Emanuel Nobel

Emanuel Nobel was born in St. Petersburg in 1859, the eldest son of Ludvig Nobel and his first wife, Wilhelmina (Mina) Ahlsell; his full siblings were Carl (born 1862) and Anna (born 1866), and his uncles Robert and Alfred were among the founders of Branobel.⁠[1][2]

In 1876 Emanuel accompanied his father Ludvig to Baku to visit Robert, and father and son were drawn into the local oil rush.⁠[2][3]

In 1881 Emanuel became responsible for Branobel’s financial matters.⁠[3]

In April 1888 Emanuel was at his dying father’s bedside in Cannes, France; he was 28 when Ludvig died and took over Branobel, while his brother Carl took over the Ludvig Nobel machine-building factory. Shortly before his father’s death he transferred half a million roubles to his uncle Alfred as security for a million roubles Ludvig owed Alfred.⁠[4][5][1]

In autumn 1888 Tsar Alexander III’s party visited Baku, and Emanuel received them with his sister Anna and the directors Bilderling and Nellis. He received the Imperial Medal and accepted the Tsar’s invitation to become a Russian citizen, the only member of the Nobel family to do so. He later received several titles and honorary memberships, was given the title “His Excellency,” and became a member of the Russian Central Bank.⁠[4][3][6][1]

In 1893 his brother Carl died of diabetes at 31, and Emanuel became sole head of all the Nobel companies. Alfred at first doubted his leadership, but with Alfred’s advice and the arrival of the Norwegian Hans Olsen in management he developed into a capable business leader. He led Branobel as chairman of the board from the head office in St. Petersburg and built close contacts with the Russian state and European banks.⁠[1][3][7]

After Alfred Nobel died in 1896, his will was contested by Robert’s family, institutions and King Oscar II of Sweden, and Emanuel helped carry it through. After the disputes and legal proceedings he bought Alfred’s Branobel shares for SEK 3,840,000, money that went to the newly formed Nobel Foundation and amounted to about 12 percent of its basic capital.⁠[1][7][3]

After Anton Carlsund, an engineer at the Ludvig Nobel works, heard Rudolf Diesel present his engine in 1897, Emanuel first sought cooperation with Metallfabriken in St. Petersburg, whose board judged the invention too untried. In February 1898, after negotiations with Berthold Bing in Berlin, he paid a million marks for the Russian Diesel patent, and Russische Dieselmotor Co was formed.⁠[8][3]

The first diesel engine was started in 1899; from 1903 the steam engines of the Nobel fleet were replaced with diesel engines, and before the revolution the fleet was the second largest after the Russian navy.⁠[8]

In 1909 Branobel marked its 30th anniversary and Emanuel turned 50; the company was at its peak, and its employee profit-sharing drew envy from competitors. Fond of grand dinners and jewellery made by Fabergé in St. Petersburg, he came to live increasingly like a Russian prince; he never married.⁠[1][6]

His most important commission from Fabergé was the Nobel Jubilee Clock, made between 1908 and 1917, commemorating the company’s production of one billion puds of crude oil from 1879 to 1906.⁠[9]

In 1915 the board members of RGO offered their shares to Emanuel, who under pressure actively pursued the takeover of RGO’s assets, giving Branobel control of half of the Russian oil industry; the Nobels paid SEK 40 million for RGO’s bank-held equity.⁠[10]

When the Soviet regime nationalised private property in 1918, Emanuel was at the spa of Jessentuki in the North Caucasus. As a Russian citizen and a wanted capitalist he had to flee; the party travelled disguised as peasants by horse and cart for seven weeks and reached Berlin on November 26, 1918. Back in Sweden he renounced his Russian citizenship that year, regained Swedish citizenship and settled in Stockholm.⁠[1][11][6][9]

In 1920, during negotiations to sell half of Branobel’s shares to Standard OilStandard OilStandard Oil was an oil company founded in 1870 in Cleveland, Ohio, by John D. Rockefeller and others. Through mergers and expansion, and organizational forms including the trust of 1882 and the New Jersey holding company of 1899, it at one time controlled most of the refining capacity in the United States. In 1911 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of its holding company under the Sherman Anti-trust Act, and the companies split off from it later evolved into oil companies including ExxonMobil and Chevron.Open the full entry, Emanuel hesitated; in April the Bolsheviks seized the company’s assets in Petrograd and Baku, and he described nationalisation as a fine word for a very ugly thing. On July 30 Standard Oil acquired half of Branobel’s shares. The company then had Stockholm as its legal domicile, with Emanuel as an occasional adviser to the Stockholm office.⁠[10][12][3]

Emanuel Nobel died in 1932.⁠[1][6][3]