“Merchant of Death” Alfred Nobel
Alfred Nobel, portrait by Emil Österman, 1915; in the Nobel Foundation, Stockholm.
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Nobel controversies go all the way back to the prizes’ founder, Alfred Bernhard Nobel. As the Swedish inventor of dynamite and other explosives, Nobel did not have the best public image. In fact, when his brother died, a French newspaper confused him with Alfred and used the headline “The merchant of death is dead.” It then stated that Nobel “became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.” The premature obituary was possibly what motivated Nobel to create the namesake prizes in order to enhance his legacy.