A Brill Calendar: October 21

The Birth of Alfred Noble

Few nineteenth century industrialists are less likely to be forgotten than Alfred Nobel, born in Stockholm, Sweden, October 21, 1833.

The Prizes eternalizing (to all practical purposes) the name of the inventor of a whole range of explosives – not only good old dynamite – was awarded for the first time on December 10 1901, the fifth anniversary of his death in San Remo, Italy.

The will and testament of the man who amassed - after the bankruptcy of his father, also an industrialist - an immense fortune by creating new dimensions in the realm of physical destruction, enabled the establishment of an independent organization devoted to the idea of honouring and financially rewarding those individuals ‘conferring the greatest benefit on mankind’ in five fields of expertise: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.

These classifying categories reflect in their way the intellectual pursuits from which ‘La Belle Époque’ expected a better and happier life for the world’s population. It is characteristic for a new and quite different era, some three generations after Nobel, that this quintet was extended to a sextet, when a Nobel Prize was added for economic science in 1969; hardly a publishable ‘science’ in Nobel’s lifetime.

If a survey was made of how business tycoons of the Industrial Age sought to escape from oblivion by posterity, Alfred Nobel’s name and strategy would be seen as unique. He didn’t donate priceless collections or palaces to the world at large, nor hospitals or scholarships remembering his name. He just created a vehicle that became a mighty metaphor in an increasingly competitive world: the acknowledgement of individual and personal merit, extended and provided without regard to nation, race, gender or religion.

This man, who lost his beloved brother by an accident in his technical experiments, must have longed for honours and exoneration more than most.