High Priest of War Who Gave His Life for Pea

Opotiki News, Volume II, Issue 251, 27 October 1939, Page 1 (Supplement)

High Priest of War Who Gave His Life for Pea

The Strange Story of Alfred Nobel, who increased man’s power to destroy a thonsana in the vain hope that world war would be too terrible for men—and then found tha he was wrong. The first merchant of death gave his life for peace.

[NE day in 1861 a group of Paris bankers gave impatient audience to a young man who said he had a big idea. He was a Swede; a thin, sickly, nervous chap, but with plenty of assurance. “ Messieurs,” he announced dramatically, “ I have an oil that will blow up the globe!”' The bankers jumped, but the young man calmly went on to explain his new explosive. Shortly his hearers cut him off. The whole thing sounded impossible, and anyway, who wanted the globe blown up? When Napoleon 111. heard about the young Swede, however, he spoke to a financier, and Alfred Nobel went back to Stockholm with a draft for 100,000 francs. Thus the foundation was laid for the Nobel fortune. To Alfred \Nobel there was nothing* sinister about powerful explosives. His father, Emmanuel Nobel, had been tinkering with them for years, and had invented a naval mine used by Russia in the Crimean War. Alfred was the third of four brothers, and the puniest of the lot. His mother fought a constant battle to keep him alive. As a young man he travelled in Europe and America; and in Paris he met a girl with whom lie fell desperately in love. She died. Saddened and embittered, Alfred returned at the age of 21 to his father’s factory, and there he went resolutely to work—for work, he decided, was all that life held for him. Emmanuel Nobel was convinced that nitroglycerin had great possibilities as an explosive, though it was used then chiefly as a stimulant in heart ailments. Under certain conditions it would explode, but no one knew just what these conditions were. Sometimes a container of the stuff would fall to the ground with a thud, and nothing would happen; sometimes a small jolt would cause a shattering explosion. Alfred and his father set out to tame nitroglycerin. Gradually Alfred took the lead in the experiments, and arrived at the theory that the only sure way of exploding the soupish liquid was to confine it in a stout container and set it off with a sharp primary explosion. He evolved the blasting cap—-an invention still the basis of the whole nitroglycerin and dynamite industry. After securing Louis Napoleon’s help, Alfred and his father went hopefully to work, but nitroglycerin still would not behave. In May, 1864, an explosion killed the youngest son, Emil, and four workmen. Old

Emmanuel was prostrated, and 'never recovered. The Nobels had no permit to work with explosives, and the authorities cracked down. Indomitably, Alfred kept on. He moved his plant to a barge moored in a lake. Chemist, manufacturer, bookkeeper and demonstrator all in one, he hardly took time to eat, and succeeded in ruining his digestion for life. He would show the world, he said, that his blasting oil was safe. Within a year the Swedish Government was using his “soup” to blast a terminal railway tunnel under Stockholm, and he had launched manufacturing companies in four countries. He was too optimistic; nitroglycerin’s reign of terror was about to begin. One morning in 1865, Nobel’s plant in Norway soared skyward. A few weeks later, a railroad worker in Silesia tried to cut frozen blasting oil with an axe. They found his legs half a mile away. The next April, 70 cases of nitroglycerin blew up aboard a ship docked in Panama. Even the wharf and freight house

nearby were wrecked and another ship badly disabled. Sixty people were killed, and the damage came to 1,000,000 dollars. A few days later, 15 persons were killed and a block of buildings was wrecked in San Francisco by a nitroglycerin explosion in an express waggon. Alfred Nobel arrived in New York on a business trip shortly after the San Francisco blast, bearing boxes of “ soup.” He was about as welcome as the plague. People avoided him, and .hotels turned him away. When he announced that he would give a public demonstration at a quarry, onlv about 20 men came to see the"fireworks, and even they kept their distance. He poured a little of the terrible oil on a flat piece of iron, and then raised a hammer. The spectators ducked for cover. There was a sharp report, but Nobel was unharmed. He coaxed them nearer, and in a dry, scientific manner explained that only the oil struck by the hammer exploded. You couldn t

blow off the lot, he said, without confining it. Then he touched a match to the puddle. It burned, but didn’t explode. For two hours Nobel put the mysterious giant through its paces. He finished the performance with some real blasts, to show what it would do when given its head. The crowd went away convinced. Although Nobel’s office now was swamped with orders and a fortune was within his reach, lie almost failed that year. Seveial countries passed laws forbidding use of Nobel's “ soup,” and ships refused to carry it. A safe nitroglvcerin had to be invented. So Alfred Nobel invented it, though some say it was an accident.

