The Nobel Family: Swedish Geniuses in Tsarist Russia 1350348910, 9781350348912

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THE NOBEL FAMILY

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THE NOBEL FAMILY Swedish Geniuses in Tsarist Russia

Bengt Jangfeldt Translated from the Swedish by Harry D. Watson

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Bengt Jangfeldt, 2023 Bengt Jangfeldt has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Translated by Harry D. Watson. Cover design by Terry Woodley Cover image: Family Portrait © The Nobel Family Archive and Watercolour painting by Imanuel Nobel, demonstrating underwater mines to Tsar Nicholas I © The Regional Archive at Lund. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce the copyright material. Please do get in touch with any enquiries or any information relating to such material or the rights holder. We would be pleased to rectify any omissions in subsequent editions of this publication should they be drawn to our attention. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-4891-2 ePDF: 978-1-3503-4892-9 eBook: 978-1-3503-4893-6 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii Foreword ix

PART ONE 1 Immanuel

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2 Immanuel Nobel & Sons

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3 Immanuel and Andriette

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PART TWO 4 Ludvig

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5 Robert

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6 Robert and Ludvig 7 The Nobel Brothers

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8 The End of an Epoch

PART THREE

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9 The Third Generation 10 Emanuel

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11 The Age of Greatness

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12 Welfare and Charity

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13 Political Unrest, Economic Growth and War 14 Anno 1917

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PART FOUR 15 Post Festum 16 Postscript 17 P.P.S.

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Family Tree 363 Illustration Credits 364 Notes 365 Bibliography 399 Index 405

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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he first time I came into contact with the Nobel family’s Russian history was in the 1990s, when I was leading a research project about the historical ties between Sweden and St Petersburg. The project generated several seminars and publications, among those my book Svenska vägar till S:t Petersburg (Swedish Roads to St Petersburg), which contains a chapter about the Nobel family in Russia. It was published in 1998. Ever since, I have felt a keen wish to dive deeper into the family’s Russian history. Now it is done, and the result is at hand. The book was published at the initiative of the Center for Business History, which for many years has collected and digitized material related to the family’s oil company, Branobel. I would like to extend my deep gratitude to its CEO Alexander Husebye, who has made the Center’s highly qualified staff available to me, especially archivist Vadim Azbel, who with his expertise and service-mindedness has been of invaluable help to me. I would also like to thank my photo editor Mikaela Nordin. A sincere thank you also to Anders Sjöman, responsible for the production process, and to Fredrik Ekman, head of the Foundation for Business-promoting Education in Russia (SAUR), who has been engaged in the project from the very beginning. The story is to a considerable extent based on the enormous family correspondence of which little or no use has been made. This goes first and foremost for Robert Nobel’s archive which for historical reasons is kept in various quarters: the Regional Archive at Lund, the Nobel Foundation and, until recently, the Nobel Museum (whose collection in 2019 was moved to the Regional Archive at Lund and incorporated with that institution’s Nobel archive). Other important sources are kept at the Swedish National Archive, the Museum of Technology and Science and the Centre for Business History in Stockholm. Some material is to be found in the Foundation for Economic History Research within Banking and Enterprise and the Royal Academy of Science in Stockholm. The staff of these institutions have been of great help to me. The project has been wholeheartedly supported by the Nobel Family Association through its chairman Gunnar Liljeqvist and vice chairman Thomas Tydén who have given me open access to the family archive (kept at the Nobel Museum). Individual family members have also helped me, mainly Robert Nobel, Agneta

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Wennerström Nobel, Leif Nobel, Rolf Nobel, Peter Nobel and Peter Oleinikoff. A warm thank you to you all! For research in Finnish archives, Dr Elisabeth Stubb in Helsinki has been of great help, while in the Russian archives, Mikhail Druzin in Petersburg. Mathias Standertskjöld, chairman of the Standertskjöld Family Archive, has made important documents available to me. I would also like to thank Professor Martin Kragh and Dr Rainer Knapas, who read the book in manuscript form and have contributed important points of view. The same goes for Johan Rosell, whose historical knowledge makes him the perfect editor for a book of this kind. Brita Åsbrink, author of the book Ludvig Nobel: ‘Petroleum has a Bright Future!’, has kindly shared knowledge and materials. Ulf Larsson (Nobel Museum), Britt af Klinteberg, Mona Wahlgren, Professor Mikhail Baryshnikov (Petersburg), Vyacheslav Yanovsky (Kislovodsk), Emil Avdaliani (Tbilisi), Madeleine Broberg (Swedish Academy), Axel Odelberg and Claes Lundberg have been helpful to me in various ways. My friend Harry D. Watson, who has translated all my books into English, has done an excellent job this time too. Like my previous books, this one has also been written at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Center for the History of Science, where I have had my desk for twenty years. A more pleasant and stimulating workplace would be difficult to find. Thank you, all my friends and colleagues there! Bengt Jangfeldt

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

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he name Nobel, both in Sweden and abroad, is mainly associated with Alfred Nobel. This is of course in view of the prize he instituted, which has been awarded for 122 years. Every year on 10 of December we are reminded of him and his achievement. Many people, but by no means all, are aware that he was also an outstanding scientist and a clever businessman. Even fewer are those who know that the discovery of nitroglycerine as an explosive, later developed into dynamite, was made in close collaboration with his father, Immanuel. Alfred Nobel was a member of a family of conspicuously gifted individuals. His father was a universal genius of the kind that no longer exists: architect, inventor, engineer, designer. All of that with only a few years’ education to his name. Immanuel Nobel built the first pontoon bridge in Stockholm, he designed houses, invented underwater mines, built steam-powered machines, and so forth. Not only Alfred but his brothers Ludvig and Robert also followed in his wake. The three brothers grew up in St Petersburg, where their father ran a mechanical workshop. While Alfred, after twenty-one years in the Russian capital, moved to Western Europe, his brothers remained behind. Ludvig developed the mechanical workshop into one of Russia’s most successful machine factories, and Robert founded Branobel, the largest oil company in the country and one of the largest in the world. Ludvig’s son, Emanuel, later expanded the Nobel industrial empire into one of the most powerful in Russia. All of this disappeared in the revolutionary storm of 1917, which swept away all private businesses. The Nobel family were forced to leave Russia, where they had been active since 1838. In the Soviet Union the name of Nobel sank into total oblivion. The Nobels were not only successful entrepreneurs but also pioneers in terms of their attitude to the workforce. As early as 1870, a profit-sharing scheme was introduced that gave the firm’s engineers and clerks 40 per cent of profits. Houses for the employees were built close to the machine factory in St Petersburg and at the oil fields in the Caucasus, as well as schools for their children. During the First World War the company’s buildings were transformed into a Red Cross hospital.

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The Nobel family were model capitalists in a country that had always had a major welfare and democratic deficit. With the founding of his prize, Alfred Nobel has achieved international celebrity. Had it not been for that, he would certainly not have been as well-known. Or he would have been known as someone who discovered, and made himself a fortune from, explosives and instruments of war. The achievements of his father and brothers were at least as remarkable. How the genius of the entrepreneurial family of Immanuel Nobel & Sons was distributed is an open question. Hopefully this Swedish-Russian family chronicle can help to provide the answer to this.

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FOREWORD

PART ONE

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1 IMMANUEL

Immanuel Nobel’s arrival at St Petersburg on 20 December 1838 provided the first chapter in a family chronicle that is without parallel in Swedish-Russian history, and not only there. In that moment, the foundation was laid for an industrial empire whose power and wealth could hold its own by international standards. The story began in Gävle, a city 170 kilometers north of Stockholm, thirtyseven years earlier. Immanuel was born on 24 March 1801, the first child of his father Immanuel Nobel senior’s (1757–1839) marriage to Brita Cajsa (Catharina) Ahlberg (1770–1823). It was the second marriage for them both. Immanuel senior had lost his first wife, Anna Rosell, in 1795 and Brita Cajsa her husband, Berndt Messman, in 1798. Immanuel Nobel senior was a barber-surgeon and hospital doctor and served in different places not only in Sweden but also in Finland, where he took part in the war against Russia in 1788–9 and, according to one – disputed – account came close to being taken prisoner in connection with the Battle of Svensksund.1 In the 1790s he worked in provincial towns in Sweden and in 1800 he entered into service as assistant provincial physician in Gävle, where his elder brother, Olof, was working as a tanner. It was here that he would meet his future wife. They married on 29 June 1800 and, nine months later, almost to the day, their son Immanuel was born. Their daughter Betty arrived in 1803 and two years later another daughter, Amalia. The family lived in a manor-house which Brita Cajsa had inherited from her first husband and where she had lived with him. From his first marriage Immanuel brought with him his seven-year-old daughter Anna Charlotta and Brita Cajsa had a boy and two girls. The family thus consisted of seven children: Immanuel and his two siblings and four half-siblings. The marriage, as far as we can judge, was a good one, although it cannot have been either cheap or easy to feed and bring up seven children. Immanuel worked for a time as a hospital doctor in Sundsvall and, when the post of town doctor there became vacant in 1808, he applied for it. He failed to get the position and instead returned to Gävle.2

