9 2 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Alfred Nobel, 



He was made a noble with hereditary 

 transmission of the title in 1885. His 

 great work in synthetic chemistry en- 

 titles him to belong to the group of 

 those who have already received Nobel 

 prizes in chemistry — van't Hoff, Fischer, 

 Arrhenius and Ramsay. 



These Nobel prizes, each of the value 

 of about $40,000, were established by 

 the will of Alfred Nobel, who died in 

 189G. Nobel was born in Stockholm; 

 he studied in St. Petersberg, and began 

 to assist in his father's 



works, but soon took up the study of 

 high explosives. In 1864 he took out 

 a patent for dynamite, obtained by in- 

 corporating nitroglycerine with some 

 porous substance. Later he invented 

 ballistite, a nitroglycerine smokeless 

 powder, but his claim that the patent 

 covered cordite was disallowed by the 

 courts after a lawsuit against the 

 British government. From the manu- 

 facture of dynamite and other ex- 

 plosives at his works in Ayrshire and 

 from developing the Baku oilfields, he 