In northern Germany there is a light, absorbent earth called kieselgulir. Nobel’s workers ran out of sawdust, and used the

earth in packing nitroglycerin cans. . The story is that one of the cans leaked, and Nobel noticed that the kieselgulir drank it up like blotting paper. He mixed three parts of “soup ’’ with one part of kieselgulir and his prayers were answered. The stuff could be kneaded like putty and packed in. cartridges and it was safe to ship. Nobel called it dynamite. Within a decade, 15 Nobel plants were turning out six. million pounds annually of the new explosive. At 40,-Alfred Nobel found himself a lonely, exhausted, .melancholy man, with no interests outside his,work, and few acquaintances outside his He didn’t even have a home. They called him “ the richest vagabond in Europe.” He tried to make himself over. I-Ie bought a fine house in Paris. He returned to Shelley, the god of his boyhood, and had an idea of writing. But he was equally at home in six languages, and never could make up his mind which to use. Even in conversation he wandered from one to another, unconsciously slipping into the language which the topic suggested.

Nobel was a prodigious reader, not only of technical books, but of poetry and philosophy. He liked those writers who bolstered his belief in the constant progress of humanity. Many of his letters —he often wrote fifty a day —were exhaustive- discussions of new novels, plays, and books of verse. Fie started two novels which lie never finished, and late in life he wrote a play, in which he became completely absorbed. He went to London for a business conference, talked business _ for five minutes, then brought out his play and read it. The play was about to be published when he died. Flis executors thought it best to burn the edition, saving only three copies. Because he wanted to entertain, her considered marriage, but since his early love affair he hadn’t met a woman he thought he could get along with. He made cynical remarks about women, for he was desperately shy and believed himself so repulsive that no woman would marry him

except for his money. Yet whenever an attractive woman made a determined attempt to be nice to him, he opened up like a flower. It was his loneliness that led to the establishment of the peace prize. His correspondence was in six languages, and it was not easy to find a good secretary and an accomplished linguist in one person. He got so he hated to hire secretaries, because he dreaded dismissing them. In 1876 he tried once more, and Bertha Kinsky, a Bohemian countess, answered his advertisement. She was an attractive woman of 30, well educated, charming in manner and a good listener. Nobel’s gloomy, kindly and occasionally sarcastic manner appealed to her. He, in turn, was much impressed. But before she had actually entered upon her duties, she eloped with young Baron von Suttner. The couple worked for the Red Cross during the Russo-Turkish War. The Baroness came back appalled by what she had seen, and wrote a passionate anti-war novel. Soon she was a recognised leader in the peace movement. The Baroness and Alfred Nobel had remained firm friends, and now she appealed to him to help in the movement. Nobel was undoubtedly moved by Bertha von Suttner’s enthusiasm, although he sometimes poked fun at her. What she needed was not money, he told her, but a workable plan. There were too many “gas bags” in ' the movement, he told her, and predicted that his high explosiveswould put an end to war sooner than her peace meetings, because, as military weapons became more deadly, horrified nations would disband their troops. In spite of his doubts, Nobel decided to leave His fortune—which amounted to about 9,000,000 dollars—to found a prize for distinguished peace workers. Later he included the prizes for science and literatuie. He intended these awards, not as crowns of success, but as lifebelts for sinking geniuses. Yet the terms of his loosely-drawn will made it impossible for the award committees to consider the financial status of the recipients. Nobel turned his back on Paris when the French Government, alarmed because he had sold his smokeless powder to Italy, placed restrictions upon his work. Fie lived his remaining days in austere solitude at San Remo, Italy. When his brother Ludwig, who had made a fortune in oil, died, the French papers thought it was Alfred; and he had the peculiar satisfaction of reading his own obituaries. They were not complimentary. At San Remo he spent most of his time working on synthetic

rubber a;id artificial silk. His heart began to. give out, and he went to specialists. He laughed when they prescribed nitroglycerin. He bought a sphygmograph, watched the line which showed the irregularity of his pulse, and pointed out to friends the degree of variation that would kill him. On December 10, 1896, he died. Before has death, Nobel had abandoned the idea that more powerful killing agents would frighten the nations into peace. He pinned his faith on somethingvery like the League of Nations. At first, he did not intend to found a perpetual peace prize. He suggested that it be discontinued at the end of thirty years, for he believed that if international peace were not assured by then, the world would relapse into barbarism. He said that in 1893. It was just thirty years later that an Austrian house-painter led a putsch in Munich.