The Man Who Fooled The World

Most people don't know the real story of Alfred Nobel. One morning in 1888, Alfred Nobel sat down to read the newspaper in his conservatory. He scanned the pages casually, but then he froze. The merchant of death is dead.

Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday. It was his own obituary. The newspaper had made a mistake.

Alfred's older brother, Lewig, had died in France, and the journalists had confused the two, but in that moment, he saw exactly how the world would remember him. Not as an inventor, but as a butcher. Now, the wording in the obituary, the merchant of death and all that, well, it's likely been exaggerated over the years. We could only find an obituary that described him as a man who can hardly be passed off as a benefactor of humanity.

But reading this allowed Alfred to see what others truly thought of him, and it wasn't good. He had earned his reputation building an empire on one substance, nitroglycerin. It's one of the most powerful explosives in the world. Its blast pressure is over 100 times greater than gunpowder.

Oh my god. Oh, that's so sick. >> But that power comes at a price. Nitroglycerin is so sensitive that if it's dropped, shaken, or even just bumped, it can detonate.

And as a result, hundreds of workers died trying to handle it. So Alfred made it his mission to tame this beast. But in doing so, he created powerful new explosives used in everything from blasting tunnels to making bombs. tools that transformed the modern world, but also contributed to deaths of tens of thousands of people, unleashing a level of destruction that would come to define him.

Alfred's father, Emanuel, was also an inventor. He opened the first ever rubber factory in Sweden and invented the rotary lathe, which made modern plywood possible. But Emanuel struggled with business. He went bankrupt shortly after Alfred was born.

So Emanuel set off to Russia to start over, leaving his family behind. Some of Alfred's earliest memories were of watching his brothers sell matches on the street corners of Stockholm just to afford food. He was often sick, bedridden with colds, stomach problems, and bouts of depression. He would later say, "Mine was a pitiful half-life which ought to have been extinguished ...