Alfred Nobel (October 21, 1833–December 10, 1896) was a Swedish chemist, engineer, businessman, and philanthropist best remembered for inventing dynamite. Paradoxically, Nobel spent most of his adult life creating ever more powerful explosives, while writing poetry and drama, and advocating for world peace. After reading a prematurely written obituary condemning him for profiting from the sale of arms and munitions, Nobel bequeathed his fortune to establish the Nobel Prizes for peace, chemistry, physics, medicine, and literature.

Early Life

Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born on October 21, 1833, in Stockholm, Sweden, one of eight children born to Immanuel Nobel and Caroline Andrietta Ahlsell. The same year Nobel was born, his father, an inventor and engineer, went bankrupt due to financial misfortune and a fire that destroyed much of his work. These hardships left the family in poverty, with only Alfred and his three brothers surviving past childhood. Though prone to illness, the young Nobel showed an interest in explosives, having inherited a passion for technology and engineering from his father, who had graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Nobel was also a descendant of the 17th-century Swedish scientist, Olaus Rudbeck.

After failing at various business ventures in Stockholm, Immanuel Nobel moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1837, where he established himself as a successful mechanical engineer providing equipment for the Russian Army. His work included torpedoes and explosive mines, which would detonate when a ship hit them. These mines worked by using a small explosion to set off bigger ones, an insight which would later prove helpful to his son, Alfred, in his invention of dynamite.

In 1842, Alfred and the rest of the Nobel family joined Immanuel in St. Petersburg. Now prosperous, Nobel’s parents were able to send him to the finest private tutors who taught him the natural sciences, languages, and literature. By age 16, he had mastered chemistry and was fluent in English, French, German, and Russian as well as Swedish.

Nobel’s Path to Dynamite and Wealth

One of Nobel’s tutors was the accomplished Russian organic chemist Nikolai Zinin, who first told him about nitroglycerine, the explosive chemical in dynamite. Though Nobel was interested in poetry and literature, his father wanted him to become an engineer, and in 1850, he sent him to Paris to study chemical engineering.

Though he never obtained a degree or attended the university, Nobel worked in the Royal College of Chemistry laboratory of Professor Jules Pélouze. It was there that Nobel was introduced to Professor Pélouze’s assistant, Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, who had invented nitroglycerin in 1847. Though the explosive power of the chemical was much greater than that of gunpowder, it tended to explode unpredictably when subjected to heat or pressure and could not be handled with any degree of safety. As a result, it was rarely used outside the laboratory.

His experiences with Pélouze and Sobrero in Paris inspired Nobel to look for a way to make nitroglycerin a safe and commercially usable explosive. In 1851, at age 18, Nobel spent a year in the United States studying and working under Swedish-American inventor John Ericsson, designer of the American Civil War ironclad warship USS Monitor.

Advances With Nitroglycerine

In 1852, Nobel returned to Russia to work in his father’s St. Petersburg business, which had flourished through its sales to the Russian Army. However, when the Crimean War ended in 1856, the army canceled its orders, leading Nobel and his father Immanuel to look for new products to sell.

Nobel and his father had heard of nitroglycerine from Professor Zinin, who had shown it to them at the beginning of the Crimean War. They began working on nitroglycerine together. One idea, for example, was to use nitroglycerine to improve explosives for Immanuel’s mines. However, Immanuel was not able to achieve any notable improvement. Nobel, on the other hand, made significant strides with the chemical.

In 1859, Immanuel was facing bankruptcy again and returned to Sweden with his wife and another of his sons. Meanwhile, Nobel stayed in St. Petersburg with his brothers Ludvig and Robert. His brothers soon focused on rebuilding the family business, eventually turning it into an oil empire called The Brothers Nobel.

In 1863, Nobel returned to Stockholm and continued working with nitroglycerine. That same year, he invented a practical explosives detonator consisting of a wooden plug inserted into a larger charge of nitroglycerin held in a metal container. Based on his father’s experience in using small explosions to set off larger ones, Nobel’s detonator used a small charge of black powder in the wooden plug, which when detonated, set off the much more powerful charge of liquid nitroglycerin in the metal container. Patented in 1864, Nobel’s detonator established him as an inventor and paved the way to the fortune he was destined to amass as the first mogul of the explosives industry.

