Alfred Nobel - The Founder of Nobel Prize
It would be difficult to imagine a greater contradiction than was summed up in the life and work of Alfred Nobel, the insignificant-looking Swede who yearned for world peace and became a multi-millionaire by selling the weapon of death to each and every country which would pay his price for it. Alfred Nobel died working to invent a force of total destruction and yet, ironically, his last will and testament laid down the terms of an imaginative effort to end all wars - the Nobel Prize.
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was the scientist who established the Nobel Prize Foundation. Born in 1833 in Stockholm, he became a scientist like his father, Immanuel Nobel. He led a bachelor's life and produced Dynamite. It was invented accidentally.
One day, he observed a little nitro-glycerine which had been dropped from a flask at his laboratory. That liquid fell on fine soil powder kept in a box. It did not explode. Instead, it became a paste. He made a ball of that paste and exploded it outside effectively. Nobel, who devised a method to contain nitro-glycerine safely, called it 'Dynamite'. He soon became very rich after inventing it. He excuted a will in 1890 that the interest on 90,00,000 dollars should be presented every year to persons who serve humanity in the field of science literature and piece. Earlier, Nobel Prize was being presented for physics, chemistry, medicine, physiology, literature and world peace only. In 1969, the Swedish Government announced that an Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for economics will also be presented.
The Nobel Prize is the largest of its kind in the world. Today, its reputation rests, not on his inventive genius, but on the international awards which bear his name. The story of Alfred Nobel is a story of a man 'from rags to riches'.
On 10, December, 1896, his butler who was alone in the house with him, found his millionaire master dead at his desk. Inside the desk, beneath a pile of designs for a new war weapon, lay his last will and testament of peace.
The will directed that his capital should become a fund, the annual interest on which was to be split into five equal parts and used to award prizes to the persons adjudged to have made the most important discovery or invention in the field of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, the person who had produced the outstanding work of literature, 'idealistic in character' and to the person who has done the most or best work for the brotherhood of nations, the abolition of standing armies as well as the formation or popularization of peace congress.
However, now that scientists have really found out a more destructive nuclear bomb, the world hopes that his aim to make the war impossible, will now be realised, because the nuclear bomb has become a deterrent weapon and while many have it, every nation is afraid of it!
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