The New Yorker:

Before he devoted himself to creating harmony between nations, Alfred Nobel made a fortune by inventing one of the most destructive substances in existence.

By Robert Shaplen

On the morning of September 3, 1864, the Swedish village of Heleneborg, which has since become a suburb of Stockholm, was rocked by a mysterious explosion. When the police investigated, they found that it had taken place in a little one-story building that served as the laboratory of Immanuel Nobel, an inventor who up to a few years before had been manufacturing land and sea mines for the Imperial Government of Russia, and his son Alfred, a sickly, morose man of thirty who had been doing some highly original work with a curious and dangerous substance called nitroglycerin. Neither Immanuel nor Alfred was hurt in the blast—both were shaken up a bit—but five people were killed, among them Emil Nobel, the youngest of Immanuel’s four sons, who at the time was home on vacation from college, and who had, in the family tradition, been tinkering with nitroglycerin in the laboratory. When the police asked Immanuel and Alfred Nobel to describe exactly how the accident had come about, the two men produced a coolly worded, bristlingly technical memorandum that, in effect, put all the blame on Emil and none on nitroglycerin. The boy, they said, had simply bungled an experiment. Nitroglycerin, they insisted, was harmless if it was properly handled; indeed, with its unprecedented explosive force, it could prove to be of immense value to humanity.

Before the Heleneborg disaster, nitroglycerin and Alfred Nobel had both had obscure, if eventful, histories; in the few years after it, they were to have a single history—even more eventful, and anything but obscure. As it turned out, the blast that killed Nobel’s brother was the first of a series of spectacular explosions involving nitroglycerin, and these stimulated a worldwide debate, often conducted in an atmosphere of sheer panic, over the use of the new substance—a debate not unlike the one now being waged over the use of nuclear energy. Undaunted by the controversy, Nobel went on with his experiments, and eventually he not only tamed nitroglycerin but invented dynamite and several other potent explosives. His work brought about the greatest advances in the development of blasting agents that the world had ever seen, and it also, inevitably, led to a tremendous increase in the destructiveness of war. An idealist who loathed war and liked to think of himself as a benefactor of mankind, Nobel came to be widely regarded as a sinister figure—the archetypal “merchant of death.” He had every right to a fairly clear conscience, for only a small portion of the ten-million-dollar fortune he accumulated was derived from the military application of his inventions, but gradually he became deeply disturbed over some of the implications of his lifework. Although he believed until his death, in 1896, that his type of scientific research was the sure road to a better world, he devoted more and more time in his last years to the problem of peace, and this growing concern was reflected in his will, in which he established, among other awards, the famous Nobel Peace Prize.
 

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