Nobel soon began mass producing nitroglycerine in Stockholm, founding companies throughout Europe. However, several accidents with nitroglycerine led authorities to introduce regulations restricting the manufacture and transport of explosives.

In 1865, Nobel invented an improved version of his detonator he called the blasting cap. Instead of a wooden plug, his blasting cap consisted of a small metal cap containing a charge of mercury fulminate that could be exploded by either shock or moderate heat. The blasting cap revolutionized the field of explosives and would prove integral to the development of modern explosives.

Nobel’s new blasting techniques garnered significant attention from mining companies and the state railways, which began to use it in their construction work. However, a series of accidental explosions involving the chemical—including one which killed Nobel’s brother Emil—convinced authorities that nitroglycerine was extremely dangerous. The use of nitroglycerine was banned in Stockholm, and Nobel continued to manufacture the chemical on a barge on a lake near the city. Despite the high risk involved in using nitroglycerine, the chemical had become essential to mining and railway construction.

Dynamite, Gelignite, and Ballistite

Nobel continued looking for ways to make nitroglycerine safer. During his experiments, he found that combining nitroglycerine with kieselguhr (also called diatomaceous earth; mostly made of silica) formed a paste that allowed the chemical to be shaped and detonated on command. In 1867, Nobel received a British patent for his invention he called “dynamite,” and publicly demonstrated his new explosive for the first time at a quarry in Redhill, Surrey, England. Already thinking of how he might best market his invention, and mindful of nitroglycerine’s bad image, Nobel had first considered naming the highly powerful substance “Nobel’s Safety Powder,” but settled with dynamite instead, referring to the Greek word for “power” (dynamis). In 1868, Nobel was awarded his better-known United States patent for dynamite referred to as “Improved Explosive Compound.” The same year, he received an honorary award from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for “important inventions for the practical use of mankind.” 

Safer to handle and more stable than nitroglycerin, the demand for Nobel’s dynamite surged. Since the user could control the explosions, it had many applications in construction work, including tunnel blasting and road building. Nobel continued creating companies and laboratories all over the world, amassing a fortune.

Nobel went on to combine nitroglycerin with other materials to produce even more commercially-successful explosives. In 1876, he was awarded a patent for “gelignite,” a transparent, jelly-like explosive both more stable and powerful than dynamite. Unlike traditional rigid sticks of dynamite, gelignite, or “blasting gelatin,” as Nobel called it, can be molded to fit into pre-bored holes typically used in rock blasting. Soon adopted as the standard explosive for mining, gelignite brought Nobel even greater financial success. A year later, he patented “ballistite,” the forerunner of modern smokeless gunpowder. Though Nobel’s main business was explosives, he also worked on other products, such as synthetic leather and artificial silk.

In 1884, Nobel was honored by being elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and in 1893, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden, the oldest university in all of the Nordic countries still in operation today.

Personal Life

Even as Nobel was building his explosives industry fortune, his brothers Ludvig and Robert were becoming wealthy themselves by developing oil fields along the shores of the Caspian Sea. By investing in his brothers’ oil businesses, Nobel obtained even greater wealth. With businesses in Europe and America, Nobel traveled throughout most of his life but maintained a home in Paris from 1873 to 1891. Despite achieving undeniable success in both his inventing and business undertakings, Nobel remained a reclusive individual who suffered through periods of deep depression. True to his lifelong interest in literature, he wrote poems, novels, and plays, few of which were ever published. An agnostic in his youth, Nobel became an atheist in his later life. However, during his years in Paris, Nobel was a practicing Lutheran who regularly attended the Church of Sweden Abroad, led by pastor Nathan Söderblom, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1930.

Politically, while Nobel was considered a progressive by his contemporaries, he might have best been described as a classical liberal, perhaps even a Libertarian. He opposed allowing women to vote and often expressed his distrust of democracy and its inherent politics as a mechanism for selecting government leaders. A pacifist at heart, Nobel often expressed a hope that the mere threat of the destructive powers of his explosive inventions would forever end war. However, he remained pessimistic about the willingness and ability of mankind and governments to maintain perpetual peace.