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Immanuel senior would have liked to see his son follow in his footsteps and choose a doctor’s calling, but the training was long and the younger Immanuel’s inclination was not for studying. (His father had more success with Immanuel’s eleven-year-older half-brother Bernhard Messman, who graduated at Uppsala in 1810 and became battalion doctor with the Svea Lifeguards in Stockholm.) Immanuel’s lack of studiousness was compensated for by other talents: he was good with his hands and had a practical turn of mind. For a while, in his younger years, he served an apprenticeship as a shoemaker, and after eight months he was said to have been able to supply the family with ‘quite adequate footwear’. Immanuel was also unusually inventive and ‘played about with experiments whose purpose nobody could understand and which in reality had no connection with his homework’.3 An example: one day he saw his father set fire to a paper with the aid of a magnifying-glass (at the beginning of the nineteenth century matches had not yet been invented and one struck a light with the help of flint and steel). However, the glass wasn’t big enough to light a pipe. So, Immanuel cut out a thin sliver of ice which he set in a ring of wood and, with his hand, formed into a lens with which he managed to light his father’s pipe. Another example: once when he was locked in the attic, instead of shouting for help he tried to find a way of getting out. There was an umbrella and a fishing net in the attic. He put up the umbrella and tied the fishing net over it so that it wouldn’t turn outside in, then jumped out of the window with the umbrella as a parachute.4 However, for the most part, such stories should be taken with a pinch of salt since, in retrospect, they tend to be interpreted as portents of future greatness. In Immanuel’s case, as we shall see, such scepticism is unjustified. Not much is known about Immanuel’s schooldays. We know that he went to Gävle trivialskola (a school teaching the classical trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric), but not how long for – the logbooks are only partially preserved. As far as we can judge, however, it was at most a few years. One trace of his schooldays is a prize that he received in 1811 for singing, which bears witness to a certain musicality.5 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Gävle had only 5,000 inhabitants but was Sweden’s biggest shipping and dockyard town, with seven shipping firms and eighty vessels. Every day during the latter part of the year ships departed or arrived to or from the Mediterranean (38 per cent, the majority), England and the North Sea. Some sailed as far as North and South America, Asia and Australia. Most of the business of the town was taken up with shipping activity, shipbuilding, seafaring and trade. For a young boy in Gävle, the seaman’s calling was a natural career choice and many opted for the sea rather than for studying. The sea also appealed to Immanuel, who occupied his leisure hours by drawing boats and ships. His talent was so conspicuous that his father was encouraged to let him train to be a shipbuilder. The initiative came from ship’s captain and shipbuilder Johan Olof Åström (1788–1820), who was married to Immanuel’s half-sister,

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Magdalena. It was on his advice that Immanuel, at the age of fourteen, was sent to sea.6 On his mother’s side he had the sea in his blood: her father had been harbourmaster in Gävle and her first husband Berndt Messman had been the captain of a trading vessel. The fact that he was drowned in the North Sea seems not to have put off either Immanuel or his mother. On 15 June 1815, Immanuel took up his berth on a ship bound for the Mediterranean: The youth Emanuel Nobell7 is registered at the Mercantile Marine Office as in service . . . he was born in Gefle 1800 24/3 . . . Father: barber-surgeon Emanuel Nobell Mother: Brita Catrina Ahlberg, unmarried and engaged with Capt Svedman to the Mediterranean as cabin-boy.8

At sea When the frigate Thetis sailed from Gävle it was laden with ‘Iron, Boards and Beams’.9 The crew consisted of twelve to fourteen men, and Immanuel served as cabin boy. The Thetis plied between various ports in the Mediterranean and carried, among other things, wood – which was sprinkled with water to make it heavier, as it was sold by weight! – salt and lupins. The cargo also contained mercury, textiles and money (Spanish piastres) to cover the cost of the return voyage. The ship was commanded by Captain Petter Svedman, who died shortly after departure and was replaced by a Captain Holmstrand, generally called Bulten (short for Fyllbulten, ‘Boozer’) by the crew. According to Immanuel, he was ‘a rough, drunken and coarse wretch . . . who valued nothing other than the aquavit and money’.10 During Immanuel’s time onboard a pilot taught him how to make himself understood in lingua franca, the language used by seamen and merchants in the Mediterranean area, which was a mixture of the languages spoken there. The main port was Livorno on the coast of Tuscany, a free port. Other ports called at were Trieste, Trapani (on the west coast of Sicily) and Alexandria in Egypt. The latter city made a big impression on Immanuel: I cannot sufficiently describe my feelings of delight, when after a stormy and difficult passage a sunny and beautiful morning dawned in the old harbour of Alexandria. By then I had already viewed the lovely air of Spain and Italy, but what was that compared to this transparent azure-blue lofty heaven, which struck all of us with amazement and delight. This air, which surrounded the whole city with its walls of yellowish sandstone erected in the time of Napoleon the 1st, made on myself at least an impression that I will never forget. In Alexandria, at which until quite recently no ‘Christian’ ship had been allowed to call, Immanuel found a use for his inventiveness. One day he spied through the

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FIGURE 1.1 The British naval officer John Shortland on the capital of the Pompey Column, 1803.

telescope some men who were busy ‘lashing spars together in order to get up to the capital of the so-called Pompey column’ – a twenty-metre high triumphal column from Roman times named after the general Pompey. The attempt failed as the ‘spars’ – small wooden beams – were too short. Immanuel then called to mind the paper kites he had made as a child and he suggested to Jernfält, the master boatswain of the Thetis, that they should stretch a thin rope over the capital with the help of a kite. With the rope they would then be able to hoist up tougher hawsers that they could climb up on. Next morning, Immanuel saw to his surprise that his idea had been carried out and the following day the pillar was fitted out with grooved shrouds so that it could easily be climbed. A number of gentlemen gathered on the capital and fired a pistol shot. It was answered by several cannon shots and a tender set out from a large English ship and pulled alongside Thetis. A basket ‘with lots of delicious fruit’ was

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hoisted up onto the deck. It was, it transpired, a present for Immanuel, whose suggestion had been forwarded to the captain of the English ship. When Boozer came onboard a few hours later he was extremely drunk and Immanuel received ‘instead of thanks, a telling-off to make his ears ring’. The captain thought he had exchanged something he had stolen from the ship for the fruit. A few days later, an elderly man came over from the English ship and asked for the youth who had given them such good advice. The captain replied that there were no boys here who could give good advice. The Englishman then took a piece of paper from his pocket and asked who had written it. Jernfält was the only person on board who could express himself in English and he was called down to the captain. He explained what had happened and pointed to Immanuel. ‘The tall, rough Englishman lifted me up and kissed me and, as the Boatswain later related, wished that one of his sons might be as inventive as myself,’ Immanuel remembered. ‘My Captain stood there mortified as the Englishman said that the first glass drunk on the column would be in my honour.’ With its rich detail the story bears the stamp of truth, but is it true? Barely ten years earlier, the British naval officer John Shortland did the same thing: used a kite to put a rope ladder over the capital. Then he and a Captain White climbed up the pillar, raised the Union Jack and drank the health of King George III. The story is told in The Naval Chronicle of 1812.11 Was it that exploit that the British sailors now wanted to repeat? Can Immanuel have known about it when much later he wrote his autobiographical notes, and fabricated the story? Or was it a pure coincidence that the teenage Immanuel and the British naval commander hit upon the same solution? There is no way of knowing, but that Immanuel, with his fertile imagination, could have hit upon such an idea is perfectly possible. In Immanuel’s account of his years at sea there are pieces of information that need to be taken with a pinch of salt. This applies, among others, to the comment that with the aid of a telescope, from his ship, he saw Napoleon on Elba. It must have been a powerful telescope, as the emperor had left Elba long before Immanuel left Gävle, but it needn’t be a memory lapse or an invention. News was carried slowly and Immanuel and the crew may well have believed that it was Napoleon they saw.12 In any event, the young cabin boy managed to experience a great deal during his years at sea. It was not only Captain Svedman who died on the ship but also a carpenter, which forced the ship into quarantine outside Livorno. During one of their visits to Alexandria, Immanuel fell ill ‘with the first physical pains I ever felt, to which I would certainly have succumbed had not fate then, as on many other occasions in a manner equally wonderful as unexpected, sent a helping hand’. The helping hand belonged to Ismaïl Gibraltar, a captain in the Turkish navy who had been in the Egyptian service and who was on his way to Sweden to negotiate the purchase of war materiel. Thetis was the only Swedish ship in Alexandria’s harbour and the captain’s wish to, in Immanuel’s words, ‘see the

