Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, and industrialist—basically the guy you’d get if Tony Stark and Dr. Frankenstein had a melancholic Scandinavian baby. He's best known today for the Nobel Prizes, those glittering trophies handed out each year to the best minds in peace, physics, literature, and more.
But here’s the kicker: the guy made his fortune inventing dynamite.
Boom First, Conscience Later
Born in 1833 into a family of engineers, Nobel was basically raised with a wrench in one hand and a test tube in the other. His big break came in 1867 when he patented dynamite, a safer and more stable version of nitroglycerin. It revolutionized construction, mining, and—unfortunately—warfare. Suddenly, blowing stuff up wasn’t just possible, it was efficient.
And guess what? The world took notice.
He became insanely rich. But then came the twist that changed everything.
The “Merchant of Death” Moment
In 1888, Alfred’s brother Ludvig died. But a French newspaper got it wrong and ran the obituary for Alfred instead, under the damning headline:
“The Merchant of Death is Dead.”
It accused Nobel of growing rich from inventing new ways to kill people faster than ever before. It was like reading your own tombstone... and finding out you're history’s villain.
That misprinted obituary hit Alfred like a ton of dynamite. He didn’t want to be remembered for blowing things up. So he did something radical.
Legacy Rewritten: The Nobel Prizes
When he died in 1896, Alfred Nobel left 94% of his fortune (about $200 million in today’s money) to fund the Nobel Prizes. His will declared that the money should go to those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” Cue the annual awards for Peace, Literature, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, and (added later) Economics.
Irony alert: the Peace Prize is bankrolled by the guy who literally invented better explosives.
TL;DR
Alfred Nobel was a brilliant inventor who got rich off dynamite, read his own scathing obituary, and panicked about his legacy. So he set up one of the most prestigious humanitarian prize systems in history. He went from blowing things up to building things up, all in the name of not being remembered as the “Merchant of Death.”
He’s proof you can’t take it with you—but you can sure as hell try to make it up on the way out.