ALFRED NOBEL

(1833-1896)

Alfred Bernhard Nobel

Was born in Stockholm, 21 of October of 1833 –he was dead in San Remo, 10 of December of 1896. He was a Swedish, famous chemical inventor and mainly by the invention of the dynamite and the prizes that take his name.

Alfred Nobel was born in a family of engineers; to the nine years of age his family moved to Russia, where he and his brothers received a careful education in natural sciences and humanities. He passed great part of his youth in Saint Petersburg, where his father installed an armament factory that broke in 1859.

He returned to Sweden in 1863, completing there the investigations that she had initiated in the field of the explosives: in 1863 she was able to control by means of a detonator the explosions of nitroglycerin (invented in 1846 by the Italian Extra Ascanio); in 1865 she perfected the system with a mercury detonator; and in 1867 it obtained the dynamite, a resulting plastic explosive to absorb nitroglycerin in a porous solid material (land of infusorians or kieselguhr), and so the accident risks were reduced (the accidental explosions of nitroglycerin, in one of which his own brother had died Emilio Nobel and other four people, had waked up strong critics against Nobel and their factories). Still it produced other inventions in the land of the explosives, like gelignite (1875) or the ballistite (1887).

Nobel patented all inventions and founded companies to make them and to commercialize them from 1865 (first in Stockholm and Hamburg, soon also in New York and San Francisco). Their products were of enormous importance for the construction, the mining and engineering, but also for the war industry (for which specifically some of them had been designed, like the ballistite or powder without smoke); with them it put the foundations of a fortune, that increased with the oil well investment in the Càucaso.

By all this, Nobel accumulated an enormous wealth, but also certain guilty complex by the evil and the destruction that their inventions could have caused to the Humanity in the battlefields. The combination of both reasons took to him to most of bequeath its fortune to a philanthropic society “the Foundation Nobel”, created in 1900 with the order to also grant a series of annual prizes to the people who had done more to the benefit of the Humanity in lands of the physics, chemistry, medicine or physiology, Literature and world-wide La Paz, and as of year 1969 in the economy (that gives the Central bank of Sweden). In their signed testament the 27 of November of 1895 in the Club Swedish-Norwegian of Paris, Nobel restores with their fortune a bottom with which she would award herself to the best exponents in Literature, Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and the Peace.

A cardiac attack caused the death to him when it was in his home in San Remo, Italy, day 10 of December of 1896 at the age of 63 years. One calculates that its fortune at the time of its death was of 33.000.000 crowns, of which hardly bequeathed to his family 100,000 crowns. The rest was destined to the Nobel prizes. In their honor the they called to an asteroid (6032) Nobel.

Carlos SAAVEDRA LAMAS He was Minister of Foreign Affairs. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936 for his role in resolving the conflict between Bolivia and Paraguay.    

Luis Federico Leloir He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1970 for his work in discovering the biochemistry of sugar nucleotides and their role in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates

-Bernardo Houssay He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1947 for the discovery of the role of the anterior pituitary lobe hormone in the metabolism of sugar. -Adolfo Pérez EsquivelHe won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980 for his work defending human rights based solely on non-violent means by the Organization for Peace and Justice Service since 1974. -Cesar Milstein Won Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1984 for the development of the hybridoma technique for producing monoclonal antibodies.

Nobel prizes can earn by:

Physics (decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences)

Chemistry (decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences)

Physiology or Medicine (decided by the Karolinska Institute)

Literature (decided by the Swedish Academy)

Peace (decided by the Norwegian Nobel Committee Norwegian Parliament)

Economy, created in 1968 by Sveriges Riksbank (Central Bank of Sweden).Officially called the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

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