ALFRED BERNHARD NOBEL
Birth: 21th October 1833/Death: 10th December 1896
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist who invented dynamite and other more powerful explosives and who also founded the Nobel Prize. He was the fourth son of Immanuel and Caroline Nobel. Alfred was prone to illness as a child, but he enjoyed a close relationship with his mother and displayed a lively intellectual curiosity from an early age.
Even from the very childhood he was interested in explosives, and he learned the fundamentals of engineering from his father. Immanuel, meanwhile, had failed at various business ventures until moving in 1837 to St. Petersburg in Russia, where he prospered as
a manufacturer of explosive mines and machine tools. The Nobel family left Stockholm in 1842 to join the father in St. Petersburg. Alfred's newly prosperous parents were now able to send him to private tutors, and he proved to be an eager pupil. He was a competent chemist by age 16 and was
fluent in English, French, German, and Russian as well as Swedish.
By 1895 Nobel had developed angina pectoris, and he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his villa in San Remo, Italy, in 1896.
At his death his worldwide business empire consisted of more than 90 factories manufacturing explosives and ammunition.
The opening of his will contained a great surprise for his family, friends, and the general public.
He had always been generous in humanitarian and scientific philanthropies, and he left the bulk of his fortune in trust to establish what came to be the most highly regarded of
international awards, the Nobel Prizes.
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