British Medical Journal London Saturday January 3 1959
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BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL LONDON SATURDAY JANUARY 3 1959 ALFRED NOBEL* BY J. ERIK JORPES, M.D. KarQlinska Institutet, Stockholnm; Visiting Lecturer, Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of St. A ndrews, Queen's College, Dundee The annual awards of the Nobel Prizes for outstanding The name Nobel is not derived from the Latin word achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, and nobilis, but from a place named N6bbelhv, in the South literature as well as the Peace Prize continually remind Swedish province of Scania. One of Alfred Nobel's us of Alfred Nobel. The splendour and the solemnity ancestors, Petrus Olofsson, born 1655 in Nobbelv, went of the occasions when the prizes are presented to the as a young man to study in the Swedish university town laureates in Stockholm and in Oslo in the presence of the of Upsala. Having been entered in the university Royal Family remind us of the European culture of the register under the name of Petrus Olai Nobelius, the late nineteenth century, based as it was on considerable ambitious young man fulfilled his education in law and prosperity or, in some instances, on really outstanding married a daughter of the famous university chancellor wealth. In these darkest days of the year, around Olof Rudbeck senior, who in his younger days (1653) December 10, the day of Alfred Nobel's death, when had discovered the lymph vessels and the thoracic duct nobody would like to go to Stockholm, except possibly simultaneously with Bartholini. to get a Nobel Prize, the capital of Sweden is the centre for the biggest scientific and literary event of the year. All the civilized world is for a moment paying attention The Nobel Family to the Nobel Prizes and to their founder. The family, though introduced into influential circles I will come back to the Nobel Prizes at the end of and endowed with good hereditary genes, never became my lecture, but now I will take you directly from the prosperous. At the time when Alfred Nobel was born, enlightened splendour of the Concert Hall in Stockholm his father went bankrupt. to the most God-forsaken place on the British Islands, Nobel's father, Immanuel Nobel junior, was an the sandhills at Ardeer, near Ardrossan, on the banks of inventor of genius with a quite unusual vitality. Between the Firth of Clyde in Scotland, where Alfred Nobel in 14 and 17 years of age he sailed as a cabin boy in the 1871 got the Government's permission to erect a nitro- Mediterranean with a ship from his hometown, Gafle, glycerin and dynamite factory in co-operation with a an extremely hard experience for the young boy. The group of Scottish financiers in Glasgow. captain and half the crew died at sea. After receiving said Alfred an incomplete technological education in Stockholm, " If I had not got my work here," Nobel, constructor, "Ardeer would certainly be the most depressing place he established himself as a building dunes with contractor, and inventor. Very soon, however, he started in the world. Picture to yourself everlasting of no buildings. Only the rabbits find a Little nourishment building beyond his means and also had a large part here; they eat a substance which quite unjustifiably his work destroyed by fire. In 1833 he went bankrupt. and of which some few In order to avoid imprisonment and the insistent goes by the name of grass, his he moved in 1837 to Finland, traces are to be found- here and there. This is a demands of creditors, wonderful sand desert, where the wind always blows, then under Russian rule, and soon to Russia, where he the ears with sand which also established himself as a mechanical engineer in and often howls, filling St. Petersburg. His wife joined him there five years drifts about the room like a fine drizzle. There lies hidden later together with their two youngest sons, Ludwig the factory, and most of the buildings have 11 themselves behind sandhills. A few yards away the aged and Alfred aged 9. ocean begins, and between us and America there is In his workshop in St. Petersburg, Immanuel Nobel nothing but water. Now you will have some idea of made wagon-wheels, steam-hammers, and other tools, the place where I am living; as I have said, without but his chief interests soon became explosive mines. work it would be intolerable." based on his own invention, using chlorate and sulphuric can be taken as a for acid as a detonator. After Schonbein's discovery of The factory at Ardeer symbol in 1846 the were mostly iron shells Alfred Nobel's creations. It, like his other enterprises, nitrocellulose mines with but in the filled with this material. Immanuel's mines apparently became very successful time, beginning were