The Life and Accomplishments of Alfred Nobel

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Alfred Nobel, born in 1833, was the inventor of dynamite. He was much more than an inventor, was fluent in several languages, enjoyed poetry and was considered to have radical ideas during his time. He left a lasting legacy by establishing the famous peace prize which is named in his honour.

Nobel’s father was an engineer and inventor. He built bridges and in relation to this, he experimented with ways to blast rock. In the year Alfred was born, his father went bankrupt because several barges of building materials went missing. In 1837 Nobel’s father left Stockholm for St Petersburg in Russia, leaving the family behind. Due to his successes in assisting the Russian navy in the ongoing Crimean war, Nobel’s father was able to bring his family to St Petersburg in 1842. Nobel and his brothers were given a first-class education from private tutors. By the time Alfred Nobel was 17 he could speak Russian, German, French, Swedish and English fluently.

Alfred enjoyed poetry which aggravated his father. So, his father sent him to meet various chemists and scientists. During a two-year period, he visited Germany, France and the USA. While in Paris, Nobel met Ascanio Sobrero, the inventor of nitroglycerine (C3 H5 N3 O9). At this time, nitroglycerine was a highly unstable liquid explosive and deemed too dangerous for practical use. Nobel became interested in finding a safer way to use this substance.

Nitroglycerine is a thick, pale yellow liquid, made by reacting glycerol with a mixture of concentrated nitric and sulphuric acid. Nitroglycerine has a much greater explosive power than gunpowder but was considered to dangerous as it was easily detonated by heat, pressure or rough handling. Also being a liquid, it was not easy to...

... middle of paper ...

...r 19th and early 20th centuries would not have been possible without a powerful and safe explosive such as dynamite.

Certainly dynamite has caused many deaths an injuries in industrial accidents and in the Franco-Prussian War – a fact that Nobel was acutely conscious of. His views on disarmament and peaceful co-operation between nations were ahead of his time, foreshadowing modern institutions such as the United Nations. In creating the Nobel Peace Prize, Alfred Nobel used the profits of his discoveries to further the cause of peace to which he was devoted.

Bibliography

Nobelprize.org. 2009.

19 Sept. 2009 http://www.nobelprize.org.

The World Of Explosives. Society of Explosives Engineers, Inc. 2007.

20 Sept. 2009 http://www.explosives.org .

Apps,Roy. The Explosive Discovery:

The Story of Alfred Nobel. Hove: Macdonald Young Books, 1997.

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