Alfred B. Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist who invented bombs and dynamite and other more powerful explosives and Alfred Nobel also founded the Nobel Peace prizes. Alfred Nobel was the fourth son out of all of his brothers and sisters. His fathers name was Immanuel and his mothers name was Caroline. Alfred's father was also an inventor and engineer who had married in his early years. When Alfred was a child he had caught a very bad illness, but he still enjoyed having a close relationship with his mother. When he was a child he displayed a lively intellectual curiosity from an earlier age. He was very interested in explosives, and he learned the fundamentals of engineering from his father. Meanwhile his father, Immanuel, had failed at previous business adventures until moving in 1837 to St. Petersburg in Russia, where he prospered as a manufacture of explosive mines and machine tools. The family left Stockholm in 1842 to join the father in St. Petersburg. Alfred's parents were able to send Alfred to see private tutors, and he proved to be an eager pupil. At the age of 16 he was a competent chemist, and he was very good at speaking, English, French, German, Russian, and very good at speaking Swedish.

Alfred then left Russia in 1850 to go spend a year in Paris. He studied chemistry and then left to spend a year in the U.S. working under the direction of John Ericsson, the constructor of ironclad warship Monitor. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Alfred worked in his fathers factory, which he made military equipment during the Crimean War. And after the war ended in 1856, his fathers company had difficulty switching to the peacetime production of steamboat machinery, and his fathers company went bankrupt 1859.

Nobel intended his invention to be used only for peaceful reasons. He was disappointed by the military use of his products, which were bombs and explosives and he also felt responsible for the destruction they had caused Before he had died in 1896 he had set aside the majority of his fortune in a trust fund and established the Nobel Foundation (The Nobel Peace Prize.) This organization continues still today to award cash prizes to outstanding individuals or institutions in six different things for their peaceful contributions to mankind.