Today, Nobel makes both dynamite and peace. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Alfred Nobel is a kind of
dark knight we find riding behind modern science.
We know he became rich by inventing dynamite and
blasting gelatin. We know he gave his wealth to
fund Nobel Prizes for science and for peace. But
what do we know beyond that?
Nobel was born in Stockholm in 1833, the same year
his father went bankrupt. The family bounced about
from country to country while his father tried one
business after another.
By 1861 his father was producing the newest
explosive -- nitroglycerin. Nitro is nasty. It's
terribly unstable. American railroads were using it
to blast out track beds. Europeans were tunneling
the Alps with it. It killed off workmen with
tedious regularity. Nobel lost one brother to a
plant accident.
So he set about to create a stable form of
nitroglycerin. In the late 1860s he found he could
soak nitro into a porous packing material. The
result was dynamite. Dynamite stays stable until
you trigger it with a blasting cap. In 1875 Nobel
went a step further and created a jelly-like
suspension of nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin --
the so-called blasting jelly.
His inventions came on the eve of the great
construction projects that followed Western
colonial expansion. As we blasted railroads,
tunnels, and canals across America, India, and
Panama, Nobel grew wealthy.
But not happy! He'd had a messy childhood. He was
strongly attached to his mother, and he was subject
to depression. He never married. His sexual
preference remains a subject of debate. Still, he
had several intense, if distant, relations with
women.
One was his friendship with the Countess Berta Kinsky von
Suttner. She married someone else but continued
a lifelong correspondence with Nobel. She worked in
the cause of international peace. She certainly
influenced Nobel to set up the Peace Prize. She
herself won that prize a decade after he died in
1896.
The year before his death, Nobel created the
foundation that would give the various prizes. He
was adamant that the prizes would be free from any
national bias.
A few years before, Berta Kinsky asked Nobel to
join her at an international peace conference. No,
he said, his explosives advanced the cause of peace
faster than her congresses. The day two armies can
destroy each other in one second, all civilized
nations will recoil from war in horror and disband
their armies.
Well, dynamite didn't do that, nor did the H-bomb.
Of course, he was whistling in the dark. But, in
the end, he did what he could to stem the damage
others had done with the fruit of his inventive
mind.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
