In partnership with
Nobody's coming to approve your idea
People assume that real businesses get built by other people with more resources. It's how great ideas get stuck in notes apps and conversations.
But you don't need six months and a developer's salary to validate your concept. You just need a weekend. Describe what you want to exist and Lovable builds it: a real site, a real product, ready to accept real payments from real customers. Not a mockup to show people. An actual thing they can use.
You don't need anyone's sign-off to get started. Take $5 off your first month.
Discount of $5 applies to first month of any paid plan. You need to sign up via this webpage in order to claim the discount. The discount applies to new and returning users without an active paid plan. Terms apply.
A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR, MASTERS OF TRIVIA
Trivia is more than a game; it’s a global tradition of knowledge and competition. Masters of Trivia’s tournaments have gone live, with 30 fast, multiple-choice questions. Most correct wins. Speed breaks ties. Compete worldwide for a $MOT token prize purse, plus valuable in-kind prizes.
Get the entry link and reminders by email — subscribe free at PlayMOT.
—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 21, 1833
Stockholm, Sweden
193 years ago
Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist born on October 21, 1833, who invented dynamite and used his fortune to establish the Nobel Prizes.
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833, the third surviving son of an inventive and frequently bankrupt engineer named Immanuel Nobel. When Alfred was nine the family moved to St. Petersburg, where his father had found success making naval mines for the Russian government. The boy was educated by private tutors, became fluent in five languages, wrote poetry, and was sent abroad at seventeen to study chemistry. In Paris he met the Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, who had discovered an oily liquid of terrifying power called nitroglycerin.
Nitroglycerin was far stronger than gunpowder and so unstable that Sobrero considered it too dangerous to use. Nobel spent years trying to tame it. In 1864 an explosion at the family workshop in Stockholm killed five people, including his youngest brother, Emil. The city banned further experiments within its limits, and Nobel moved his work to a barge on a lake.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Nobel Prize, the set of annual international awards established by Alfred Nobel's will and first presented in 1901.
The breakthrough came in 1867. Nobel found that nitroglycerin absorbed into a porous chalky earth called kieselguhr formed a paste that could be shaped into sticks, shipped safely, and set off only with the blasting cap he had invented earlier. He called it dynamite, from the Greek word for power. The timing was ideal. Dynamite blasted the railway tunnels through the Alps, cut canals, opened mines, and cleared harbors during the greatest construction boom the world had yet seen. Nobel followed it with blasting gelatin and a smokeless military powder, built some ninety factories in more than twenty countries, and became one of the richest men in Europe.
He was also solitary, often ill, and never married. He lived mostly in Paris and later in San Remo, Italy, and described himself as a misanthrope who nevertheless wished humanity well. He corresponded for years with the Austrian peace campaigner Bertha von Suttner, who had briefly been his secretary. According to a widely told story, when his brother Ludvig died in 1888 a French newspaper printed Alfred's obituary by mistake, under a headline announcing that the merchant of death was dead, and the experience shook him. The original article has never been firmly identified, but something moved him to think hard about his legacy.
On November 27, 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed a will, written without a lawyer, that left the bulk of his estate, about thirty-one million Swedish kronor, to a fund whose interest would be awarded each year to those who had conferred the greatest benefit on humankind in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. He died in San Remo on December 10, 1896. His relatives contested the will, the named institutions hesitated, and it took five years to sort out. The first prizes were awarded in 1901, on the anniversary of his death. Bertha von Suttner won the Peace Prize in 1905. A prize in economic sciences in his memory was added by Sweden's central bank in 1968.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Nobel's inventions made the modern built world possible. Tunnels, canals, mines, quarries, and railways on the scale of the late nineteenth century depended on a safe high explosive. Dynamite did for civil engineering what the steam engine did for transport.
The Nobel Prizes became the world's benchmark for intellectual achievement. No other award carries comparable prestige across so many fields. For more than 120 years the prizes have shaped scientific careers, literary reputations, and public attention to peace efforts.
His life poses a lasting question about inventors and their inventions. Nobel believed powerful explosives would make war too terrible to fight. He was wrong, and he seems to have known it. The will can be read as his answer to the question of what a person owes the world for what his work has unleashed.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 21, 1833, a boy was born in Stockholm who would lose a brother to nitroglycerin, tame it anyway, and grow rich blasting holes through mountains. At the end of a lonely life he wrote a will that surprised his family and gave away nearly everything. Every October, when the prizes are announced, his name is in the news again.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“To those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.”
— Alfred Nobel, from his last will and testament, November 27, 1895
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Alfred Nobel, the invention of dynamite, the story of the premature obituary, the will he signed in Paris, and the history of the Nobel Prizes?