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Scandinavian polar bears who, in his mind, constituted the crew’ were the reason for his visit to the ship, where with great curiosity he inspected all onboard – ‘in particular the tidiness and orderliness in every part seemed to interest him in the highest degree’. As Immanuel was able to express himself in the lingua franca, Captain Gibraltar asked the Swedish captain if he might take him along on his trip to Sweden, but Holmstrand’s demand for financial compensation was so unashamed that the offer fell through. When Gibraltar found out that Immanuel had gone down with the plague, however, he sent across his ship’s doctor, who opened the boil and thereby saved Immanuel’s life.13 Thetis, with ‘P. Holmstrand, in place of Svedman’ and laden with French salt, returned to Gävle sometime between 18 and 24 July 1818. Immanuel had by then been at sea for three years and one month. He was received, he recalled, with open arms by his parents and most of his sisters and half-sisters – his brother Bernhard had already flown the coop. Upon his mother asking him what he would like for dinner he replied ‘sausage’. His mother was doubtful as the sausage that was hanging on a pole in the kitchen was old and dry, but Immanuel’s ‘mouth watered at the thought of enjoying a dish I had had to go without for so long’. Before Immanuel shipped on the Thetis he had, naturally enough, ‘seen little of the world’, and there was much that awoke his sense of wonder in the course of the voyage. If he had not been so young, he would ‘now in truth have been able to tell many interesting things’, as he wrote in his autobiographical notes. Naturally a great deal passed Immanuel by on account of his age, but the observations he made, on religion among other things, give a certain insight into his thoughts and mind-set. Several times during the voyage he was witness to the hypocrisy of priests and monks. In Trapani in Sicily, he was allowed to follow the crew ashore on their day off. After going from ‘one hostelry to another’ the company finished up in a brothel, where the madam ‘laid her hands in a cross on the Bible and swore that “the gentlemen could safely use her daughter” ’. When this did not have the desired effect, she called on a monk who gladly corroborated her words. ‘To such a degree of wretchedness had the people of this wonderful land been corrupted by their priests, and their equivalents, the monks,’ Immanuel noted, asking rhetorically: ‘Can one do other than shudder and despise a fraternity that has sunk so low as this Catholic so-called priesthood?’ It was not only the ‘Catholic so-called priesthood’ that sowed religious doubts in Immanuel. He was in general sceptical about official religion, especially under the influence of the natural phenomena he experienced during the voyage. On one occasion the sea was filled with strange, luminous, slimy creatures and the sky ‘by a sort of dazzling flashes, rather like our flashes of so-called summer lightning but with a much stronger and greater intensity of light’. They stretched far along the horizon, only to then suddenly disappear and then just as suddenly reappear ‘in a

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different point of the compass, often in a quite distant spot’. This phenomenon made Immanuel ponder on nature, the Christian gospel and the life after this one: All the wonders that I saw then in Creation made me reflect, although I was only a boy, on how little the founders of our religions have reflected on all Nature’s wonderful access to means of achieving its ends, without recourse to such injustices or means that our so-called holy books in the most distorted ways cook up and force their sheep simply to believe in lest they be excluded from a blessed life after this one. On returning home, Immanuel had still not been confirmed, an omission that had to be dealt with if he wished to go to sea again. When his father agreed with the priest that Immanuel could study privately, Immanuel thought this was ‘to go one step back after the rascally tricks and deceptions I had seen carried out by priests in the countries I had visited during this long and so varied voyage’. However, the priest seems to have been a sensible man and Immanuel was excused questions about the Catechism, about which he was ill-informed. Instead, the subject-matter was ‘only such as touched on God in relation to nature, or vice versa’ and after three lessons he was allowed to take communion. Insofar as Immanuel could be described as religious, he can probably best be described as a pantheist. After Immanuel’s return home, his father tried again to persuade him to tread ‘that road on which he, with his knowledge, could guide me’, but Immanuel was adamant in his refusal. He had absolutely no desire to study; indeed, Immanuel never learned to write properly. His inconsistent and extraordinarily unorthodox spelling, like his inability to formulate a coherent sentence, suggest that apart from his deficient schooling he also suffered from some form of dyslexia. (The reminiscences quoted here were edited by someone else and are not representative of his use of language.) Immanuel senior has been described as ‘serious and strict’ and relations between father and son seem to have been complicated.14 On the few occasions when his father is mentioned in Immanuel’s autobiographical notes it is with conventional epithets. Perhaps he pressed his son too hard with his educational ambitions and felt let down when Immanuel, whose talents were of a quite different nature, failed to live up to his expectations. His mother on the other hand is mentioned often and in the warmest terms. The same is also true of the master boatswain on the Thetis, Jernfält, a sensible and honest person who took the crew’s part against the drunken captain and on several occasions helped Immanuel out of a scrape. If his ‘kind-hearted, tender mother . . . tried to inject into my still so fragile being that seed that later would develop into a mind with decent human feelings’, Jernfält taught him to rely on himself and not on others during his years at sea. In Gävle, Jernfält was received with great hospitality by the Nobel household after Immanuel told them of the ‘fatherly

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benevolence’ Jernfält had shown him. When shortly afterwards the master boatswain died at sea he was deeply mourned by Immanuel, ‘for I loved and looked up to that man with warm feelings like those I entertained for my own beloved Father’.

Carl XIV Johan’s triumphal arch Immanuel did not go back to sea, although his confirmation was over and done with. Instead, he chose to develop his talent for drawing. His father was family doctor to Johan Christopher Loëll, who was konduktör, i.e. assistant architect – more or less a constructional engineer in today’s terms – in Gävle. Immanuel was apprenticed to him, which ‘went quite well because of the knack I had practised earlier of making drawings of ships’. However, he was dissatisfied at not being given more demanding tasks than drawing roof trusses and bell towers. When he was given drawings to shade in and colour his interest grew, and one day Loëll showed him a model of a church tower. ‘This enlivened my spirits so that I could not rest until I had shown Loëll that I knew how to draw both plans and façades and profiles of all kinds of named models.’ In September 1819, King Carl XIV Johan was planning a ceremonial tour of Sweden, visiting Gävle. This required a triumphal arch. Loëll, who according to Immanuel had been afflicted by mental illness at that time, was not in a condition to draw up a proposal. Responsibility for the work therefore devolved on to court konduktör Fredrik M. Bäck, who was called up from Stockholm. According to Immanuel, however, it was he himself who designed the triumphal arch ‘by scribbling something with a pencil on a sheet of writing-paper’, after which his father showed the drawing to the mayor, who in turn showed it to the provincial governor. ‘It was . . . arranged that the work on the triumphal arch should be handed over to me, and as a result, from that moment until the king departed I was in the most dreadful agony of soul, but so much the greater was my joy when everything was over and done with to the satisfaction of all concerned.’ Immanuel’s name is not included in the lists of people who were involved with the festivities, but the information he provides about the work on the triumphal arch is so detailed that there is no reason to doubt that he had a hand in it.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts Shortly after the triumphal arch was erected, Immanuel moved to Stockholm to begin his studies as a student at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. The person who had encouraged him to apply there was supposedly the art professor Fredrik Blom, who in connection with an inspection of the triumphal arch in

