Nobel, Alfred Bernhard (1833-1896)

Swedish chemist and engineer. He invented dynamite in 1867, gelignite in 1875, and ballistite, a smokeless gunpowder, in 1887. Having amassed a large fortune from the manufacture of explosives and the exploitation of the Baku oilfields in Azerbaijan, near the Caspian Sea, he left this in trust for the endowment of five Nobel prizes.

Nobel was born in Stockholm and studied in Europe and North America. He worked in his father's company in St Petersburg during the Crimean War 1853-56, producing munitions. After the war his father went bankrupt, and in 1859 the family returned to Sweden. During the next few years Nobel developed several new explosives and factories for making them. In 1864, a nitroglycerine factory blew up, killing Nobel's younger brother and four other people.

In 1863 Nobel invented a mercury fulminate detonator for use with nitroglycerine. Dynamite was invented to make the handling of nitroglycerine safer, by mixing it with kieselguhr, a porous diatomite mineral. Gelignite, a colloidal solution of nitrocellulose (gun cotton) in nitroglycerine, was safer still: less sensitive to shock and strongly resistant to moisture.

Nobel also worked in electrochemistry, optics, biology, and physiology, and helped to solve many problems in the manufacture of artificial silk, leather, and rubber.