The Nobel Prize is the word’s most famous prize. It is awarded every year to persons with most outstanding contribution to physics, chemistry, literature, physiology or medicine, peace, and economics. This Nobel Prize was founded by Alfred Bernhard Nobel who was the founder of the science of destruction.
Nobel was born on 21st October 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden. His father Immanuel Nobel, came from a poor peasant background and worked his way to fame as a military engineer. Nobel learned the fundamentals of engineering from his father and he had an inborn talent for invention. Like his brothers, Alfred Nobel was schooled at home by private tutors.
Young Nobel was a competent chemist at 16 and was fluent in English, French, German, Russian and Swedish languages, whereas our children drawback to learning any other language than their own mother tung. He left Russia in 1850 and studied chemistry in Paris. He went to the United States and worked under John Ericsson, the builder of the ironclad warship “Monitor”.
Together with his father in Sweden Alfred Nobel began to experiment with explosives. One day in 1864 an accident occurred in their workshop, where they were researching to produce Nitroglycerine, his younger brother and four others were killed. At that time Nobel was branded as “Mad Scientist”
As Nobel’s father fell sick badly, Nobel started his researches alone. He began to set up factories in Norway and Germany, but this nitroglycerine remained dangerous. Mishaps occurred in Germany, San Francisco, New York, and Australia and in a ship off Panama. Most of the countries restricted their use.
In 1866 he discovered that some nitroglycerine had leaked from its cask which was packed in an absorbent substance. Alfred noticed that nitroglycerine was much safer to handle in that condition. That is if was absorbed into absorbent substance it would not explode from shocks. Nobel called this discovery “Dynamite”
Thereafter Alfred Nobel’s factories grew rapidly and made his fortune from selling dynamite. In 1887 he invented Smokeless nitroglycerine Powder that most countries soon began to use as gun powder. Nobel secured more than 100 patents on his inventions.
When he died in 1898, he left 19 million dollars in Swiss Bank and according to his will from the interest, it should be distributed as prizes as mentioned.