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Gävle had chatted with Immanuel and been charmed by his ‘at once frank and respectful bearing’.15 Immanuel turned out to be a hard-working student and in January 1822 he was awarded the Academy’s medal for architectural drawing. In the following years he was to receive several distinctions, among them another prestigious medal.16 The teaching was not particularly demanding, only a few hours a week, so Immanuel had time to complete his education in parallel. In 1798, a mechanical school had been set up at the Academy but it was poorly run and in 1816 it was brought under the control of the Academy of Agriculture. During Immanuel’s student years it was led by the same Blom who had encouraged him to go to Stockholm. Since 1817, Fredrik Blom had been a professor at the Academy of Art and was one of the most prominent and most productive architects of his time. Among his best-known works are Skeppsholmen Church and Rosendal Palace as well as numerous barracks and private villas in Stockholm. He was also active in Gävle, whose gymnasium (senior high school) he designed. Immanuel also distinguished himself in this field of education: in 1822 he was awarded the Royal Academy’s major bursary of 60 kronor for a ‘model of a winddriven pump’. The following year he was named by Blom as one of four students who had ‘completed assignments that deserve to be exhibited at the Royal Academy’. The same thing happened the next year, in 1824, when Immanuel was singled out as one of two students worthy of praise. Both in this and in the following year he again received the major bursary of 60 kronor, which roughly equalled six months’ rent. Immanuel was awarded the 1824 bursary for a ‘well executed model of a portable house’, and that of 1825, among other things, for ‘two portable houses’. It was no coincidence that these particular pieces of work were being awarded prizes: portable houses, prefabricated wooden houses, were one of the innovations of Immanuel’s professor. Fredrik Blom had worked out a method of constructing houses in which walls, floor and roof were constructed in pieces that could be taken apart, transported and then put together again. One such house was the Royal Rosendal Palace, which was not constructed to be moved but which was built with such a technique, in prepared sections. The portable houses also attracted attention abroad and were exported to the USA, Russia and France.17 Immanuel’s talent and industriousness were so obvious that Blom made him his assistant while he was still a student; according to Immanuel, for almost starvation wages. He seems to have soon made himself indispensable, and as he was of an age for conscription Blom saw to it that he was assigned to the navy with a salary of 30 kronor a month. In this way two birds were killed with one stone: Immanuel remained in Stockholm and his salary for working for Blom was paid by the navy. With the help of a manufacturer of tiled stoves, Immanuel constructed a portable stove, a task that Blom had failed to achieve. Blom had also had problems finding someone who could make models of the portable houses that were good

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enough to show. Immanuel managed to do this too and some of the models were sent to Russia. When the first model was ready it was to be collected by men from provincial Sweden who to Immanuel’s amusement confused his name with the object in question, ‘so that on arrival they asked for Herr Modell and said they had been sent to fetch a nobel’. Immanuel was also involved in the work on the Rosendal Palace and when in 1823 Blom was asked by the king to travel to Christiania (Oslo) with him he asked Immanuel to come too. A royal palace was to be built in the Norwegian capital and Blom needed help with designing it. According to Immanuel, Blom exploited him to breaking point, and he was given so many tasks and became so worn out that in the end he could neither see nor stand upright. The drawings and the suggestions, according to Immanuel, met with Blom’s approval – but ‘not a word of thanks passed his pock-marked lips notwithstanding all the efforts I had made’. Despite Blom’s exertions, the task of designing the palace went to another architect. Complaints about lack of respect and poor pay permeate Immanuel’s reminiscences of Blom, who is described as mean and jealous. In financial dealings

FIGURE 1.2 Immanuel in his forties.

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with his boss, he often received help from his half-brother Bernhard who served as battalion doctor to the Svea Lifeguards, whose barracks was designed by Blom. Whether Immanuel’s criticism was justified or not – little is known about Blom’s character – it reveals quite a lot about himself. Because of his deficient school education, he was always finding himself socially at a disadvantage. However, he was diligent and conscious of his abilities, which must be described as exceptional. That he did not always feel appreciated as he deserved to be is hardly surprising.

The inventor In the inventory of the estate of his mother, who died at the age of fifty-five in October 1823, Immanuel is named as ‘Architect of the Royal Academy of Painting’.18 He was still a student at the Academy in 1825, but afterwards he disappears from the rolls. When in 1827 the mechanical school was absorbed into the Technological Institute (afterwards the KTH, Royal Institute of Technology), Immanuel was appointed as designer. This involved teaching so-called ‘linear drawing’ or geometrical projection and, in addition,‘to supervise the teaching in the workshops, which is conducted mainly in wood- and metal-work with instruction of the workers employed for that purpose’.19 At the same time, Immanuel continued to work as an architect. The earliest buildings registered in his name are a portable house intended to be erected on a small island outside the present National Museum,20 a villa for the stockbroker Reinhold Weylandt (now Djurgårdsvägen 124), and the customs house that was erected in 1830 at Roslagstull. Immanuel also re-built the commercial firm of Jacob de Ron & Sons’ property beside the Weylandt villa and carried out a complicated operation, in terms of structural engineering, at another de Ron house. The house had settled and was threatening to tumble down the slope, but further settling was prevented by inserting chocks under the foundations and erecting firm supports. The work was carried out without anyone having to move out of the house, which at that time was seen as quite an achievement.21 A number of other contracts involving maintenance or repair work are documented, for example the Petersen house in the Old Town of Stockholm, a project beset by significant problems. More of that later. Immanuel’s biggest project involved a floating bridge over Skuru Sound, between the island of Värmdö east of central Stockholm and the mainland. The old ferry station no longer met the requirements of modern communications and in the autumn of 1830 a contract bidding auction was held which Immanuel won. The project cost 13,000 kronor (about one million kronor in today’s values) but it was beset with problems: a stone caisson sank and three barges with building material were lost while being towed.22 The bridge was ready by 1832. During the construction, Immanuel had made use of pontoons with air-tight metal and wooden vessels of his own construction

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which he tried to patent in 1836, but his application failed because he did not submit any detailed descriptions.23 However, the Skuru Sound bridge occupies an important place in Immanuel’s biography as, a few years later, he devised a new method of building floating bridges which we will return to later. Several years after leaving the Academy of Art, Immanuel began to make a name for himself as an inventor. In 1828, he submitted three patent applications: for a planing machine, a mangling machine with ten rollers and a ‘mechanical movement’. As regards the application for a planing patent, the Technological Institute, which had the final say on the application, pointed out that such a machine already existed. (This was typical for Immanuel, whose seething brain was not infrequently filled with ideas that had already been implemented by others.) However, the other patent applications were supported by the Institute. However, Immanuel was unlucky – for some reason the National Board of Trade failed to take a decision about his inventions.24 In the summer of 1827, Immanuel married Carolina Andriette Ahlsell, known as Andriette, who was born in Stockholm in 1803.25 Her father was an accountant but had died as early as 1809. In nine years, Immanuel and Andriette had four children: Robert (b. 1829), Ludvig (b. 1831), Alfred (b. 1833) and Henrietta (b. 1836). Their first home was simple and the rent low. Although Immanuel had a fair number of commissions, some of them prestigious, the family had it tough financially. Presumably he was not well-paid for his work. In 1829, the family moved to the prison island of Långholmen in central Stockholm. There, on 2 December 1829, Immanuel took out the lease of a property called Knapersta, which comprised the former customs inspector’s official residence and an orchard. The family moved into the ramshackle house but Immanuel immediately asked for permission to erect a new house to his own design with ten rooms, situated at some distance from the old house. When the lease ran out in 1873, according to the agreement, the property would revert to the city without compensation. Once at Långholmen, Immanuel, true to form, set up an extensive business operation and ran, among other things, a carpentry and lathe turning workshop in the prison. However, financial worries continued to afflict him and he found it hard to look after the lease, which in March 1832 was transferred to the notary J.C. Möllersten.26 The family now moved to Ridön in Lake Mälaren, in what is now the municipality of Södertälje. That they moved to Ridön can be explained by the fact that there was a gunpowder warehouse there, something that may have attracted Immanuel, whose first experiments with explosives may be dated to this period. In the end, Immanuel’s financial problems became so insurmountable that he was forced into bankruptcy. The last straw was a conflagration on New Year’s Eve 1832 which destroyed Knapersta – although not the new house which was almost completed but not yet occupied, but instead the old customs inspector’s official residence.27 The property burned down to the ground but the greater part of the

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household utensils were saved.28 Although the lease had already been transferred to Möllersten the previous spring, Immanuel was mentioned as the owner in the newspapers and the records of the police authority. It therefore caused a degree of surprise and suspicion that he was nowhere to be seen after the fire – obviously no one realized that he had moved to Ridön, or at least no one in the police did. When Immanuel heard what had happened, he hurried off to the parish registrar’s office in Stockholm on 4 January to have it recorded that, ‘in the spring gone by’, he had moved to Ridön – terrified, one imagines, of being suspected of having set the fire and then cleared out.29 His bankruptcy was now inevitable. In his petition to the municipal court on 11 January 1833, Immanuel explained that ‘I have suffered such significant losses that, with the best will in the world, it is impossible for me to be able fully to redeem the debts and liabilities owed by me at present to my various creditors’. Among the reasons for his insolvency he quoted that ‘a caisson I was contracted to lay in connection with the Skurö ferry sank, three barges laden with building material were lost as a result of damage at sea and a major repair I was contracted to carry out on the Petersen house [. . .] against all expectation and quite unforeseen by me was found to be so bad that one of the detached wings of the house had to be almost completely rebuilt’.30 The court records mention, among other things, a bankruptcy declaration dated Ridön, 3 November 1833.31 In the register of taxpayers of that same year ‘Mechanicus Im. Nobel’ was described as ‘poor’ and was taxed as an ‘artist’.32 (Mechanicus was a title applied to inventors, engineers, designers and others; in the army and the navy it was a post with the rank of lieutenant.) The bankruptcy proceedings continued until July 1834, but he was unable to pay back his debts for almost another twenty years.

