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Nobel Background
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, armaments
manufacturer and the inventor of dynamite. He owned Bofors, a major armaments manufacturer, which he had redirected from its
previous role as an iron and steel mill. In his last will, he used his enormous fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes. The
synthetic element Nobelium was named after him.
Nobel found that when nitroglycerin was incorporated in an absorbent inert substance
like diatomaceous earth it became safer and more convenient to manipulate, and this mixture he patented in 1867 as dynamite.
He next combined nitroglycerin with another high explosive, gun-cotton, and obtained a transparent, jelly-like substance,
which was a still more powerful explosive than dynamite. Gelignite, or Blasting gelatin as it was called, was patented in
1876. Some years later Nobel produced ballistite, one of the earliest of the nitroglycerin smokeless gunpowders, containing
in its latest forms about equal parts of gun-cotton and nitroglycerin. This powder was a precursor of cordite, and Nobel's
claim that his patent covered the latter was the occasion of vigorously contested law-suits between him and the United Kingdom.
The erroneous publication in 1888 of a premature obituary of Nobel by a French
newspaper, condemning his invention of dynamite, is said to have made him decide to leave a better legacy to the world after
his death. The obituary stated Le marchand de la mort est mort ("The merchant of death is dead") and went on to say, "Dr.
Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." On November 27,
1895 at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed his last will and testament and set aside the bulk of his estate
to establish the Nobel Prizes, to be awarded annually without distinction of nationality.
Nobel Prizes are awarded in five categories: The first three of these prizes
are for eminence in physical science, in chemistry and in medical science or physiology; the fourth is for the most remarkable
literary work "in an ideal direction" and the fifth is to be given to the person or society that renders the greatest service
to the cause of international brother/sisterhood, in the suppression or reduction of standing armies, or in the establishment
or furtherance of peace congresses.
There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics. A common legend states that Nobel decided
against a prize in mathematics because a woman - said to be either his fiance, wife, or mistress - rejected him for or cheated
on him with a famous mathematician, often claimed to be Gosta Mittag-Leffler. There is no historical evidence to support the
story, and Nobel was never married.
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More About the Nobel Prize
Elite researchers are nominated for the coveted Nobel
Prizes. Each prize is an enormous honor--and each comes with a pretty fat check: 10 million Swedish kronor. That's roughly
$1.3 million.
Peace pays off, when Alfred Nobel's committee awards the lofty
Nobel Peace Prize. There's as much irony as honor and money in that one. Why? Because, during his life, Alfred Nobel worked
as much to blow people to pieces as he did for peace.
Nobel was born in Stockholm in 1833. His father was an energetic,
eccentric inventor who moved the family to Russia and made a bundle making machine tools and mines for the czar's army.
Nobel's formal education was brief, but he was a quick study,
picking up five languages by age 17. Eventually, he landed in Paris, where he studied nitroglycerine--a new liquid explosive
that packed more punch than gunpowder but that was considered too volatile for most use. With the start of the Crimean War
in 1853, Nobel returned to Russia and joined his father and brothers in making mines.
After the war ended (and the family business went bankrupt), Nobel
returned to his nitroglycerine experiments and produced his first significant invention: a detonator for nitroglycerin charges
that made the explosive stuff easier to use. In 1863, the family moved back to Stockholm, and Nobel began promoting his "safe"
explosive as a substitute for gunpowder, with great success.
Though the money rolled in and Nobel nitroglycerin factories flourished,
appalling accidents convinced many governments to ban "Nobel's blasting oil." In 1864, a factory explosion killed Nobel's
brother. Nobel continued to promote his product, but privately, he worked hard to make a better one.
Nobel's next invention blew everyone away. By combining nitroglycerin
with a chalky substance called diatomaceous earth, he found he could produce a high explosive that was far safer to handle
than nitroglycerine alone. He named his invention dynamite from the Greek dynamis, meaning power.
Dynamite opened up new worlds. Enormous industrial engineering
projects were finally possible. In 1872, for example, workers used dynamite to blast a 19-mile (31-km) railway tunnel through
the Alps. As the mountains moved, Nobel made a mint. He also made more and better explosives, innovating almost until his
death in 1896.
Though he spent his life working on explosives, Nobel's letters
reveal a man who hoped his work might help deter war. "My factories may put an end to war sooner than your congresses," he
wrote to a peace activist friend. "The day when two army corps can annihilate one another in one second, all civilized nations,
it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops."
In this spirit, Nobel's will carved his vast fortune into prize
money honoring leaders in the sciences and literature. The childless inventor also established an honor for "the person who
shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies
and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." It was the last of Nobel's dynamite inventions.
Claire Vail
Copright 2006, KnowledgeNews. All rights reserved.
Doris Lessing
Writer -- short stories, novels, essays, science fiction
by Jone Johnson Lewis
Doris Lessing has written many novels, short stories, and essays, most about contemporary
life, often pointing to social injustices. Her 1962 The Golden Notebook became an iconic novel for the feminist movement
for its consciousness-raising theme. Her travels to many places in the British sphere of influence have influenced her writings.
Doris Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran), when her father worked for a bank.
In 1924, the family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she grew up, as her father tried to make a living as
a farmer. Though she was encouraged to go to college, Doris Lessing dropped out of school at age 14, and took clerical and
other jobs in Salisbury, South Rhodesia, until her marriage in 1939 to a civil servant. When she divorced in 1943, her children
stayed with their father.
Her second husband was a Communist, whom Doris Lessing met when she also became
a Communist, joining what she saw as a more "pure form" of Communism than she saw in the Communist parties in other parts
of the world. (Lessing rejected Communism after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.) She and her second husband divorced
in 1949, and he emigrated to East Germany. Later, he was the East German ambassador to Uganda and was killed when Ugandans
revolted against Idi Amin.
During her years of activism and married life, Doris Lessing began writing. In
1949, after two failed marriages, Lessing moved to London; her brother, first husband, and two children from her first marriage
remained in Africa. In 1950, Lessing's first novel was published: The Grass Is Singing, which dealt with issues of
apartheid and interracial relationships in a colonial society. She continued her semi-autobiographical writings in three Children
of Violence novels, with Martha Quest as the main character, published in 1952-1958.
Lessing visited her African "homeland" again in 1956, but was then declared a
"prohibited immigrant" for political reasons and banned from coming back again. After the country became Zimbabwe in 1980,
independent of British and white rule, Doris Lessing returned, first in 1982. She wrote of her visits in African Laughter:
Four Visits to Zimbabwe, published in 1992.
Having rejected communism in 1956, Lessing became active in the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament. In the 1960s, she became skeptical of progressive movements and more interested in Sufism and "nonlinear thinking."
In 1962, Doris Lessing's most widely-read novel, The Golden Notebook, was
published. This novel, in four sections, explored aspects of the relationship of an independent woman to herself and to men
and women, in a time of re-examining sexual and political norms. While the book inspired and fit in with increasing interest
in consciousness-raising, Lessing has been somewhat impatient with its identification with feminism.
Beginning in 1979, Doris Lessing published a series of science fiction novels,
and in the 80s published several books under the pen name Jane Somers. Politically, in the 1980s she supported the anti-Soviet
mujahideen in Afghanistan. She also became interested in issues ecological survival and returned to African themes. Her 1986
The Good Terrorist is a comedic story about a cadre of left-wing militants in London. Her 1988 The Fifth Child
deals with change and family life in the 1960s through 1980s.
Lessing's later work continues to deal with people's lives in ways that highlight
challenging social issues, though she's denied that her writing is political. In 2007, Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature.
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