In April 1888, Ludvig Nobel — Russian oil magnate and elder brother of the dynamite king — died in Cannes. The story goes that at least one French newspaper muddled its Nobels and ran an obituary for the wrong brother: "Le marchand de la mort est mort" — the merchant of death is dead — damning Alfred Nobel as a man who had grown rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before. Alfred, so the tale continues, read his own death notice, glimpsed how the world would remember him, and resolved to buy himself a better epitaph.
It is one of history's most satisfying anecdotes, and it deserves an honest asterisk. No copy of the offending newspaper has ever been produced, and historians note that the story rests on retellings from decades later; it may be embroidered, or invented outright. What is beyond dispute is that Nobel brooded on his posthumous reputation — his letters show it — and that within a decade of Ludvig's death he had stunned Europe with the most famous will ever written.
The fortune it disposed of was built on instability. Born in Stockholm in 1833 to a family of engineers, Nobel became obsessed with taming nitroglycerine, a liquid explosive so temperamental that in 1864 a blast at the family's Stockholm workshop killed five people, among them his younger brother Emil. The city barred further experiments within its limits, so Nobel carried on from a barge moored on a lake. In 1867 he found the answer: soak nitroglycerine into kieselguhr, a porous fossil clay, and it becomes a stable paste that can be shaped into sticks and detonated on command. He called it dynamite, from the Greek word for power. Gelignite and the smokeless propellant ballistite followed, along with some 355 patents and factories in around twenty countries. He lived nowhere in particular — a restless polyglot once described as Europe's richest vagabond — wrote melancholy poetry in English, and never married.
Four pages that shook Stockholm
On 27 November 1895, at the Swedish–Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed a short handwritten will leaving about 94 per cent of his estate — roughly 31 million Swedish kronor, a colossal sum for the day — to endow annual prizes for those who had conferred the greatest benefit on humankind in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. The peace prize, alone among them, was to be awarded by a committee of the Norwegian parliament. A year later, on 10 December 1896, Nobel died of a stroke at his villa in San Remo, Italy, attended only by servants.
Then the fighting started. Relatives contested a will that left the family only a sliver; the institutions named as judges hesitated to take the job; even the Swedish king grumbled about a national fortune being handed out to foreigners. The estate was rescued largely by an executor still in his mid-twenties, the engineer Ragnar Sohlman, who spent days rattling around Paris in a horse-drawn cab, sitting on Nobel's share certificates with a revolver to hand, racing to move the assets before French courts could freeze them. The Nobel Foundation was finally established in 1900, and the first prizes were handed out on 10 December 1901 — the physics prize going to Wilhelm Röntgen for the discovery of X-rays.
The pacifist and the small print
Why a peace prize from an explosives magnate? The gentlest influence was Bertha von Suttner, briefly his secretary in Paris and a lifelong correspondent, whose anti-war novel Lay Down Your Arms made her Europe's most famous pacifist. Nobel half-teased her that his factories might end war sooner than her peace congresses; in 1905 she became the first woman to win the peace prize he had endowed. The prizes now come wrapped in quiz-friendly small print: the ceremonies fall each year on 10 December, the anniversary of his death; peace is awarded in Oslo and everything else in Stockholm; and there is no Nobel Prize in economics in the will at all — the economics award is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in memory of Nobel, bolted on in 1968. Element 102, nobelium, carries his name around the periodic table.
Whether or not a careless French editor really killed him off in 1888, the verdict Nobel feared — merchant of death — is not the one the world remembers. Every December, in Stockholm and Oslo, humanity reads out the obituary he wrote for himself.
Quiz nuggets
- The premature obituary reportedly called Alfred Nobel "the merchant of death", but no copy of the newspaper has ever been found and historians question the story.
- Nobel patented dynamite in 1867 by stabilising nitroglycerine with kieselguhr; an 1864 explosion had killed his brother Emil.
- His 1895 will left about 94 per cent of his estate to fund five prizes; he died on 10 December 1896 in San Remo.
- The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, with Wilhelm Röntgen taking the physics prize for discovering X-rays.
- The economics prize is not in Nobel's will — it was created by Sweden's central bank in 1968.