The name of the most well-known Swede of all time  — Alfred Nobel  — is famous all over the world due to the prize he established. Despite hundreds of publications about the Nobel Prize, most people know very little about the man behind it.

Alfred Nobel was born in 1833, in Stockholm, Sweden. When he was four, the family moved to St. Petersburg, Russia. Alfred studied at home with the best private tutors and quickly mastered chemistry and became fluent in English, French, German and Russian as well as his native language, Swedish. In Russia, Alfred attended neither school nor university.

Alfred left Russia at the age of 18 to take a two-year trip around Europe and to the USA. When he returned to Russia, he began working at his father's arms factory where he experimented with chemistry and explosives.

Later, Alfred Nobel expanded the business to Europe and America. He had homes in six countries complete with laboratories as he was also a workaholic. He said himself that “my home is where I work and I work everywhere”. Alfred Nobel had 93 profitable factories around the world when he died. Many of the leading industries in the chemical field today like ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) came from companies established by Nobel. His 355 registered patents1 showed that Alfred Nobel had a wide range of interests in many fields of technology. There were experiments with imitation leather, artificial rubber and synthetic silk. Nobel tried to improve the electrical battery, the light bulb and the phonograph. He also took photographs from the air, using rockets and parachutes. Alfred Nobel was also a big letter writer, sometimes writing as many as 30 letters a day. It was not only letters that Alfred Nobel wrote. A year before his death, he published his sad novel “Nemesis” that was performed as a play in Stockholm. Nobel was full of paradoxes. He was successful yet felt hopeless. He made a fortune out of war but fought for peace. He was a faithful patriot, yet spent little time in Sweden. He was an outstanding scientist and inventor, yet had only one year of formal schooling and no university degree. He loved family life but had none of his own. His dream of a wife and children never came true.

In 1864, a deadly explosion killed his younger brother. Deeply affected, Nobel developed a safer explosive: dynamite. Soon the newspapers accused Alfred Nobel of being the “salesman of death”, even though 90 % of dynamite use was for non-violent purposes. However, Alfred Nobel himself knew that “there was nothing that could not be abused”. He never tried to defend his revolutionary invention. But Nobel was disappointed with how he might be remembered and decided to establish the Nobel Prizes to honour men and women for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and for working towards peace. . A prize in economics “in memory of Alfred Nobel” was added in 1969.