biography
| name: |
Nobel, Alfred Bernhard
|
pronunciation:
[nohbel]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1833–96)
|
| biography:
| Chemist and industrialist, the inventor of dynamite and the founder of the Nobel Prizes, born in Stockholm, Sweden. He moved to Russia as a child, studied chemistry in Paris, worked in the USA (1852–6) under John Ericsson, and settled in Sweden in 1859. An explosives expert like his father, in 1866 he invented a safe and manageable form of nitroglycerin he called dynamite, and later, smokeless gunpowder and (1875) gelignite. He helped to create an industrial empire manufacturing many of his other inventions, and amassed a huge fortune, much of which he left to endow annual prizes (first awarded in 1901) for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. (A sixth prize, for economics, was instituted in his honour in 1969.) |
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