In 1888, Alfred Nobel opened a newspaper to find his own obituary under the headline “The merchant of death is dead.” The mistake, made when his brother Ludwig died, gave the explosives magnate a brutal preview of his legacy. This episode explores the paradox of a solitary, depressed industrialist whose fortune came to fund the world’s most famous prizes for peace and achievement.

We trace Nobel from his family’s bankruptcy and fortune in St. Petersburg through his work with nitroglycerin, the 1864 explosion that killed his brother Emil, and the invention of dynamite, gelignite, and ballistite. We also examine his secret 1895 will, the troubled launch of the prizes, his ties to Bertha von Suttner, and his letters to Sophia Hess.

• How diatomaceous earth tamed nitroglycerin and turned it into dynamite
• Why smokeless powder transformed the battlefield
• The irony of Nobel being prescribed nitroglycerin for his angina
• How a vague phrase in his will led the Academy to overlook Tolstoy and Ibsen
• Why the economics prize was not part of Nobel’s original plan