Gummi elasticum As soon as the bankruptcy case was settled Immanuel got down to his next project. Since the middle of 1833 he had been experimenting with rubber, or gummi elasticum. Rubber had been discovered in the sixteenth century by the Spanish in Central America and northern Latin America, where the indigenous peoples played a game with bouncing balls. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, French researchers travelling in Ecuador discovered a tree which, when the bark was cut, oozed a white liquid which hardened on contact with the air. The natives used this material to fashion lengths of cloth reminiscent of oilcloth, water-tight foot coverings and pear-shaped bottles that could be used as syringes if a reed was inserted into them. During the eighteenth century, French and British scientists continued to study rubber and its characteristics and they succeeded in making it applicable to various ends, such as impregnating cloth, fashioning tubes and more. In 1820, the world’s

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first rubber factory was founded in England and soon raincoats (called ‘macintoshes’ after their inventor Charles Macintosh) as well as galoshes and erasers were available for sale. In England, a Swedish newspaper reported in 1834, rubber had entered everyday use for making clothes, bandages, cables, ropes, diving suits ‘and even harpoon lines for whaling’.33 The first Swedish rubber factory was started by two brothers in Stockholm, Pierre and Leopold Lamm, who in 1830 obtained an eight-year monopoly on the manufacture of rainwear and other civil and military protective clothing. The waterproof textiles were coated on the inside with a rubber solution. A large selection was demonstrated at the Craft Exhibition in Stockholm in 1834, including inflatable products, for example, a life belt. The exhibition was not a success as the products suffered from a serious failing: they smelt repulsive.34 However, rubber manufacture was generally seen as a promising line of business. Although Immanuel had never studied chemistry other than by himself, he followed eagerly what was happening on the technical front and was to the highest degree a child of his time. A successful rubber manufacture would make it possible for him to pay off his debts, and in November 1834, after eighteen months of experimenting, he applied for a ten-year patent for ‘an invention for making elastic materials and bands’: Since after many attempts the undersigned has been fortunate enough to imbue woven materials together with cords, tapes and the like with the elasticity inherent in Rubber, whereby such Materials become serviceable, no less for the manufacture of Braces than, in particular of, from a Surgical point of view, indispensable elastic Bandages, trusses and more of the same, in which such elasticity has long been very desirable, may I respectfully and Humbly beg your Worshipful Royal College for a Ten-year exclusive monopoly of the manufacture of Elastic Materials.35 Attached to the petition was a drawing of the machines that made the rubber products and a description of how they should be operated. In a later addition to his application, in March 1835, Immanuel sought patents for several inventions, among them ‘a fully air-tight Material of stretched Rubber membrane which can be utilized to preserve any liquid whatsoever in . . . as well as for bedclothes filled with air, and for lifebelts also filled with the same substance, for those who wish to be safe at sea’. The air- and water-tight material was made by a layer of rubber, a ‘rubber membrane’, being placed between two layers of material. One obstacle to a patent for elastic materials was the eight-year patent of the Lamm brothers, but in his patent application, Immanuel submitted that their products gave off ‘a most disagreeable stench’ and in a report from the head of the Technological Institute, Professor Gustaf Magnus Schwartz, it was stated that Nobel’s ‘process’ had nothing in common with Lamm’s, which was declared to be

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THE NOBEL FAMILY

‘quite inferior’ in comparison to Immanuel’s.36 Immanuel had not managed to get rid of the smell, but he had at least succeeded in reducing it by means of a new method of preparation. Another obstacle was his bankruptcy, but as a result of the bankruptcy administrator testifying on 7 of April that Immanuel in the bankruptcy judgement ‘was seen neither as fraudulent nor as a negligent debtor’ that obstacle was also overcome and he was granted his licence. The handling of the patent application contains several odd features. In The National Board of Trade’s humble report on the position of the workshops and manufactories 1835 we can read that Robert Hjalmar Nobel has obtained a patent for ten years ‘for an invention for producing elastic materials and bands and for preparing air-tight materials and vessels with stretched rubber’.37 Robert Hjalmar, then – not his father Immanuel, who was the one who made the discovery. The patent application, which is preserved in the National Archives, is indeed signed by Robert Hjallmar Nobell [sic], who at this time was six years old. This poses two questions. The first – why? – is relatively easy to answer. By making Robert the holder of the patent, Immanuel wanted to protect himself from creditors and guarantee his family financial security if the rubber production was a success. The other question – how did it come about? – is harder to explain. The National Board of Trade and Immanuel’s former boss at the Royal Institute of Technology, Professor Schwartz, obviously knew that the invention was Immanuel’s, yet it is mentioned in their writings as made by Robert Hjalmar Nobel, a six-yearold boy! The only reasonable explanation is that they wanted to help Immanuel, whose genius they obviously valued, in a difficult financial situation. It took only a few days after the patent decision before the National Board of Trade informed Immanuel that patents could not be issued to an under-age person. Immanuel explained the fact that the application had been submitted in his son’s name by ‘foolishness, as the Royal Patent regulations did not inform me of the fact’. He therefore humbly begged that ‘the same patent might be transferred to myself’.38 This was of course simply disingenuous. Specific instructions were hardly required to understand that a six-year-old may not seek a patent and his signature may not be forged. The letter to the National Board of Trade was signed I.H. Nobel and the letters patent, published in the Post och Inrikes Tidningar on 2 May, were made out in the name of Immanuel Hjalmar Nobel.39 There was no such person – the name is a combination of Immanuel’s name and his son Robert’s middle name. (Immanuel himself had no middle name.) How did this mangled name come about? The answer can be found in the archives of the National Board of Trade. In the rough draft of the letters patent Robert Hjalmar is given as the owner of the patent, but ‘Robert’ has been scored out and substituted for ‘Immanuel’: The Royal Board of Trade has therefore . . . agreed to grant Robert Immanuel Hjalmar Nobell a Patent, for a period of 10 years, for the manufacture, as

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described by him, of elastic bands and tissues as well as air-tight materials and vessels . . .40 The change was made because the patent had reverted to Immanuel and no longer belonged unlawfully to Robert, a minor. The fact that ‘Hjalmar’ was not also scored out may have been because of faulty communication or carelessness on the part of the scribe, but this is not plausible. Why, in that case, sign the letter to the National Board of Trade with the initials I.H? Whatever the reason was, the combination Immanuel Hjalmar never occurs again. Just as Immanuel Hjalmar Nobel did not exist in reality, Immanuel was also not the official owner of the rubber factory. According to the census details of 1836, Conducteur Nobel and his family lived in an apartment that belonged to Per Elde but was let to senior judge-advocate Otto Westfeldt. Elde called himself a ‘factory promoter’ and in that same year he married Immanuel’s sister Betty (who had been widowed five years earlier). Like Immanuel, Elde (1802–74) was a man of many parts: he owned a mechanical workshop and a printing office, operated passenger traffic with paddle-steamers on Stockholm’s waterways and manufactured soda water. To cover his financial commitments Immanuel wanted to sell his patent to Elde, but the deal didn’t come off because a silk weaver, Emanuel Unge, whom Immanuel had employed to weave his materials, had made a complaint about his patent. The affair dragged out for some time but in the end the complaint was not upheld.41 In 1837, Elde sought and obtained the National Board of Trade’s permission to prepare ‘chemical products together with water-tight and elastic materials’ and it was here, among other sites, that Immanuel’s rubber manufacture took place.42 The person who was officially in charge of the work was neither Elde nor Immanuel but senior judge-advocate Otto Westfeldt, who in turn leased the premises to Immanuel, who was stated to have a lace-maker, a factory worker, a woman to spool yarn, two seamstresses and a ‘girl’ working for him. This artful arrangement was no doubt intended to keep his creditors at bay. It is unclear what persuaded Immanuel to drop the masquerade, but it is clear from the accompanying advertisement that he advertised the products under his own name. In that same year, Immanuel applied for permission to use premises belonging to the National Board of Trade in Frescati, in the northern outskirts of Stockholm, for the manufacture of his elastic materials. His argument was that the forested provinces in Norrland would benefit from the manufacture of the turpentine that was used in the preparation of the rubber. Included with his application was a list of ninety-four products together with four boxes containing samples of elastic materials. In a lengthy report the chemist Jacob Berzelius certified that he found Nobel’s products ‘as good as the products of the same type from abroad’ that he had had the opportunity of acquainting himself with: ‘His Methods of using the Rubber are to some extent peculiar to himself and witness both to his talent for invention

