21st October: Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel was born this date in 1833. 10 things about the man who founded Nobel Prizes.

1. Most people know that Alfred Nobel invented dynamite - but he also invented gelignite (which was what made him very rich) and ballistite, a predecessor of cordite.
2. Explosives were the Nobel family business from Alfred's father's time. The motivation for inventing dynamite and gelignite arose from an explosion in their nitroglycerine factory which killed one of Alfred's brothers. He set out to create an explosive which was more stable and safer to handle, and the result was dynamite. At first, Nobel was going to name this substance "Nobel's Safety Powder", but in the end went with dynamite, derived from the Greek word for power.
3. Nobel's father invented plywood.
4. Alfred Nobel never married, but there were several relationships with women, one of which lasted eighteen years. Nobel's first love was in Russia with a girl named Alexandra, who rejected his proposal. In 1876 Austro-Bohemian Countess Bertha Kinsky became Alfred Nobel's secretary. She left him to marry her previous lover, Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner. Nobel's longest-lasting relationship was with Sofie Hess from Vienna, whom he met in 1876.
5. Nobel could speak six languages, Swedish, French, Russian, English, German and Italian.
6. He was also a poet. He wrote a poem in English, called Nemesis, a prose tragedy in four acts about Beatrice Cenci, partly inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci. It wasn't well received. It was regarded as scandalous and blasphemous, and the entire print run was destroyed after his death, except for three copies.
7. When his brother Ludvig died, a French newspaper erroneously published an obituary of Alfred, which gave him an insight into how he was likely to be remembered. "Le marchand de la mort est mort" ("The merchant of death is dead"), it said. It went on to say, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." Despite his work with explosives, he was actually a pacifist and this disturbed him, prompting him to think of ways to make his legacy more positive.
8. The idea he came up with was the Nobel prizes. On 27 November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed the will to set aside the bulk of his estate to establish the Nobel Prizes, to be awarded annually without distinction of nationality. After taxes and bequests to individuals, Nobel's will allocated 94% of his total assets, the equivalent of £1,687,837 at the time.
9. Two people Nobel knew personally became recipients of his peace prize. One was the pastor of the church he used to attend, Nathan Söderblom who won the 1930 Nobel Peace Prize, and Bertha von Suttner, his former secretary, who received the prize in 1905. It's thought that it was her influence which prompted Nobel to include a peace prize on his list.
10. Nobel has a synthetic element named after him. Nobelium, a radioactive metal, has the symbol No and atomic number 102. Its discovery was announced by physicists at the Nobel Institute in Sweden in 1957.