Universal Peace Centre

Universal Peace Centre A lfred Nobel (1833 – 1896) who was born in Stockholm, Sweden, worked at his father’s arms factory as a young man. Intellectually curious, he went on to experiment with chemistry and explosives, finally developing the use of dynamite. Thanks to his acumen as an industrialist and the patents he took out on explosives, Nobel became a multimillionaire. In 1864 there was a lethal blast in his nitroglycerine factory, in which his younger brother and several other people were killed. A French newspaper mistakenly thought it had been Alfred Nobel himself who had died and it published his obituary under the title: The Merchant of Death is Dead. The obituary said: ‘Dr Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.’1 When Nobel read this, he was shocked. He began thinking about how to improve his badly damaged image and decided to leave behind his enormous fortune to fund a set of prizes named after him. Thus, in his last will, Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets, 31 million Swedish kronor (about 186