Nobel

Most people know Alfred Nobel as the founder of the Nobel Prizes, for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology & Medicine, Literature and Peace. Many may know that he was the inventor of dynamite. But few will know that he was one of the world's most prolific inventors, with 355 patents to his name, and more intriguingly that he spent several years of his life in  Scotland in Ayrshire, setting up his largest explosives factory on the Ardeer peninsula in 1871.

 Born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1833 to a construction engineering father, who was also an enterprising inventor, Nobel was brought up in Russia where his father had moved in 1837 to set up successful workshops. As well as inheriting the family flair for industry - along with his three engineering brothers - he also became fluent in five languages and developed a love of literature, poetry, chemistry and physics, before being sent abroad by his father to broaden his skills and experience. While studying chemistry in Paris, he met the inventor of nitroglycerine, Sobrero.

Later his inventive mind led him to combine this dangerous explosive fluid  with an inert clay-like substance called kieselguhr, to form dynamite, patented in 1867.
When combined with Alfred's other important invention, the detonator, dynamite became a major tool for the mining and construction industries.

Nobel went on to found nearly a hundred factories and laboratories in over 20 countries, one of the most prominent being the Ardeer works, due to the sympathetic support he received from local entrepreneurs and to the splendid isolation of the local natural facilities. 

"Picture to yourself everlasting bleak sand dunes with no buildings....It is a sand desert where the wind always blows.....Between us and America there is nothing but water, a sea whose mighty waves are always raging and foaming. Now you will have some idea of the place where I am living," he wrote vividly to one of his brothers in Azerbaijan in 1871. The first nitroglycerine was produced  at Ardeer  in 1873 and the first dynamite two years later, from what was to become in 1877 Nobel's Explosive Company.

By 1907 Ardeer was the largest explosives  factory  in the world .  Nobel  Industries Ltd  was one of the firms which merged in 1926 to form the chemical giant ICI.

Nobel died in 1896 at his San Remo home in Italy.. A lifelong pacifist, increasingly concerned at the warlike uses to which his invention was put, Nobel's will left a large sum of money for the establishment of an award system which promoted the best in human achievement - what we now know as the Nobel Prizes, first presented in 1901.