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and his ingenuity.’43 Despite Berzelius’s testimonial Immanuel’s application ended up on the back burner and when the premises were finally auctioned off, as we shall see, the issue was no longer of concern to him. The making of rubber products was yet another expression of Immanuel’s industriousness and foresightedness. The workshop offered over one hundred articles for the most varied applications. The list of products is long and cannot be given here in its entirety, but a few articles must be mentioned as testament to the breadth of the range: For general use – raincoats, elastic cushions for carriages and for sufferers from haemorrhoids, suspenders, neck-braces ‘so that passengers may recline while travelling’, ‘rubber membranes to make jars and other containers airtight’, ‘water-tight white cotton material, to be used under babies’, ‘a device for nursing mothers, when the mothers’ breasts are painful’, syringe tubes, hunting boots, lifebelts, water-resistant shoe polish. For surgical and medical requirements – beds that fill with water for the avoidance of bedsores, enema syringes with elastic tubes, navel- and inguinal-hernia trusses, siphons for the removal of urine from the bladder after operations, ‘urine reservoirs’ for women with incontinence problems, stomach pumps, mechanical chairs fitted with wheels so that the patients can move around,‘bandages to prevent knock-kneed or bandy-legged development’, and more besides.44 Even if not all the items were Immanuel’s own idea, we can assume that many of them were. The rubber products duly attracted interest both from the general public and from more specialized customers, like the military. Crown Prince Oscar, admiral of the fleet and chairman of the Naval Defence Committee, asked Immanuel to try to produce rubberized water-tight material for soldiers’ greatcoats. Immanuel delivered a sample, but the order never materialized. Nor did he win support for a model of an antipersonnel mine, the construction of which depended on the elastic properties of the rubberized material. Instead, Immanuel presented a proposal for another product: a knapsack of rubber to keep the soldier’s pack dry. The idea was that the knapsack could be used not only as a backpack but also as a swimming float and a buoyant element in rafts and pontoon bridges. It was blown up by mouth and when the ‘the inner half ’ was pulled out the knapsack doubled in size. Several knapsacks could be joined together to form ‘a raft steered by oars, which will have great carrying capacity’. If the raft was covered with boards, then ‘greater or lesser weights could be carried over to the opposite bank’ and if the covering was sufficiently large, whole bridges could be built ‘for the biggest armies imaginable’. However, Swedish defence circles were not interested in the knapsacks. ‘Sweden had got its first rubber industry,’ notes a historian of technology – ‘the only problem was that it had no customers’.45 When Immanuel failed to obtain a sympathetic hearing from the Swedish government for his watertight knapsacks he tried the idea out on the American minister in Stockholm, Christopher Hughes. Hughes was interested and asked if

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he could show the drawings to some acquaintances. One of them was the counsellor at the Russian legation in Stockholm, Alexander Bodisko (de Bodisco), who in turn asked if he could show them to the minister, Peter van Suchtelen. When Immanuel did not get the drawings back, he called at the Russian legation, where to his dismay he found someone busy copying them. He complained to Hughes and when the latter took up this ‘scandalous behaviour’ with the Russian minister ‘in the most severe manner’, he was offered ‘the fullest apologies’ and a promise that all demands – unclear which – that Immanuel should make would be fulfilled.

Lars Gabriel von Haartman Bankruptcy, in combination with the lukewarm interest in his inventions, ruined Immanuel. When one of his creditors applied to the Office of the Governor of Stockholm to get his money back, it was decided that if Immanuel did not pay his debts within fourteen days he would ‘be incarcerated in the Debtors’ Prison until he has paid his dues’.46 The verdict of the Office of the Governor of Stockholm was dated 30 November 1837. Faced with the threat of imprisonment, Immanuel, who was financially irresponsible but in no way a criminal, took a decision with dramatic consequences. On the same day that the threat of sequestration was due to take effect, 15 December, he collected a passport from the Office made out to ‘mechanicus I. Nobell’ and left for Åbo (Turku) in Finland. The week before – on 7 December – he had hastily disposed of the rubber business to Anton Ludvig Fahnehjelm (1807– 75), engineer lieutenant in the engineering division of the navy and, like Immanuel, something of a genius at invention. A shipwreck in 1836 had made him start to think about ways to salvage ships. It was these thoughts that made him want to take over Immanuel’s rubber workshop, in which he later made Sweden’s first diving-suit. (Fahnehjelm also had other interests in common with Immanuel: already as a twenty-six-year-old he had successfully demonstrated a self-detonating apparatus for mines to Crown Prince Oscar.)47 The aim of his overseas trip, Immanuel explained later, was to try ‘to realize some of my plans and gain some encouragement for my strenuous endeavours, which I saw clearly would never be my lot in my own homeland’.48 When Immanuel decided to try his luck in the east, his wife and children stayed behind in Stockholm. He took the decision with emotions he declared he could not describe, ‘in particular at the parting from my wife, whom I loved and esteemed so highly, my three small sons and my most dear and esteemed mother-in-law, whom I was obliged to abandon to an uncertain fate’. In his Swedish passport the goal of his journey was given as Finland, and his Russian visa stated that the journey was ‘aller et revenir’, i.e. ‘there and back’.49 Nevertheless, it was not Finland but Russia and St Petersburg that was his final

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destination. Since Russia under Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century had opened towards the West, many enterprising foreigners had made their way to the country. For Swedes, the way to Russia – for geographical as well as linguistic reasons – lay over Finland, which since 1809 had been a Russian Grand Duchy. When Finland became Russian many members of the country’s ruling class promptly entered Russian service. Among their number was Gabriel Erik Haartman, who had already been ennobled in 1810 for his loyalty to his country’s new masters. His son Lars Gabriel (1789–1859) was appointed secretary to the committee for Finnish affairs in St Petersburg and throughout his life occupied posts of major importance in the administration. From 1831 to 1842, he was governor in Åbo and Björneborg province, which made him one of the most influential people in the Grand Duchy. He was concerned mostly with economic issues and in the spring of 1837, he was appointed official envoy to the Swedish court tasked with negotiating a trade, maritime and friendship treaty between Sweden and Russia.50

FIGURE 1.3 Lars Gabriel von Haartman, “His Frightfulness”, socalled because of his harsh manner. Portrait by Timoleon von Neff.

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In this context von Haartman spent a couple of the summer months of 1837 in Stockholm in company with his wife Eva Wilhelmina (‘Minette’) Mannerheim, her brother August and their mother. Both wife and brother-in-law had a close connection with the Russian court: she was a maid of honour to the empress and August was secretary at His Imperial Highness’s chancellery for Finland in St Petersburg. It was during von Haartman’s stay in Stockholm that Immanuel’s emigration plans were conceived. They were introduced to each other during a dinner hosted by the American chief of legation. In a memo with the heading ‘The reason for my voyage to Russia’ Immanuel states that von Haartman enquired of him if he ‘might not be willing to travel over to St Petersburg and propose some of my inventions to the Russian Government’. Van Suchtelen had died in 1836 and was succeeded as Russian minister in Stockholm by Lev Pototski, with whom, according to Immanuel, von Haartman had a good relationship. Von Haartman promised to do everything possible, through Pototski’s and his own recommendations, to prepare the way for Immanuel in Russia. He kept his word and provided Immanuel with letters of introduction to, among others, the Minister for War Alexander Chernyshov and the Minister for the Navy Alexander Menshikov; letters which, according to Immanuel, ‘exceeded my expectations’. As Immanuel saw it, it was his idea for water-tight and inflatable knapsacks that lay behind the effusive letters of introduction. This sounds plausible bearing in mind their potential military significance; perhaps on the Russian side they also wanted to compensate him for the unlawful copying of his drawings. Was von Haartman’s offer a suggestion or a downright invitation from the Russian government? One source states that Immanuel came to St Petersburg at the invitation of von Haartman.51 A Russian researcher has even hinted that his move to Russia may have been arranged jointly by the Swedish and Russian governments.52 There is no proof of this. If such an agreement existed it must in any case be seen in the light of the extremely good relations between the countries throughout the reign of Carl XIV Johan, and not least between the king and Emperor Nicholas I personally. One expression of this is the visit that the Emperor paid to Stockholm in the summer of 1838, private and incognito, to demonstrate his friendship to the king. In connection with this several Russians were awarded the Royal Order of the Seraphim, among them Alexander Menshikov, who was not only Minister for the Navy but also Governor-General of Finland, and who had led an extraordinary diplomatic mission to Stockholm in 1834. Whether von Haartman’s inquiry to Immanuel should be seen as a ‘suggestion’ or an ‘invitation’ is of little importance. One thing is clear: during the conversation with von Haartman it was made clear to Immanuel that he would be met with open arms at the highest political and military level if he chose to put his inventive genius at the disposal of the Russian government.

