Term Papers on Alfred Nobel

Term Paper Title	Alfred Nobel
# of Words	1533
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	6.13

Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden on October 21, 1833.(Encarta) His father Immanuel Nobel was an engineer and inventor who built bridges and buildings in Stockholm. In connection with his construction work Immanuel Nobel also experimented with different techniques of blasting rock.  Alfred's mother, Andrietta Ahlsell came from a wealthy family. Due to misfortunes in the construction work caused by the loss of some barges of building material, Immanuel Nobel was forced into bankruptcy the same year Alfred Nobel was born.  In 1837,  Immanuel Nobel left Stockholm and his family to start a new career in Finland and in Russia. To support the family, Andrietta Nobel started a grocery store which provided a modest income. Meanwhile Immanuel Nobel was successful in his new enterprise in St. Petersburg, Russia. He started a mechanical workshop which provided equipment for the Russian army and he also convinced the Tsar and his generals that naval mines could be used to block enemy naval ships from threatening the city.  The naval mines designed by Immanuel Nobel were simple devices consisting of submerged wooden casks filled with gun powder. Anchored below the surface of the Gulf of Finland they effectively deterred the British Royal  Navy from moving into firing range of St. Petersburg during the Crimean war (1853-1856).

Immanuel Nobel was also a pioneer in arms manufacture and in designing steam engines. Successful in his industrial and business ventures, Immanuel Nobel was able, in 1842, to bring his family to St. Petersburg.
There, his sons were given a first class education by private teachers. The training included natural sciences, languages and literature. By the age of 17, Alfred Nobel was fluent in Swedish, Russian, French, English and German. His primary interests were in English literature and poetry as well as in chemistry and physics. Alfred's father, who wanted his sons to join his enterprise as engineers, disliked Alfred's interest in poetry and found his son rather introverted. In order to widen Alfred's horizons his father sent him abroad for further training in chemical engineering. During a two year period,  Alfred Nobel visited Sweden, Germany, France and the United States.(Schuck p. 113)  In Paris,  the city he came to like best, he worked in the private laboratory of Professor T.J. Pelouze, a famous chemist. There he met the young Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero who,  three years earlier, had invented nitroglycerin, a highly explosive liquid. Nitroglycerin was produced by mixing glycerin with sulfuric and nitric acid. It was considered too dangerous to be of any practical use.(Schuck p. 87) Although its explosive power greatly exceeded that of gun powder, the liquid would explode in a very unpredictable manner if subjected to heat and pressure.

Alfred Nobel became very interested in nitroglycerin and how it could be put to practical use in construction work. He also realized that the safety problems had to be solved and a method had to be developed for the controlled detonation of nitroglycerin. In the United States he visited John Ericsson, the Swedish-American engineer who had developed the screw propeller for ships. In 1852, Alfred Nobel was asked to come back and work in the family enterprise which was booming because of its deliveries to the Russian army. Together with his father he performed experiments to develop nitroglycerin as a commercially and technically useful explosive. As the war ended and conditions changed,  Immanuel Nobel was again forced into bankruptcy. Immanuel and two of his sons, Alfred and Emil, left St. Petersburg together and returned to Stockholm. His other two sons, Robert and Ludvig, remained in St. Petersburg. With some difficulties they managed to salvage the family enterprise and then went on to develop the oil industry in the southern part of the Russian empire. They were very successful and became some of the wealthiest persons of their time. (Compton's)

After his return to Sweden in 1863, Alfred Nobel concentrated on developing nit...

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