Dynamite Money

Housing Genius: the Nobel Museum, Stockholm

#1: The Growling Bear

Since this week happens to be the time of year when small bands of elite academics (and sometimes spurious accessories, like Barack Obama) are ushered into the scholarly Hall of Fame, this seems the perfect time to start a new column here on Sifting The Evidence: I'll aim to profile the life and graft of one Nobel Prize winner every month. 


This will span three of the five categories, so anyone from physics, chemistry or physiology/medicine is eligible, but I won’t feature winners of the literature or peace prizes (for, in the eyes of this blog, these are domains of beatniks). And economics also squeaks in, despite its unofficial status. The prizes have been awarded for a diverse array of amazing theories, discoveries and innovations, from radioactivity to IVF, and are given to personalities of every shade, from the outspoken to (perhaps predictably) the somewhat autistic. But first, we’ll start with the Growling Bear himself: Alfred Nobel. 

Born in 1833, Nobel swiftly grew up to be a man of the world. A Swede who comfortably adapted to life in St. Petersburg in his youth, he zipped around France and the U.S. when his childhood tutelage came to an end as he turned 17. The young Nobel could speak five languages proficiently; clearly the type of man who’d have relished the era of Ryan Air flights. 

Of all the many patents under Nobel’s name, dynamite is by far his defining scientific legacy. An Italian named Ascanio Sobrero had synthesised a molecule called nitroglycerine in Paris in 1846, following his experiments with the extremely unstable guncotton (nitrocellulose), and unveiled the new liquid explosive to the world in Turin a year later. Nobel encountered the discovery on his Grand Tour in 1850, and recognised the potential of the feisty substance.  He saw that the real golden goose lay in the mechanism by which it could be used for controlled explosions. 

At this point, we have a brief interlude. A number of the Nobel family, including the patriarch Immanuel, were inventive sorts who made their trade in engineering and production. So it was, during his early 20s, that Alfred himself appeared to be the black sheep. That is, he went through his beatnik phase. Hungry to find his place in the world, being something of a humanist and having a multitude of interests, he thought about abandoning the laboratory and pursuing his voracious appetite for literature and philosophy. But his interest in becoming a poet and writer eventually stagnated and so he rejoined his family’s business in Russia, once again taking to the laboratory and making the liquid explosive his plaything. 

Reigning in nitroglycerine took its toll. Although Alfred had a patent for a detonator by 1863, the liquid was still not to be trifled with and Alfred’s brother Emil was killed in an explosion in 1864. Spurred on by the tragedy, Nobel eventually worked out how to tame the beast:  by mixing nitroglycerine with a siliceous rock called diatomite, he tempered the unruly properties of the liquid. In 1866, he had his patent for dynamite. 

Nobel belonged to a rare breed of scientist who combines entrepreneurial instincts with the creativity of a successful inventor. His shrewd eye for commercialising dynamite, now the most potent utilisable explosive since gunpowder, led his family to phenomenal wealth.  But his idealist, philanthropic streak ran deep. The loving beatnik in you never dies, no matter how gnarled and conservative you think your old frame can get. He knew the implications of putting such a bombastic explosive on a platter for the world. But he hoped that it would increase human prosperity, and not feed our potential for self-destruction (with tunnels and wars standing testament today, dynamite has of course contributed to both). 

Despite the old rascal continuing to sign off letters to an old girlfriend as ‘the Growling Bear’ till he lay in his deathbed in 1896, the aged Nobel had no wife or heirs and left his huge fortune (~$250 million in today’s money) to a trust responsible for honouring great work of individuals who came up with revolutionary ideas, discoveries or inventions to help mankind. Ever the worldly philanthropist, he stipulated that his will should be enacted without concern for national divides, and the Nobel Prize became renowned for honouring giants of science, diplomacy and literature from all corners of the globe.  

Nowadays, the interest skimmed off his vast piles of dynamite money keeps the world’s attention on science that matters. But it’s safe to say they use pyrotechnics and not Nobel’s breadwinning formula to help with the celebrations at the ceremony each December.