Nobel never married, possibly fearing that romantic relationships might interfere with his first love—inventing. However, at the age of 43, he advertised himself in a newspaper as: “Wealthy, highly educated elderly gentleman seeks lady of mature age, versed in languages, as secretary and supervisor of household.” An Austrian woman named Bertha Kinsky answered the ad, but two weeks later she returned to Austria to marry Count Arthur von Suttner. Despite their brief relationship, Nobel and Bertha von Suttner continued to correspond with one another. Later becoming active in the peace movement, Bertha wrote the famous 1889 book “Lay Down Your Arms.” It is believed Nobel may have tried to justify his inventions to Bertha with the rationale that he could create something so destructive and terrible that it would stop all wars forever.

Later Life and Death

After being accused of high treason against France for selling ballistite to Italy in 1891, Nobel moved from Paris to San Remo, Italy. By 1895, he had developed angina pectoris, and died of a stroke on December 10, 1896, at his villa in San Remo, Italy.

By the time of his death at age 63, Nobel had been issued 355 patents and, despite his apparent pacifist beliefs, had established more than 90 explosives and ammunitions factories worldwide.

The reading of Nobel’s will left his family, friends, and the general public in shock when it was disclosed that he had left the bulk of his fortune—31 million Swedish kronor (over 265 million U.S. dollars today)—to create what is now regarded as the most coveted international award, the Nobel Prize.

Legacy, the Nobel Prize

Nobel’s highly controversial will was challenged in court by his disgruntled relatives. It would take his two chosen executors four years to convince all parties that Alfred’s final wishes should be honored. In 1901, the first Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature were awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Peace Prize in what is now Oslo, Norway.

Nobel never explained why he chose to bequeath his fortune to establish his namesake awards. Always a rather reticent character, he remained largely isolated in the days before his death. However, it is possible that a freakish incident in 1888 may have motivated him. In that year, Nobel’s oil industry magnate brother Ludvig had died in Cannes, France. One popular French newspaper reported Ludvig’s death, but confused him with Alfred, printing the glaring headline “Le marchand de la mort est mort” (“The merchant of death is dead”). Having worked so hard during his life to portray himself as a pacifist at heart, Nobel was outraged to read what might be written about him in his future obituary. He may have created the prizes to avoid being posthumously labeled a warmonger.

There is also evidence that Nobel’s long and close relationship with the noted Austrian pacifist Bertha von Suttner influenced him to establish the prize awarded for contributions to peace. Indeed, Noble’s will specifically stated that the Peace Prize should be awarded to the person who in the preceding year “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Early Life and Education

Eli Whitney was born on December 8, 1765, in Westborough, Massachusetts. His father, Eli Whitney Sr., was a respected farmer who also served as a justice of the peace. His mother, Elizabeth Fay, died in 1777. The young Whitney was considered a born mechanic. He could take apart and reassemble his father’s watch, and he designed and built a violin. By age 14, during the Revolutionary War, Biographry of Eli Whitney and Founder of Cotton Gin Biographry of Eli Whitney and Founder of Cotton Gin Biographry of Eli Whitney and Founder of Cotton Gin Whitney was running a profitable nail forge out of his father’s workshop.

Before entering college, Whitney worked as a farm laborer and school teacher while studying at Leicester Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts. He entered Yale College in the fall of 1789 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1792, having learned many of the latest concepts in science and industrial technology.

Path to the Cotton Gin

After graduating from Yale, Whitney hoped to practice law and teach, but he wasn’t able to land a job. He left Massachusetts to take a position as a private tutor at Mulberry Grove, a Georgia plantation owned by Catherine Littlefield Greene. Whitney soon became a close friend of Greene and her plantation manager, Phineas Miller. A fellow Yale graduate, Miller would eventually become Whitney’s business partner.

At Mulberry Grove, Whitney learned that inland Southern growers desperately needed a way to make cotton a profitable crop. Long-staple cotton was easy to separate from its seeds, but could only be grown along the Atlantic coast. Short staple cotton, the one variety that grew inland, had many small and sticky green seeds that took time and labor to pick out of the cotton bolls. Profits from tobacco were shrinking because of over-supply and soil exhaustion, so the success of cotton growing was vital to the economic survival of the South.