boxes, filled with powder, with long iron as in Ardeer was square the same hard wind blowing against out from their These poles, when sometimes with a terrible poles sticking sides. the young man, strength. hit by a ship, broke a glass tube with sulphuric acid There was in fact no wealth to begin with, not even a inside chlorate, sulphur, and sugar, causing a small name. explosion which lit a fuse, and this in turn set off the *Inaugural address to the Postgraduate Medical School of the was this of a of St. Andrews, delivered on October 9, 1958. powder. It idea, causing big explosion University 5113 NOBEL BRmnS 2 JAN. 3, 1959 ALFRED NOBEL MWICAL JOURNAL by means of a little one, that was to be decisive in Alfred period and of travelling in Europe for a couple of years, Nobel's life. partly in order to improve his health. When the Crimean War was imminent the Russian Through his father, Alfred had been introduced into Government supplied Nobel with a subsidy for the the field of explosives, and he found many important extension of his factory, and when the war broke out problems awaiting solution. One of them was the in 1854 the Russian High Command entrusted the mine- employment of nitroglycerin as an explosive. laying programme to Nobel. Kronstadt, the fortress Sveaborg in Finland, and the harbour of Reval in Nitroglycerin Estonia were protected with mines. An Italian, Sobrero, a pupil of Pelouze's, prepared in Nobel's submarine mines aroused great interest. On 1847 nitroglycerin, "piroglycerina." the second expedition of the combined Anglo-French Owing to the high risk of explosion, this new fleet to the Baltic in 1855 the British flagship, the compound was very difficult to handle. On the one steamer Duke one the of Wellington, captured of mines. hand it burnt like an oil without explosion when directly It exploded on deck and killed one man. The Britons ignited, and on the other could explode at any time had also seen a Russian steamer being badly damaged during storage or if handled carelessly, particularly if when upon a running mine. Rumours of the mines the product was deficiently purified and still contained and the knowledge of the strong Russian defence forces nitric and nitrous acids. Thus nitroglycerin remained on shore then prevented the British fleet from sailing a taboo for technicians for 18 years after its invention. into the innermost parts of the Gulf of Finland. Nobel's Alfred Nobel succeeded in getting the fluid to detonate contributed to Kronstadt from a mines thus protect at will and to exploit its power. bombardment of the kind the fleet on their first During the a expedition in June, 1854, had applied so successfully in Crimean War Russian chemist, Zinin, had called the attention of Immanuel Nobel and his son destroying the Russian fortress at Bomarsund, on the Aland islands in the Baltic. to the possibility of using nitroglycerin in his mines. No practical results came out of the discussion. After his Immanuel Nobel had thus rendered the Russian return to Sweden Immanuel tried in 1863 to mix Government very a great services, and, although ordinary gunpowder with 10% nitroglycerin, but no real foreigner, was awarded an Imperial gold medal. improvement was achieved. Alfred was more successful. But Russia is Russia. The Crimean War ended with In Russia he had in 1862 placed nitroglycerin in a defeat. The old Tsar Nicolaus I had away. The passed firmly stoppered glass tube inside a metal tube filled with new Government disregarded the promises made its by black powder and ignited the latter by means of a fuse. predecessor and placed no orders of any kind in Nobel's The whole was thrown into a canal and caused a heavy enterprises, but, to the contrary, supported his underwater explosion. competitors. As a consequence Nobel's workshop went bankrupt. This was in 1859. It was a terrible blow Nobel's Detonator Nobel. Broken down and for Immanuel disappointed, In 1863 he went to Stockholm to join his father in the he returned in the same year to Stockholm. work with nitroglycerin. Here Alfred repeated his Immanuel Nobel was a genius. Only a genius can experiments from Russia, but put the components in without any education in chemistry and with only a reverse order. few years' technical training construct explosive mines Instead of putting a tube of nitroglycerin into a larger and build steam-engines on a large scale in a foreign tube filled with gunipowder he dipped a small tube of country. In his later years, broken by bankruptcy and gunpowder, with a fuse attached to it, into a large tube struck by hemiplegia, he still made suggestions for new of nitroglycerin. This gave excellent results. On igniting inventions. Famous is his prediction of the possibilities the black powder by means of of the present-day plywood industry.