Premature Obituaries, the French Press, and the Nobel Prizes
During the week of November 16th 2020, the French news site Radio France Internationale erroneously published 100 pre-written obituaries, including those of Queen Elizabeth II, Pele, Brigitte Bardot and Abdoulaye Wade, the former President of Senegal, who generously remarked “Not everybody gets the chance to take note of one’s obituary…”. It is typical for media organizations to have prewritten drafts of the obituaries of prominent figures in the files at the ready, so to speak, as they reach older age. Reading about this snafu in the New York Times (November 18, 2020) led me to recall another mistaken report of a death by the French Press, this one in 1888.
In 1888, several Parisian newspapers erroneously reported the death of Alfred Nobel, then living in Paris, when it was his brother, Ludvig Nobel, who had died in Cannes. Years before, Ludvig who was running the Nobel armaments business in Russia asked his brother, Robert Nobel, to travel to Baku to buy walnut wood for rifle stocks. Robert saw the burgeoning oil business there and, seeing its potential, bought an interest in an oil refinery in 1876. With that modest start, Robert and Ludvig built an enormous oil company, Branobel, which ultimately produced over half the kerosene sold to the Russian Empire. They had the first oil tanker built, the Zoroaster, which plied the Caspian Sea and, later, additional tankers connecting the Baltic Sea through the Volga and Don rivers and canals to the Caspian Sea. They also constructed the first pipelines to carry oil from the fields to the tankers and designed and built railroad tanker cars to facilitate ground transportation of oil. They in concert with the Rothschilds broke the back of John D. Rockefeller’s and Standard Oil’s monopoly on the world’s oil supply.
The erroneous obituary of Alfred, when it was Ludvig who had died, was headlined “Le marchand de la morte est morte” (“The merchant of death is dead”). It went on to state that Alfred Nobel became rich by “…finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before”. The Nobel family business started by the development of explosives for canal building, notably at Suez. The business morphed into the manufacture of armament, land and sea mines and munitions at the behest of the Tsar to support Russia’s involvement in the Crimean War in the mid-1850’s. Alfred Nobel’s many inventions (355 patents), notably Dynamite, for which his patent and multiple licenses contributed to his enormous fortune was bolstered by his share of his brothers’ oil empire.
Alfred was an accomplished chemist, inventor, and industrialist and one of the great entrepreneurs of the 19th century. He was tutored in the sciences and humanities at a young age but had no formal schooling. At age 17 years, recognizing his precociousness, his father sent him to France, Germany, Italy and the United States to confer with chemists and industrialists to gain technical information to advance their businesses. He was fluent in French, Italian, English, Swedish and Russian. His interest in chemistry and physics was evident. He was devoted to literature as well. At the time of his death, his library consisted of 1500 volumes, many in their original language. He wrote numerous poems, the drafts of several novels, and the script of a play. He interacted with the literati of Paris, visited literary salons and had a personal relationship with Victor Hugo.
Alfred’s severe atherosclerotic disease in his late adulthood and his scientific background led him to be interested in the burgeoning science of medicine at the end of the 19th century. He had angina pectoris and died in 1896 from a cerebral hemorrhage. His angina was treated with nitroglycerin, a component of dynamite, the latter consisted of nitroglycerin stabilized by diatomaceous earth to markedly reduce the risk of inadvertent explosion from minor jostling, a serious impediment to nitroglycerin’s use. Emil Oskar Nobel, Alfred’s younger brother, was killed along with a technician from an accidental explosion of nitroglycerin in a Nobel laboratory. Alfred in a letter to a friend said, “Isn’t it an irony of fate that I have been prescribed nitroglycerin, to be taken internally! They call it Trinitrin, so as not to scare the chemist and the public.”
His close relationship with the Baroness von Suttner, a former employee of his before her marriage to the Baron and a leader in the effort to bring peace to the nations of Europe, wracked by centuries of war, led to his interest in the reduction of standing armies and the effort to promote peace among the nations of Europe. Bertha von Suttner had been deeply involved in the peace movement in Europe and had published two books on the subject, one translated into English entitled Lay down your arms. She won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1905.
The foregoing interests and experiences led to Alfred Nobel’s particular focus on chemistry, physics, medicine, literature, and peace as subjects for the prizes for extraordinary accomplishment in those fields and to which he dedicated his fortune. The mistaken Parisian obituary, which painted him as a facilitator of war, weaponry and as a “merchant of death” jarred him. He thought of himself as a man of letters, science and peace. This revelation by the press of their very different view of him and, presumably, representing the world’s view as well, is thought to be the principal event that led to his decision to change his will and leave his fortune to establish the Nobel Foundation and the annual award of the five Nobel Prizes. In this case, a dramatic effect of the publication of a premature obituary.
Written December, 2020