Stéphane Bern, edited by Alexis Patri 13:34, December 27, 2021

He gave his name to an award that notably celebrates peace, but he also invented an explosive used in warfare.

A clever mix for an equally clever chemist.

In "Historically yours", Stéphane Bern tells us the story of the one who blew it up: the famous Alfred Nobel.

It is September 3, 1864 in Stockholm, on a peaceful shore facing the bucolic island of Långholmen.

The weather is fine, a delicate lapping accompanies the birdsong when, suddenly, a deafening noise tears the calm of the place.

A wooden shed has just been blown up by an explosion!

It is, or rather was, the factory-laboratory of the Nobel family, well known in the area.

Unfortunately, five people are killed.

Among them, Emil, 22, younger brother of Alfred Nobel.

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What happened ?

Emil and his colleagues were experimenting with nitroglycerin, an explosive liquid, which produces extremely powerful blasts, but which remains very unstable and can jump at the slightest movement or change in temperature.

The goal was precisely to control this instability.

We have to admit that it is a failure.

The Nobel family is bereaved by this tragic loss, but that does not prevent them from continuing their research.

Alfred, ugly duckling of the Nobel siblings

Immanuel, the father, is an engineer and wealthy industrialist who notably invented underwater explosive mines. He made his fortune by supplying the Russian army, which put it to good use during the Crimean War of the 1850s. War which was nevertheless lost. The fortune having dwindled, Immanuel returned to Sweden and is now interested in another explosive: nitroglycerin therefore.

And since his son Emil has just died and two others are involved in oil production in the Russian Empire, only Alfred remains to continue working, fortunately absent at the time of the accident.

Alfred Nobel, born in Stockholm in 1833, is a little apart in a family of scientists.

Introverted, melancholy, in his youth he was more focused on poems than on equations.

His father hardly tasting his literary connections, he sent him to study chemistry in the United States and then in France.

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It was in Paris that Alfred met, in 1850, the Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, who had just developed a new product. Until now and for centuries, the only real explosive known was black powder. The nitroglycerin developed by Sobrero, easy to manufacture in the laboratory, is a revolution. But the liquid is so unstable and sensitive that it seems very difficult to find a use for it.

Alfred Nobel will take care of this within the family business.

For the love of science perhaps, but above all for the colossal profits that this could generate.

We are in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.

Mountains are blown up everywhere to drill tunnels, dig mines or quarries.

The networks of canals, ports and railways are being deployed.

A powerful and handy explosive would then be a goose that lays golden eggs.

The birth of dynamite

The drama which cost the life of his little brother does not dampen Alfred's enthusiasm, quite the contrary. First step, manufacture nitroglycerin industrially; this is possible despite a few accidents. Second step, find a way to control the explosion, a detonator in short, that Alfred Nobel manages to develop in a percussion system with a cap filled with mercury fulminate, a white powder. Problem, the explosive liquid remains volatile and dangerous, especially for transport.

Alfred Nobel therefore seeks to stabilize it by mixing it with other substances.

He tries the charcoal powder, the cement… Nothing helps.

Until this day in 1866 when, somewhat by chance, he mixed nitroglycerin with Kieselguhr, a soil of sedimentary rock of very common organic origin.

Eureka!

It obtains a powerful explosive paste that is resistant to shocks or changes in temperature, and even fire.

He models it in the form of a cylindrical stick with a detonator, applies for patents in various countries since 1867 and chooses to call it "dynamite", from the Greek word which precisely means power.

Alfred Nobel, "the richest vagabond in Europe"

Very quickly, industries tear it up. Unthinkable earthworks and excavations become possible, mining extraction can be multiplied… it is an immense technical advance. But, at the same time, a less virtuous use emerges, as evidenced by the dynamite used by Prussia and then France from the war of 1870. Later, the new explosive is integrated into more and more destructive shells as it becomes the manna of smugglers and almost the emblem of anarchist attacks.

Are inventors responsible for their inventions?

Are the technologies to blame, or the people who use them?

Still, Alfred Nobel perfected his dynamite as much as he developed his juicy business.

By integrating new substances, Nobel makes its explosive even more powerful and more practical.

He founded companies in twenty countries and, despite the competitors who rushed into the breach, he found himself at the head of a veritable industrial empire, unified in 1886 under the name of Nobel Dynamite Trust Company.

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Alfred Nobel is extremely wealthy, travels all the time, meets beautiful people. Victor Hugo even describes him as "the richest vagabond in Europe". He works in his various laboratories on weapon technologies as well as on other projects such as synthetic rubber, leather or silk and will have filed 355 patents at the end of his life.

A busy life then, but in a sense maybe a little empty, too.

"Neither woman, nor children, nor mistress" according to his own formula.

He is described as lonely, spends a lot of time in seclusion reading and writing, sometimes bordering on depression, surely wondering what his place in the world is.

What will he leave for posterity other than bombs?

What Alfred Nobel will bequeath is not just explosives.

Nor are they his poems, which he refuses to publish, deeming them far too imperfect.

It will be something else.

A pacifist, despite everything

While he has worked a good part of his life selling potentially destructive and murderous material, Nobel is a great pacifist. Thus he maintains a rich correspondence with his friend Bertha von Suttner, an activist who actively participates in several world peace congresses. In 1891, he wrote to her: "Perhaps my factories will end wars sooner than your congress: the day two armies can annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations can retreat in horror and disperse. their troops. "

Nobel therefore honestly believed that the power of arms could put an end to armed conflicts, that by being appalling, war would become impossible.

The rest of history unfortunately proves that it is not.

The legend also says that in 1888, an obituary, believing him dead when it was in fact one of his brothers, left him with a bitter taste.

She would have presented him as the one "who made his fortune by finding a way to kill more people faster than ever before" His title: "The merchant of death is dead!".

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The fact is that in his third and last testament drawn up on November 27, 1895, after having placed his relatives away from want, Nobel made his immense fortune available so that each year the most eminent actors in the sciences (chemistry, physics and medicine), literature (his eternal love) and, above all, in his words, "the person who will have most or best contributed to the rapprochement of peoples, to the abolition or reduction of standing armies and to the 'establishment and promotion of peace congresses. "

The Nobel Prize was born.

The first awards were given in 1901, five years after the death of Alfred Nobel, who thus finally succeeded in atoning for the murderous explosions in the eyes of the world, leaving his name forever associated with peace.