constantly traveling.⁠[9][7][1]

In 1875 Nobel received British patent no. 4179 for an improved explosive (“blasting gelatine or gelatine dynamite”), and in 1876 Swedish patent no. 1352 for making solid explosives from nitroglycerine, called gelatinated nitroglycerine.⁠[6][4]

In 1876 Bertha Kinsky (later Bertha von Suttner) came to Paris to work as Alfred Nobel’s secretary, leaving after only a couple of months to return to Vienna and marry. She afterwards maintained an extensive correspondence with Nobel and was very critical of the military applications of dynamite, becoming increasingly critical of the arms race over the years.⁠[10][1]

That year Nobel met Sofie Hess (1851–1919), who was working as a helper in a flower shop. She came from a Jewish family that initially lived in Baden near Vienna. The encounter developed into a long-term romantic relationship; Nobel rented an apartment for her in Paris, but she never moved into it.⁠[11]

Robert Nobel first came to Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1873, sent by Ludvig to look for walnut trees for rifle making, and later bought a small refinery. In 1879 Robert and Ludvig established an oil extraction business there, which grew into the oil empire known as the Brothers Nobel, or Branobel, based on the oil deposits of Baku on the Caspian Sea. Togrul Bagirov, chairman of the Baku Nobel Heritage Foundation, said that between 20 and 22 percent of the funds used to start the Nobel Foundation came from Alfred’s shares in the oil company.⁠[5][3]

In 1881 Nobel bought an estate with a laboratory at Sevran, northeast of Paris.⁠[9]

In 1886 the British and German Nobel companies formed the Nobel Dynamite Trust Company, the first international holding company of its kind. Nobel by then held only 6 percent of it and was made honorary president, having gradually reduced his commercial involvement. In 1887 Paul Barbe merged the remaining French, Spanish and Italian-Swiss companies into la Société Centrale, also called the Latin Trust.⁠[8]

His brother Ludvig Nobel died in 1888. A widely repeated story holds that at least one French newspaper believed that it was Alfred who had died and ran an obituary branding him a “merchant of death,” prompting him to reconsider his legacy. Historians, however, have yet to find an original copy of the obituary; some dismiss the story as a myth, while others argue it was only one of many factors behind his decision to create the prizes. The biographical articles on the official Nobel Prize website consulted for this entry do not mention the story.⁠[12][5][1]

In 1888 Nobel received British patent no. 1471 for smokeless powder, ballistite, followed in 1889 by Swedish patent no. 2158 (“Ballistite or Nobel’s gunpowder”).⁠[6]

In 1889 Bertha von Suttner published Die Waffen nieder (Lay Down Your Arms), which became a classic.⁠[10]

Nobel offered ballistite to Italy, which accepted and acquired the manufacturing rights; he turned over his Italian patent for half a million lire. This did not sit well with France, where a press campaign was launched against him; he was unjustly accused of espionage and of high treason against France and had to close his Sevran laboratory. In 1891 he left Paris and settled in Sanremo, Italy.⁠[13][9]

In 1891 he bought a villa in Sanremo that had belonged to a Polish poet, who called it “Mio Nido,” and renamed it Villa Nobel; after settling there he had a laboratory built close to the villa. The Mediterranean climate brought relief from his chronic colds and other ailments, and he spent his last five years there.⁠[13]

In 1894 Nobel bought AB Bofors-Gullspång in Karlskoga, Sweden, seeking a site for powder experiments and shooting trials; he immediately began building a laboratory, which was ready in 1895, and the young engineer Ragnar Sohlman was among those who worked there. Björkborn Manor on the Bofors estate became his last home in Sweden, where he spent his summers; it is now the Nobel museum in Karlskoga.⁠[14][15][1]

Sofie Hess had a daughter, Margarethe, born in July 1891, with the Hungarian cavalry officer Nikolaus Kapy, who married her in September 1895 but did not live with her.⁠[11]

On November 27, 1895, Nobel signed his third and last will at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris. It directed that his executors convert the capital into safe securities to form a fund, the interest on which was to be divided into five equal parts as prizes: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature (to the person who produced “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”), and peace (to the person who had done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations).⁠[16][17]

The will assigned the physics and chemistry prizes to the Swedish Academy of Sciences, physiology or medicine to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, literature to the Academy in Stockholm, and the peace prize to a committee of five persons selected by the Norwegian Storting, and stated his express wish that no consideration be given to nationality. It appointed Ragnar Sohlman, resident in Bofors, and Rudolf Lilljequist as executors. It also left Sofie Hess a life annuity of 6,000 Austrian florins.⁠[17][18][11]

Nobel, who had a lingering heart ailment, died of a stroke at Villa Nobel in Sanremo on December 10, 1896, aged 63. At his death he held 355 patents worldwide, and over the years he had founded factories and laboratories in some 90 places in more than 20 countries. In accordance with his will, Villa Nobel was later sold.⁠[13][1]

His family opposed the establishment of the Nobel Prize, and certain family members disputed the will. Ragnar Sohlman, a young chemical engineer who had worked for Nobel in his Sanremo laboratory, and the engineer Rudolf Lilljequist, suspecting that French authorities might claim the money and block its transfer, collected the estate’s documents from Paris banks and shipped them to Sweden. Sohlman was instrumental in establishing the Nobel Foundation and organizing its cooperation with the prize-awarding institutions, and later served as its Executive Director from 1929 to 1946. To avoid a scandal, the executors’ side bought Nobel’s roughly 200 letters to Sofie Hess from her for 12,000 florins.⁠[16][18][19][11]

On June 29, 1900, the King in Council promulgated the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation at the Royal Palace in Stockholm.⁠[18]

Five years after Nobel’s death, the first Nobel Prizes were awarded on December 10, 1901.⁠[18][16]

Nine years after Nobel’s death, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize to Bertha von Suttner.⁠[10]

In 1968 Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, established the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel on the occasion of its 300th anniversary and made a large donation to the Nobel Foundation. The prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and has been awarded since 1969, when the first laureates were Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen. It is not one of the prizes established by Nobel’s will, which provided only for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.⁠[20][21][18][17]

On October 12, 2026, the economics prize in Nobel’s memory was awarded to Robert E. HallRobert E. HallRobert E. Hall is an American economist, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University and senior fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institution, known for research on consumption, employment fluctuations and the flat tax; he long chaired NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee and shared the 2026 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Michael Woodford.Open the full entry of Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry and Michael WoodfordMichael WoodfordMichael Woodford is an American economist and John Bates Clark Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University, one of the main architects of New Keynesian monetary policy theory and author of Interest and Prices, who shared the 2026 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Robert E. Hall.Open the full entry of Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry for research on the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilization and new macroeconomic models used by central banks and governments around the world.⁠[22]

Nobel Prize: Official website: https://www.nobelprize.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]