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2 IMMANUEL NOBEL & SONS

On account of the ice, the voyage to Finland just before Christmas 1837 was not made in one of the steamboats that had plied the route Stockholm-Åbo for some years, but in the post-boat from Grisslehamn, north of Stockholm. The journey to Åland went well but from there, the voyage was dramatic. On several occasions they were forced to pull the boat over the ice, which sometimes cracked. Immanuel considered himself lucky to have completed the voyage in one piece. ‘Happily arrived on Finland’s solid ground I uttered a prayer of gratitude to the One who wonderfully steers our fates and who had saved me for the sake of my dear ones.’1 Immanuel arrived in Åbo on 20 December.2 The day after his arrival he called on von Haartman, who received him warmly. With his help Immanuel immediately obtained ‘suitable lodgings’ – two rooms in the house of the wealthy provisionsdealer Johan Scharlin. He was also put in contact with influential people in Åbo, who also greeted him ‘in the most friendly manner’. Among their number was the businessman Abraham Kingelin and the town pharmacist Erik Julin, both of them well-to-do men. Erik Julin had not become rich in his capacity of pharmacist but as a businessman, especially in the fields of shipbuilding and shipping; among other things he was part owner of a steamboat company which operated the route ÅboSt Petersburg. Abraham Kingelin was also a shipowner, owner of the Åbo shipyard and a leading light in the Finnish business world. It is not far-fetched to conclude that Immanuel and these two gentlemen had a great deal of common ground to discuss around shipyards, shipping lines and sea travel. Erik Julin’s brother, John, was also a successful businessman, owner of the Fiskars ironworks and a close friend of von Haartman. On one occasion when Immanuel visited the ironworks along with Erik Julin, perhaps to present some idea, he assumed that the rich industrialist would not think that ‘a Swede with no fortune’ was someone to ‘enter into some more intimate connection with’. However, it turned out that John Julin admired Immanuel both as a person and for ‘the little gift’ that he possessed. Immanuel’s insecurity was explicable against the background

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of his setbacks in previous years but also in view of his inferiority complex. For a commoner from Gävle with a few terms in trivialskola and three years at sea behind him it must surely have been sorely trying to mix with the cream of Finnish society. Not much is known about Immanuel’s stay in Åbo. In the ‘Register of Tickets issued to Foreigners for further travel or residence in the Empire’ it is stated that he was allowed to stay for a year in the city and was entitled to travel to St Petersburg.3 Why he stayed in Åbo for a whole year, although his ultimate destination was St Petersburg, is unclear. It emerges from a lengthy article in Åbo Tidningar in April 1838, ‘On the manufacture of rubber,’ that although the rubber factory was no longer his, he continued to offer its products for sale, and they could be ordered from Immanuel in Åbo or bought direct from the factory in Stockholm. According to Immanuel himself, during that year he busied himself with ‘various speculations’, for example regarding a stone-cutting machine that could cut stone slabs with even sides direct from the rock. However, according to

FIGURE 2.1 The Scharlin house in Åbo, depicted in 1842 by Henrik Cajander from Finland’s first known photograph (daguerreotype). Cathedral tower in the background.

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Immanuel, nothing came of this because of a lack of suitable workers and factories in the area. From von Haartman he received an order for a treadmill for the prison in Åbo, but the project foundered on the grounds of ‘the manager’s own interests’. A concrete reminder of Immanuel’s time in Åbo is the grand stone house he designed for his landlord Scharlin, on the other side of the street from the house Scharlin lived in, and where he had lodgings. In 1827, Åbo had been devastated by a fire which left only a third of the city’s houses standing and the need for rebuilding was great. The Scharlin house is immortalized, with the cathedral tower in the background, in a daguerreotype from 1842, Finland’s oldest photograph. Someone else whose acquaintance Immanuel made in Åbo was Baron Johan Reinhold Munck, who had had a meteoric career in the Russian military; when only nineteen years old he had taken part in the Russian army’s conquest of Paris. The career turning-point in his life came in connection with the so-called Decembrist revolt in St Petersburg in 1825, when a number of reform-minded officers rebelled against Nicholas I the day before his accession to the throne. Munck and his regiment did not take part in the rebellion and Munck was ordered by the Emperor to take command of the firing-squad which executed five officers sentenced to death – something which is said to have tormented him for the rest of his life. Munck’s close ties of friendship with the Emperor led in any event to his quick promotion. When Immanuel met him, he was a colonel and battalion commander of the Pavlovsk regiment and in 1839 he was appointed major-general and put in command of the Preobrazhensky Lifeguard regiment.4 The person who introduced Immanuel to Munck was Baron Johan Claes Fleming, marshal of the court to Crown Prince Oscar, who was visiting Åbo and whom Immanuel knew from Stockholm. According to Immanuel, Munck was asked by Fleming ‘to wrap me in friendship on my arrival in St Petersburg’, which is what happened.

The city on the Neva If Immanuel could look forward with a degree of confidence to his professional future, the last months in Åbo were hard for him on the personal level. On 31 August 1838, his beloved half-brother Bernhard died and less than five weeks later his own youngest child, his daughter Henrietta, died only two years old. Immanuel was entitled to stay in Åbo for a year, and in December he received permission to travel to St Petersburg, where he arrived on 20 December 1838. As the sea had frozen over, he travelled by the land route. Colonel Munck sent a Swedish-speaking officer to the customs post to help Immanuel. Munck also helped him find lodgings with a Swedish woman in St Petersburg. The Swedishspeaking officer then put himself at Immanuel’s disposal. He was gravely

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handicapped socially as he knew neither Russian nor either of the other two major languages spoken in the Russian capital – French was the language of high society and German was used in administration, commerce and the trades. Munck promptly introduced Immanuel into the leading Swedish-speaking circles in St Petersburg – the upper reaches of Finnish society, the Finland Swedes, had Swedish as their mother tongue. Christmas Eve was spent at the home of Baron Gustaf (Gösta) von Kothen, son of Gustaf von Kothen senior, who was president of the court of appeal division in Viborg judicial district, a member of the Imperial Senate for Finland’s department of finance and Active State Councillor. Gösta himself was staff captain of the Imperial Moscow regiment of Life Guards in St Petersburg and younger brother to Casimir von Kothen, who was also a staff captain. Casimir held high positions in Finland and Russia, among others as adjutant to Minister of the Navy Menshikov, and he was married to Lars Gabriel von Haartman’s half-sister Anna Charlotta, who like von Haartman’s own wife was maid of honour to the Empress. Casimir and the third and youngest brother Mauritz, lieutenant in the Imperial Moscow regiment of Life Guards, were among the guests, as was Baron Johan Axel Cedercreutz, born in Sweden but in Russian service since his early years and later governor in Åbo and Björneborg province.

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FIGURE 2.2 The magnificent city that met Immanuel on his arrival in St Petersburg: the boulevard Nevsky Prospekt by the German Church. The street to the right is Little Stableyard Street, where the Swedish church was situated, and many Swedes and other Scandinavians lived. Watercolour from 1828. Unknown artist.

