AT Alfred Nobel
Alfred Nobel, the great Swedish inventor and industrialist, was a man of many
contrasts. He was the son of a bankrupt, but became a millionaire; a scientist with
made a fortune' but lived a simple life, and although cheerful in company he often
a
a patriotic son of his native land, he died alone on foreign soil. He invented a new
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love of literature, he was an industrialist who managed to remain an idealist. He
explosive, dynamite, to improve the peacetime industries of mining and building,
but saw it used as a weapon of war to kill and injure his fellowmen. During his
useful life he often felt he was useless. World-famous for his works, he was never
personally well known, for throughout his life he avoided publicity": "I do not see”.
be once said, "that I have deserved any fame and I have no taste' for it”, but since
his death his name has brought fame and glory to others.
He was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833, but moved to Russia with his
in 1842, where his father, Emmanuel, made a strong position for himself in
the engineering industry, Emmanuel Nobel invented the landmine and made a lot of
money
from government orders for it during the Crimean War, but went bankrupt
soon after Most of the family returned to Sweden in 1859, where Alfred rejoined
them in 1863, beginning his own study of explosives in his father's laboratory. He
had never been to school or university but had studied privately and by the time
he was twenty he was a skilful and excellent linguist, speaking Swedish, Russian,
German, French and English. Like his father, Alfred Nobel was imaginative and
inventive, but he had better luck in business, building up over eighty companies
in twenty different countries. Indeed his greatness lay in his outstanding ability
to combine the qualities of an original scientist with those of a forward-looking
industrialist.
But Nobel's main concern was not to make money or even to make scientific
discoveries. Seldom happy, he was always searching for a meaning to life, and
from his youth had taken a serious interest in literature and philosophy. Perhaps
because he could not find ordinary human love - he never married - he came to
care deeply about the whole mankind. He was always generous to the poor: "I'd
rather take care of the stomachs of the living than the glory of the dead in the form
of stone memorials”, he once said. His greatest wish, however, was to see an end to
wars and thus peace between nations, and he spent much time and money working
for this cause until his death in Italy in 1896. His famous will, in which he left
money to provide prizes for outstanding work in physics, chemistry, physiology,
medicine, literature and peace, is a memorial to his interests and ideals.
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