9781422277584

Although he was immensely wealthy by the standards of his day, he lived relatively modestly and quietly. Generous to his guests, he was restrained with himself. Though his inventions greatly increased the destructiveness of military weapons, he was an ardent worker for the cause of peace. He received little formal education, yet he mastered many aspects of science and engineering, and became fluent in the principal European languages. At nineteen he was writing verse in English that would have done credit to some of the minor poets. Despite poor health, he was amazingly energetic; few people ever achieved more than he did. A shrewd industrialist, he well knew the vital importance of precisely worded legal contracts, yet he drafted his own all-important will so imprecisely that years of litigation were necessary before his wishes could be fulfilled. To use a Latin tag, Alfred Nobel was a man sui generis : that is, one who fits no ordinary category. Before trying to unravel this complex web, we must, however, look at the main events in his life and the background against which they took place. As his main achievement was to build a vast international business to make high explosives , we have to first learn something of the history of this industry up to the time that Nobel began to take an interest in it. The History of Explosives The details of the discovery of gunpowder are still obscure, but the main facts are well known. From ancient times—certainly as early as 500 bce — extensive military use was made of highly flammable materials. The most famous of these was the so called Greek Fire which, from the seventh century, played a big part in the defense of the Byzantine Empire. The exact composition of Greek Fire is unknown, and probably no standard recipe existed, but the main ingredient was naphtha . In about the eleventh centur, the Chinese found that such mixtures burned even more fiercely if saltpeter —which yields oxygen on heating—was added to them. From this it was quite a short step to gunpowder— described, but not invented, by Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century—a

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