Whitney realized that machines capable of efficiently removing the seeds from short-staple cotton could make the South prosperous and its inventor wealthy. With the moral and financial support of Catherine Greene, Whitney went to work on his best-known invention: the cotton gin.

The Cotton Gin

In a matter of weeks, Whitney built a working model of the cotton gin. A cotton gin is a machine that removes the seeds from raw cotton fiber, a previously labor-intensive process. In one day, a single Whitney cotton gin could produce nearly 60 pounds of clean, ready to weave cotton. By contrast, hand-cleaning could produce only a few pounds of cotton in a day.

Similar in concept to today’s massive cotton processing plants, Whitney’s cotton gin employed a rotating wooden drum studded with hooks that grabbed the raw cotton fibers and pulled them through a mesh screen. Too large to fit through the mesh, the cotton seeds fell outside the gin. Whitney liked to say that he had been inspired by watching a cat trying to pull a chicken through a fence and seeing that only the feathers through came through.

On March 14, 1794, the U.S. government granted Whitney a patent—Patent No. 72-X—for his cotton gin. Rather than selling the gins, Whitney and his business partner Phineas Miller planned to profit by charging growers to clean their cotton with them. However, the mechanical simplicity of the cotton gin, the primitive state of U.S. patent law at the time, and the growers’ objections to Whitney’s scheme made attempts to infringe on his patent inevitable.

Unable to build enough gins to meet the demand for their cotton cleaning services, Whitney and Miller watched as other makers churned out similar gins ready for sale. Eventually, the legal costs of protecting their patent rights consumed their profits and drove their cotton gin company out of business in 1797. When the government refused to renew his cotton gin patent, Whitney remarked that “an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.” Embittered by the experience, he would never attempt to patent any of his later inventions.

Though he never profited from it, Whitney’s cotton gin transformed Southern agriculture and bolstered the U.S. economy. Growing textile mills in New England and Europe became eager buyers of Southern cotton. After the introduction of the gin, U.S. cotton exports grew from less than 500,000 pounds in 1793 to 93 million pounds by 1810. Cotton soon became America’s main export, representing over half the value of total U.S. exports from 1820 to 1860.

The cotton gin significantly bolstered the African slave trade. In fact, the gin made growing cotton so profitable that growers enslaved more people. According to many historians, the invention of the gin made growing cotton with the stolen labor of enslaved people a highly profitable undertaking that became the primary source of wealth in the American South and helped drive westward expansion from Georgia to Texas. Paradoxically, while the gin made “King Cotton” a dominant American economic force, it also sustained enslavement as an economic and social institution in the Southern states, a key cause of the American Civil War. 

Interchangeable Parts 

By the late 1790s, legal fees from patent fights and a fire that destroyed his cotton gin factory had left Whitney on the verge of bankruptcy. However, inventing the cotton gin had earned him a reputation for ingenuity and mechanical expertise which he would soon apply to a major government project.

In 1797, the U.S. government was preparing for a possible war with France, but the government armories had managed to produce only 1,000 muskets in three years. The reason for this slow pace was the conventional method of arms production, in which every part of every musket was handmade by a single gunsmith. Since each weapon was unique, replacement parts had to be specially made—a time-consuming and costly process. To speed up production, the War Department solicited bids from private contractors for the manufacture of 10,000 muskets.

Eli Whitney had never built a gun in his life, but he won the government contract by proposing to deliver all 10,000 muskets in just two years. To accomplish this seemingly impossible feat, he proposed inventing new machine tools that would enable unskilled workers to make identical individual parts of each particular musket model. Since any part would fit any musket, repairs could be made quickly in the field.

To build the muskets, Whitney built an entire town called Whitneyville, located in the present-day Hamden, Connecticut. At the center of Whitneyville was the Whitney Armory. Employees lived and worked in Whitneyville; to attract and keep the best workers, Whitney provided free housing and education and vocational training for the workers’ children.

