Alfred Nobel

Alfred Bernhard Nobel {{Audio|sv-Alfred_Nobel.ogg|listen}} (October 21, 1833, Stockholm, Sweden – December 10, 1896, San Remo, Italy) was a Swedish chemist, engineer and the inventor of dynamite. In his last will, he used his enormous fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes. The synthetic element Nobelium was named after him.

Personal background

Alfred Nobel was the third son of Immanuel Nobel (1801-1872), born in Stockholm, but, at an early age he went with his family to St. Petersburg, where his father (who had also discovered plywood) started a "torpedo" works. In 1859 this was left to the care of the second son, Ludvig Emmanuel (1831-1888), by whom it was greatly enlarged, and Alfred, returning to Sweden with his father after the bankruptcy of their family business, devoted himself to the study of explosives, and especially to the safe manufacture and use of nitroglycerin (discovered in 1847 by Ascanio Sobrero, one of his fellow-students under Théophile-Jules Pelouze at the University of Torino). Several explosions were reported at their family-owned factory in Heleneborg, and a disastrous one in 1864 killed Alfred's younger brother Emil and several other workers.

Related Topics:
Immanuel Nobel - Stockholm - St. Petersburg - Plywood - "torpedo" - Ludvig Emmanuel - Explosives - Nitroglycerin - Ascanio Sobrero - Théophile-Jules Pelouze - University of Torino - Heleneborg - 1864 - Emil

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Less well-known is the fact that Alfred Nobel was also a playwright. His only play (Nemesis, a prose tragedy in four acts about Beatrice Cenci, partly inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley's blank verse tragedy in five acts The Cenci), was printed when he was dying, and the whole stock except three copies was destroyed immediately after his death, being regarded as scandalous and blasphemous. The first surviving edition (bilingual Swedish-Esperanto) was published in Sweden in 2003. The play has not yet (May 2003) been translated into any other language than Esperanto.

Related Topics:
Nemesis - Beatrice Cenci - Percy Bysshe Shelley - The Cenci - Esperanto

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Alfred Nobel is interred in the Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm.

Related Topics:
Norra begravningsplatsen - Stockholm

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