Alfred Nobel

Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born in 1833, in Stockholm, Sweden. He was a Swedish chemist, inventor, engineer, and philanthropist. He was educated in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in the United States of America, where he studied mathematical reasoning. Alfred Nobel knew how to speak several languages. He traveled widely and wrote poetry. After his schooling, he returned to St. Petersburg to work in his father’s factory. He developed mines, torpedoes, and other explosives there. After a factory explosion in his family-owned factory that killed his younger brother and four other people in 1864, he tried to find a safe way of handling nitroglycerin, a powerful explosive derived from glycerin, by treatment with a mixture of concentrated sulfuric and nitric acids. He made a nitroglycerin explosive, but so many accidents occurred when it was put on the market that Nobel was considered a public enemy for a number of years. After the accident that killed Nobel’s brother and four other...