"I'd rather take care of the stomachs of the living than

                                            the glory of the dead in the form of stone memorials."

                                                                                   Alfred Nobel

 

                                     Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born in

                           Stockholm, Sweden on October 21,

                           1833 and was the fourth son of 

                           Immanuel and Caroline Nobel.  In

                           their family there were eight child-

                           ren, but only three of them were

                           able to become adult.

                           From his first days he was a weak and sickly child and his childhood was marked by chronic illness. But he enjoyed a close relationship with his mother and displayed a lively intellectual curiosity from an early age. 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. Nobel-father invented the landmine and made a lot of money from government orders for it during the Crimean War.

    Most of the family returned to Sweden in 1859, where Alfred rejoined them in 1863,beginning his own study of explosives in his father’s laboratory.

    Nobel had never been to school or university but had studied privately and by the time he was twenty he was a skillful chemist and excellent linguistics, speaking Swedish, Russian, German, French and English.

       In youth he had taken a serious interest in literature and psychology. He wrote a considerable number of plays, novels and poems, only one of which was published. He was always generous to the poor.

      Unlike many contemporaries he was Spartan in his habits, he neither smoked nor drank, he never played cards or other games.

     Alfred Nobel was a man on many contrasts. He made a fortune but lived a simple life, he was cheerful in company but sad in private. A lover of mankind, he never had a family or wife to love him. He was a patriotic son of his native land and he died on foreign soil. Alfred Nobel died in his home in San Remo, Italy on December 10, 1896.

 

 

 

 

     

 

Alfred Nobel