Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/96

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He was made a noble with hereditary transmission of the title in 1885. His great work in synthetic chemistry entitles him to belong to the group of those who have already received Nobel prizes in chemistry—van't Hoff, Fischer, Arrhenius and Ramsay.

These Nobel prizes, each of the value of about $40,000, were established by the will of Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. Nobel was born in Stockholm; he studied in St. Petersberg, and began to assist in his father's works, but soon took up the study of high explosives. In 1864 he took out a patent for dynamite, obtained by incorporating nitro-glycerine with some porous substance. Later he invented ballistite, a nitroglycerine smokeless powder, but his claim that the patent covered cordite was disallowed by the courts after a lawsuit against the British government. From the manufacture of dynamite and other explosives at his works in Ayrshire and from developing the Baku oilfields, he