Immanuel Nobel

Immanuel Nobel was born in Gävle, Sweden, on March 24, 1801, the first son of his namesake father Immanuel Nobel and his second wife, Brita Katarina Ahlberg; his father served as a field cutter and as a military surgeon. The Nobel family can be traced back to the 17th century through Petrus Olai Nobelius, who married Wendela, daughter of Olof Rudbeck, rector of Uppsala University.⁠[1][2]

He grew up in a poor family that could not afford formal schooling, and his father taught him to read and write. At 14 he became a sailor, spending several years at sea as groundwork for an intended career as a master shipbuilder.⁠[3][4]

Back in Sweden he entered the building trade and studied at the school of architecture of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Konstakademien) and at the mechanical school of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture (Lantbruksakademien).⁠[3][4][2]

In 1827 he married Andriette Ahlsell, whose family were public officials and civil servants in Stockholm. In March 1828 he applied for patents for three inventions: a planing machine, a mangle and a mechanical movement.⁠[2][5]

While in Sweden he worked increasingly as a building contractor and engineer, constructing bridges and buildings in Stockholm; he also designed private villas, built Sweden’s first pontoon bridge and founded Sweden’s first rubber factory.⁠[2][6][7]

Of the couple’s children, four sons survived infancy: Robert (born 1829), Ludvig (born 1831), Alfred (born 1833) and Emil (born 1843); the others died as infants.⁠[5][2]

In 1833, the year Alfred was born, Immanuel went bankrupt and the family moved to simpler quarters; afterwards he found it difficult to start a new business in Sweden. Accounts of the cause differ: one attributes it to the loss at sea of barges loaded with building materials, another to a heavy financial loss connected with a large fire at Långholmen in Stockholm.⁠[3][5][8][4]

In 1837, with his creditors threatening him with debtors’ prison, Immanuel left Stockholm alone for Finland; his wife and children stayed in Stockholm in meagre circumstances, and Andriette supported the family by running a milk and vegetable shop.⁠[2][7][5][9]

After a year in Åbo (Turku) he arrived in St. Petersburg in December 1838. Unlike the Swedish government, the Russian government took great interest in his knapsacks, which, when filled with air, functioned as pontoons.⁠[7][10]

Immanuel’s designs for sea and land mines attracted the attention of the Russian military. He conducted mine tests in 1841 and painted an illustration of them; in one test on the Okhta River his mine completely destroyed a wooden raft. He also painted a watercolour showing himself demonstrating his underwater mines to Tsar Nicholas I.⁠[10][11][2]

In the autumn of 1842 Nicholas I ordered that he be paid a substantial reward and an allowance of 25 silver roubles a day. The Russian government bought the patent for his mines for a sum equivalent to several million kronor in today’s values, which allowed him to send for his family and start a mechanical workshop. In 1842 his family, who had remained in Stockholm, joined him in St. Petersburg.⁠[11][7][2][9]

He opened a mechanical workshop with a foundry, which soon expanded on orders for military equipment from the Russian army and grew into the large mechanical engineering company Fonderies & Ateliers Mécaniques Nobel & Fils. Besides mines it made machines for fabricating wagon wheels and steam engines for Volga steamboats.⁠[2][3][10][1]

Together with Colonel Ogarev he also founded a privileged mechanical wheel factory and pig-iron foundry.⁠[4]

He invented machine tools for the mechanical industry and a system for central heating of buildings with radiators and hot water, introducing the first central heating systems in Russia; he also invented a lathe used to make plywood.⁠[3][1]

In 1853 he received an imperial gold medal for making 11 steam engines for warships, the Tsar’s award for diligence and creative skill in Russian industry.⁠[2][10]

During the Crimean War the works received large orders for both mines and steam engines for the Russian navy, and the family became rich; during the war the company had more than 1,000 employees. His eldest son Robert also worked on mines following Immanuel’s instructions.⁠[7][4][2]

Of the 1,865 anti-ship mines Russia laid near Kronstadt in the spring and summer of 1854, nearly 1,400 were of Nobel’s design; another 994 mines were laid in the approaches to Sveaborg, near Helsinki. His mines played a role in the defence of Sveaborg and Kronstadt and kept the British Royal Navy from moving within firing range of St. Petersburg.⁠[11][3][6]

Nobel’s design was a pyrotechnic contact mine, armed as soon as its fuse was fitted. On June 9 (June 20, New Style), 1855, a steam corvette and a steamer struck mines, the first recorded case; the mines that went off were evidently Nobel’s, which carried small charges.⁠[11]

After Tsar Nicholas I died in 1855, the Russian government concluded peace and returned to ordering from abroad; once the war was over, the state reneged on contractual orders and the works was forced into liquidation. Immanuel went bankrupt for the second time and left his factory to his creditors.⁠[2][7][10]

In the summer of 1859 he left Russia with his wife and youngest son Emil and returned to Stockholm, while Robert, Ludvig and Alfred stayed in Russia to salvage what they could of the business.⁠[10][2][7][8][9]

Back in Sweden he began experimenting with nitroglycerin with his sons Alfred and Emil. Torsten Althin writes in the Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography that in 1862 Immanuel was the first to demonstrate a comparatively simple way of producing nitroglycerin on a factory scale, and that he and Alfred worked on it independently, using different methods.⁠[3][8]

In 1863 Alfred also returned to Sweden to begin experimenting with a mixture of gunpowder and nitroglycerin together with his father.⁠[2]

On September 3, 1864, the family laboratory at Heleneborg on the outskirts of Stockholm exploded, killing Emil and several other people; another account puts the death toll at five. After the explosion all manufacture of nitroglycerin was forbidden within Stockholm’s city limits.⁠[3][2][12][8]

Afterwards Immanuel suffered a stroke that confined him to bed, and he never fully recovered; Alfred carried on with the work.⁠[3][2]

On November 28, 1864, Alfred founded Nitroglycerin Aktiebolaget, with Alfred and his father, together with Smitt and Carl Wennerström, as shareholders. Thereafter Immanuel and Andriette lived on a ten percent dividend from 25 shares in the company.⁠[12][2]

In 1870 he published a paper on the emigration fever, titled “Försök till anskaffande af arbetsförtjenst till förekommande af den nu, genom brist deraf tvungna utvandringsfebern” (an attempt to create earnings to forestall the emigration fever forced by their lack).⁠[2]

Immanuel Nobel died at Heleneborg, on the outskirts of Stockholm, on September 3, 1872; his estate showed a residue of SEK 28,700.⁠[4][1][2]

Andriette kept the Nitroglycerin AB shares until her death in 1889, by which time they were worth eight times as much as when she and Immanuel received them.⁠[2][5]

Immanuel was a talented, self-taught inventor who was more interested in his inventions than in financial gain, but he was a poor businessman who several times became involved in unrealistic projects and went bankrupt more than once.⁠[3][2][7]