By January 1801, Whitney had failed to deliver a single gun. He was summoned to Washington to justify his continued use of government funds. In a storied display, Whitney reportedly amazed outgoing President John Adams and President-elect Thomas Jefferson by assembling several working muskets from a random selection of parts. It was later proven that Whitney had actually marked the correct musket parts beforehand. However, the demonstration won Whitney continued funding and credit for what Jefferson declared “the dawn of the machine age.”

Ultimately, it took Whitney ten years to deliver the 10,000 muskets he had contracted to deliver in two. When the government questioned Whitney’s price per musket compared to the weapons made in the government armories, he provided a complete cost breakdown, including fixed costs such as machinery and insurance, which were not included in the production costs of the government-made guns. He is credited for one of the first demonstrations of total cost accounting and economic efficiency in manufacturing.

Today, Whitney’s role as the originator of the idea of interchangeable parts has been largely disproven. As early as 1785, French gunsmith Honoré Blanc suggested making easily replaceable gun parts from standard templates. In fact, Thomas Jefferson, then serving as American minister to France, visited Blanc’s workshop in 1789 and was reportedly impressed by his methods. However, Blanc’s idea was flatly rejected by the French gun market, as individual competing gunsmiths realized the devastating effect it would have on their business. Even earlier, English naval engineer Samuel Bentham originated the use of standardized parts in wooden pulleys for raising and lowering sails.

While the idea was not his own, Whitney’s work nevertheless did much to popularize the v of interchangeable parts in the United States.

Later Life

Until middle age, Whitney put much of his personal life, including marriage and family, on hold. His work had been his life. In a series of letters to his old patron, Catherine Greene, Whitney revealed his feelings of isolation and loneliness. After Greene married Whitney’s former cotton gin business partner Phineas Miller, Whitney began to refer to himself as the “solitary Old Bachelor.”

In 1817, at age 52, Whitney moved to recapture his personal life when he married 31-year-old Henrietta Edwards. Henrietta was a granddaughter of famed evangelist Jonathan Edwards and daughter of Pierpont Edwards, then the head of the Connecticut Democratic Party. The couple had three daughters and one son: Elizabeth Fay, Frances, Susan, and Eli. Known throughout his life as “Eli Whitney, Jr.,” Whitney’s son took over his father’s arms manufacturing business and taught physics and mechanical arts at the University of Vermont, Cornell University, Columbia College, and Brown University.

Death

Eli Whitney died of prostate cancer on January 8, 1825, just a month after his 59th birthday. Though plagued by the pain of his illness, Whitney studied human anatomy with his doctors and invented a new type of catheter and other devices to help ease his pain. In his final days, Whitney sketched designs for improved tools for making lock parts.

The nation’s high regard for Whitney was expressed in his obituary published in the Niles Weekly Register on January 25, 1825:

His [Whitney’s] inventive genius rendered him one of the greatest benefactors of the age, and was the means of changing the whole course of industry in the southern section of the union.

Mr. Whitney was a gentleman of extensive literary and scientific attainments, of liberal and expanded views, benevolent in his feelings, and mild and unassuming in his manners. While his death will be regarded by the nation as a public calamity, it will be felt in the circle of his private friends as a bereavement of its brightest ornament.

Whitney was buried in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut. The foundation of the building where his first operating cotton gin was erected still stands on the grounds of the old Mulberry Grove plantation in Port Wentworth, Georgia. However, the most visible monument to Whitney’s memory is located in Hamden, Connecticut, where the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop has preserved the remains of his groundbreaking musket factory village on the Mill River.

Legacy

Never active or even interested in politics or public affairs, Whitney did not live to see his inventions’ sweeping impact on the development of America. His cotton gin revolutionized agriculture in the South, but made the region even more dependent on stolen labor of enslaved people. At the same time, his advances in more efficient manufacturing methods helped the North grow its wealth and status as an industrial power. In 1861, these two divergent economic, political, and social systems collided in what remains the nation’s bloodiest war: the American Civil War.

Today, the Eli Whitney Students Program at Yale University, named in Whitney’s honor, offers a preferred admissions program for individuals whose educational careers have been interrupted.