Are You Smarter than a Tortus?

December 16, 2009

Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833 –1896) was a Swedish chemist and inventor who held 355 patents. His most famous invention, aside from the Nobel Prizes? Dynamite.

Nobel owned a major armaments manufacturing company inherited from his father. Unfortunately, during his experiments with the use of nitroglycerine, five people were killed at his factory in 1864, including his younger brother Emil. Eventually, he received a patent for dynamite (which he named for the Greek word for ‘power’) in 1867, but he realized that he did not want the invention to be his only legacy. In 1888, a French newspaper accidentally printed Alfred Nobel’s obituary when in fact it was his brother Ludwig who had died. In it, the paper decried Nobel as “le marchand de la mort” (“the merchant of death”) and reviled him for inventing dynamite and becoming wealthy “by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before”.

Before he died in 1896, Nobel established the Nobel Prizes, which internationally awards excellence in physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, literature, and, not the least of all, peace. You may not have known that Nobel invented dynamite, but his name will forever be associated with peace.