How to Overcome the Bully in Your Brain - The Story of Alfred Nobel
GIVE PEACE A CHANCE
On 12 April 1888, engineer and businessman Ludvig Nobel passed away in France from a heart attack. In the annals of history, his death would perhaps have been of little note other than for the series of extraordinary events shaped by his sad departing.
Thanks to some poor reporting, at least one French newspaper believed that it was not Ludvig that had perished but his brother Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor and businessman. As a result, it printed a contemptuous obituary that branded Alfred a ‘merchant of death’. It went on to assert that Nobel had grown rich by developing new ways to ‘mutilate and kill’, stating that he had become rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.
Unsurprisingly, the error was later redacted, but not before Nobel had the unpleasant experience of reading his own death notice. Historians have noted that it was this single, unfortunate occurrence that may have brought on a crisis of conscience, and steered Alfred to revaluate his business practices. Nobel, who was a self-proclaimed hermit, once wrote: ‘I am a misanthrope and yet utterly benevolent, have more than one screw loose, yet am a super-idealist who digests philosophy more efficiently than food’. What Nobel read that day troubled him so profoundly that he then became obsessed with his posthumous reputation. In his last will and testament, he bequeathed the majority of his fortune to ‘a cause upon which no future obituary writer would be able to cast aspersions’.
Nobel held an impressive 355 different patents, of which dynamite was his most famous invention. It was also the product he made the majority of his great wealth from. There is some evidence that Nobel believed that dynamite would be instrumental in bringing about world peace. He once wrote to Baroness Bertha von Suttner: ‘Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops’.
Known as the ‘dynamite king’, Nobel chose very a simple life and lived it isolated from society. He travelled constantly, which allowed him to remain distant from his relatives. He never married and had few female friendships. One day, he fell gravely ill and the only visit he received was from one of his employees. This solitary, compassionate experience, along with his potential obituary, drove Nobel to reflect profoundly on his life and on his legacy, and how he would be remembered.
The Nobel Foundation noted that he may have first got the idea for the science prizes in 1868, when he received an award from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for ‘important inventions for the practical use of mankind’. Nobel was also a voracious reader who spoke five languages and dabbled in writing plays and poems. It was this love of the written word that no doubt sparked his interest in offering a prize in literature.
Although Nobel may have provided the funds, it was chemical engineer Ragnar Sohlman who made the Nobel Prizes a reality. After Alfred Nobel’s death on 10 December 1896, Sohlman was occupied for several years with the task of realising Nobel’s intentions of establishing the Nobel Prize. He secured Nobel’s assets and collaborated with the prize-awarding institutions. Between 1929 and 1946, he presided over the Nobel Foundation and helped make the awards a worldwide phenomenon, awarding prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.
Just as Nobel’s beliefs about how he was to be remembered drove him to take massive action, sometimes, our previously unshakeable beliefs in our own abilities can be challenged unexpectedly, forcing us to believe that perhaps we have been outsmarted, as in the following remarkable true story.
