Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel and his prizes

There is no Nobel Prize in the category "country with the most Nobel prizes per capita" or Sweden, you won't be surprised to hear, would have won that too. Nothing to do with favouritism, you understand.

What was the man like? Alfred Nobel (1833-96) studied chemistry, and quickly realised the potential of nitroglycerine, a liquid that was fantastically explosive but equally hard to harness. If a safe way of packing and detonating the material could be found, it would replace the far weaker gunpowder. One of his experiments caused the death of five people, including his younger brother.

Aged thirty he found the solution: a porous silicate of hardened algae called kieselguhr, which absorbed the fluid and made it transportable and secure.. Nobel christened it dynamite, and intended to have peaceful uses such as mining or construction of railways, but it was also used by terrorists: Czar Alexander II was assassinated by dynamite.

[The fear of nitroglycerine was so widespread he had to show it was safe by tossing sticks from a great height or into bonfires. In England there was a ban on moving it by rail, so that Nobel had to send all the blasting oil to his British factory in bottles marked "White Wine". Eventually dynamite was accepted as safe and when he died he owned 90 factories around the world.]

When his brother Ludvig died, a French newspaper thought it was Alfred and published an obituary that called him a "cynical merchant of death, always discovering new ways to mutilate and kill". So for the rest of his life, Alfred was obsessed with the way posterity would remember him. The result was his prizes, funded by his bequest.

The physics prize was actually available to technologists and inventors as well., according to Nobel’s testament. However, according to Anders Barany, curator of the Nobel museum, after early awards were given to a number inventors, including Marconi for the telegraph in 1909, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided informally not to honour technical inventions: perhaps because they were pure scientists themselves..
The latest generation of academicians started showing greater fidelity to Nobel’s original instructions. In 2000, Jack Kilby, ,was honoured for his invention of the integrated circuit. And last year Fert and Grunberg were awarded the Physics prize for the technology used to read data on hard disks,. Barany predicts that “many more” technical inventions receive the Physics prize in the future..