Immanuel Nobel

Immanuel Nobel

Immanuel Nobel (born March 24, 1801 in Gävle , † September 3, 1872 in Heleneborg, Stockholm ) was a Swedish engineer , architect , inventor and industrialist . His son Alfred Nobel , who continued his father's company, was the founder of the Nobel Prize .

youth

Although his father of the same name, Immanuel Nobelius , had made a name for himself as a field clerk in the Swedish army and hospital doctor in Gävle, Immanuel Nobel grew up in poor circumstances. His parents could not give him any formal education and gave him private lessons. At the age of fourteen he became a seaman on the Swedish ship Thetis , with which he traveled the Mediterranean. At eighteen he returned to Sweden. In 1818 he was employed as a shipbuilding apprentice at Loell in Gävle, and in 1819 he became a member of the Stockholm Art Academy . There he studied construction and descriptive geometry, after which he was employed as a teacher at what was then the Teknologiska institutet .

Family life

In 1827 he married Carolina Andrietta Ahlsell, who came from a wealthy Swedish family. They had eight children together, but only four sons Robert Hjalmar (1829-1896), Ludvig Immanuel (1831-1888), Alfred Bernhard (1833-1896) and Emil Oskar (1843-1864) reached adulthood.

Entrepreneurship

In 1833, Nobel experienced the bankruptcy of his construction company when several uninsured barges with building materials went down and the family home had already burned down. On the run from his creditors, Nobel went as an entrepreneur to Saint Petersburg in 1837 via Turku , where he worked as a rubber manufacturer and architect . In 1842 he founded his own machine shop there with an attached foundry , which at times employed over a thousand workers. With great ingenuity and talent, he quickly developed new machines, especially for warfare: a rapid-fire rifle ; stationary sea ​​mines that played a role in the defense of Sveaborg and Kronstadt in the Crimean War ; a waterproof and inflatable military backpack made of rubber ; a lathe for processing plywood; a steamboat; a central heating system with circulating hot water. Numerous orders from the Russian army and the favor of the court of the tsars gave the company a great boom and Immanuel Nobel and his family economic prosperity.

Manufacture of explosives

At the end of the Crimean War and with the death of Tsar Nicholas I , the company's economic situation became difficult as further orders from the Russian military failed to materialize and debtors did not pay outstanding invoices. Under pressure from the creditors, his sons Ludvig and Robert took over the management of the company. Immanuel Nobel moved back to Sweden with his family in 1859 . With his two sons Alfred and Emil he built a successful family business there that experimented with nitroglycerin . From 1862 the substance was used as Nobels sprängolja in mountain blasting in Sweden and was patented in 1863. Emil and other workers were killed in a serious explosion in the Heleneborg company laboratory on Mälaren See on September 3, 1864. Immanuel Nobel, who suffered a stroke in 1865 , did not recover physically from this stroke . He died eight years later on the anniversary of the explosion.

Appreciation

Immanuel Nobel was a talented inventor and 19th century entrepreneur. His ambitious projects often failed due to unrealistic plans and a lack of funding. Nevertheless, he became the founder of one of the most successful Swedish industrial dynasties. His sons continued his life's work. The noble park in Gävle is named after the family.

Life

• Immanuel Nobel . In: Herman Hofberg, Frithiof Heurlin, Viktor Millqvist, Olof Rubenson (eds.): Svenskt biografiskt handlexikon . 2nd Edition. tape 2 : L – Z, including supplement . Albert Bonniers Verlag, Stockholm 1906, p. 183 (Swedish, runeberg.org ).