Ludvig Nobel

Ludvig Nobel built the Russian oil industry, and his death gave his brother the idea for the prizes. He was the elder brother of Alfred, and stayed in Russia when the family returned to Sweden, taking over the machine works in St Petersburg that their father had failed with and making it the largest in the country. He went to Baku in the 1870s looking for walnut for rifle stocks and found the oil field instead. Branobel - the Nobel Brothers Petroleum Company - was the result, and it invented much of the modern industry: the first successful oil tanker, the Zoroaster, launched on the Caspian in 1878; pipelines instead of barrels carried by cart; purpose-built rail tank cars; and storage depots along the Volga. At its height it produced a substantial share of the world's oil and broke Standard Oil's hold on the Russian market. He also introduced profit-sharing, an eight-hour day in some works, schools and hospitals for employees, and standardised metric measurement in Russian engineering. He died at Cannes in 1888, and a French newspaper confused the brothers and printed Alfred's obituary under a headline calling him a merchant of death who had grown rich by finding ways to kill more people faster. Alfred read his own obituary and rewrote his will. Whether that single newspaper error produced the Nobel Prizes is a story the family told and historians treat cautiously, but the will that created them was drafted in the years immediately afterwards. Branobel was seized in the Russian Revolution and the family got nothing for it; the son Emanuel had already sold half the shares to Royal Dutch Shell just before, which is the only reason anything survived. The Baku field they opened is still producing.

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