Another guest, Major-General Anders Edvard Ramsay, was commander of the third Finnish Sharpshooters’ battalion of the Life Guards in St Petersburg. He had distinguished himself in the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830 and also during the Decembrist revolt in 1825, when he was personally entrusted with the safeguarding of the heir to the throne, the future Alexander II.5 Also present at the Christmas table was August Mannerheim, who the previous year had visited Stockholm with von Haartman and with whom it can be assumed Immanuel would have been acquainted. According to Immanuel, Christmas Eve was spent ‘in the most agreeable way’, although he said he found it difficult not to think about his family in Stockholm. In view of the high positions of the hosts and their guests in the state service and the military, one might be tempted to believe that most of the company was elderly, but this was not the case – everyone was of Immanuel’s age or younger. Gösta von Kothen was thirty and his wife twenty, and they had a son only five months old. The company that Immanuel was introduced into constituted, through their social position, their traditions and their family connections a close-knit and extremely influential Swedish-speaking elite which was firmly loyal to the Russian Emperor and which would play an important role in the Swedish newcomer’s career in the Russian capital.

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Explosive experiments Even if Immanuel had seen a bit of the world outside Sweden, nothing that he had seen during his years in the Mediterranean could compare with the sight that Russia’s capital offered. Founded in 1703 and the capital since 1712, St Petersburg had, in barely 100 years, developed from nothing into a world metropolis with half a million inhabitants and had become one of the biggest cities in Europe. Moreover, the city was unique in its architectonic design. Its central streets and squares were planned from the beginning as ensembles, with Nevsky Prospekt as the hub round which the city moved and grew. When Immanuel arrived in Russia the country was governed with an iron hand by Nicholas I, whose narrow-minded thinking left its mark on architecture as much as social climate. His ideal was the barracks, both as building and as mentality. Russia was an absolute monarchy, an autocracy, where subjects were kept in check with the help of a repressive police force and a paralysing bureaucracy. The country was also centrally governed economically, there was no developed capitalism even if trading companies had been permitted for some time. If anyone wanted something done they needed to have good connections at the highest political level. That applied to everyone, but most of all to foreigners. Like his stay in Åbo Immanuel’s early days in the Russian capital are sparsely documented, largely through his own recollections. In the summer of 1839, he had the opportunity to demonstrate the technique of his air- and water-tight rucksacks, which by this point he had further developed to resemble trunks. He received 3,000 silver roubles to prepare and carry out the experiment, which took place on a canal by the Narva customs post in the presence of several high-ranking officers. (One silver rouble, according to the calculations of the Bank of Finland, corresponded to around £20 in today’s values.) The crossing over the floating bridge with a mounted battery and a cannon went perfectly, but in Immanuel’s words, the idea nevertheless went ‘up in smoke’. The reason was that elastic rubber was dependent on temperature: the products became soft and sticky when warm and stiff when cold, and they could split. Only with the technique of vulcanization, discovered that same year by Charles Goodyear but not in industrial use until much later, could the design be put into practice. As if the deaths of his brother and his daughter in the autumn of 1838 were not enough, Immanuel got yet more bad news during his early days in St Petersburg. On 29 January 1839 his father died at the age of eighty-one. Immanuel inherited a share of the house in Gävle where he had grown up but sold it to his brother-inlaw, Andriette’s brother, the customs collector Ludvig Ahlsell. His share was valued at 325 kronor, which corresponds to around 25,000 kronor today, and scarcely signified any meaningful amelioration of his financial worries.6 In addition, the distribution of the estate developed into a court case as his half-brother Bernhard had issued large promissory notes before he died, money that was now being

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demanded from Immanuel and his brother-in-law. How the matter was resolved is unclear.7 In the autumn of 1839, Immanuel, together with J.E. Ekström, former managing director of the Älvdalen porphyry works in Sweden, founded a ‘mechanical establishment’. Ekström had delivered the porphyry vase that Carl XIV Johan had presented to Nicholas I in 1838 and that was placed in the Summer Garden in St Petersburg. Ekström received a gratuity of 2,000 roubles for this from the Emperor, which he invested in their mutual business project. Further capital came from Carl Lenngrén, director of Carl Tegelsten’s silver- and bronze-workshop in St Petersburg, and from Tegelsten himself. Immanuel was in debt to Ekström till his dying day. Otherwise there are no details of the fate of the mechanical workshop.8 Immanuel was also entrusted with a series of different assignments. Munck introduced him to Major-General Hermann (Russian: Ivan) Röhrberg, deputy head of the Department for Military Colonies (an allotment system designed to provide soldiers for the army), who needed help to get rid of the damp in the barracks of the Moscow Life Guards. Immanuel built stoves which both removed the damp and warmed the air, moreover with only a third of the consumption of wood compared with the old stoves. The successful result led to several stateowned properties being provided with these stoves. However, Immanuel received no payment for his work. When he applied to the Minister for Communications and Public Buildings, Pyotr (Peter) Kleinmikhel, he was, according to his own account, received like ‘a beggar seeking alms’ and was denied payment.9 Immanuel’s exuberant and undisciplined genius gave rise to a large number of inventions, but there is one invention above all that his fame rests on: underwater mines. For several years the Russian government had encouraged and financed experiments with new weapons for the defence of the country’s harbours. In November 1839, the Committee for Underwater Experimentation (‘the Mine Committee’) was set up under the leadership of high-ranking Russian officers and one civilian, the German physics professor Moritz Hermann (Russian: Boris) Jacobi, who on the invitation of the government arrived in St Petersburg in 1837. The Committee’s remit was, among other things, to judge the usefulness of the underwater mines that had been prepared by the military engineer General Karl Schilder, Nicholas I’s adjutant general. During the course of 1840 several experiments were carried out with Schilder’s mines – gunpowder bombs that floated on the surface of the water and that were detonated by electric current with the aid of an underwater cable operated from the land. Jacobi was responsible for the technical solution. The problem was that there were no good methods to isolate the cable, and to pull it hundreds of metres under the water without it snapping or short-circuiting was well-nigh impossible; unwanted detonations were therefore hard to avoid. Werner von Siemens’ discovery of gutta-percha as insulating material, which solved the problem, was several years in the future.

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Immanuel came into the picture when, in the course of a dinner with Menshikov, the Minister for the Navy, he happened to hear Schilder, Jacobi and some highranking officers discussing an experiment with underwater mines that was to take place the following day. Also at the dinner was Eberhard (Ivan) von Schantz, another outstanding Finno-Swede in Russian service – a shipbuilder, high-ranking officer in the navy and future admiral.10 Immanuel maintained that it was pretty well impossible to determine from a distance the position of the vessel as well as the right time for detonating the mine. Asked by Schilder if they knew a better method in Sweden, he replied in the negative, but said he was convinced that there was a solution that was better and more reliable than the one suggested. If the government compensated him for his expenses in connection with the preparations for and conducting of the experiment, he could contemplate giving a demonstration. To this, Schilder replied ‘that if the thing succeeded I could demand whatever I wished and would certainly receive all that I desired’.11 Immanuel’s unsolicited intervention in the discussion and his, in several respects, risky suggestion shows that mine detonation was not something he was unfamiliar with. As we have seen, he had already experimented with antipersonnel mines in Stockholm (and presumably also in Åbo). Immanuel’s underwater mine consisted of a container filled with gunpowder hanging from a line anchored to the seabed. In contrast to Schilder’s and Jacobi’s mine, which was triggered by means of a galvanic cable, Immanuel’s was detonated on contact with the enemy ship. The explosion occurred when the vessel came into contact with one of the three detonators situated under the lid of the mine.12 In September 1840, Immanuel demonstrated his method to Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich (1798–1849), the youngest brother of Emperor Nicholas I. The Grand Duke was inspector-general of the engineering corps and had a decisive influence on the technical development of the military sector. He was interested in Immanuel’s idea and gave the Mine Committee the task of investigating to what extent it was practicable. To ascertain this an experiment was carried out at the Little Neva on 12 October 1840. The experiment took the following form. The mine was lowered into the water with the help of a pulley with ballast which in turn was controlled by a rope. In this way it was possible to determine the position of the mine and its depth from land. The difficulty – ‘the most difficult venture of all that I have undertaken’, Immanuel recalled – was to get four Russian sailors, ‘by whom I was not understood and whose language I did not understand’, to sink the mine ‘without any security measures’. Although he asked for Swedish-speaking Finns as assistants the mines were laid by Russians. He realized, however, that any hesitation would lead to ‘a disagreeable outcome to my project’ and therefore exposed himself to this ‘truly life-threatening danger’, which might have cost him and his men their lives. The floating material that was to be blown up was a raft steered by a hawser. When the raft came into contact with the mine it exploded and fragmented.

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General Schilder was so happy that he took Immanuel in his arms, kissed him and danced around. The reason for the startling outburst of emotion was that Schilder was the one responsible for the mine project, which until now had led nowhere and had only cost money. Immanuel’s experiment won the Mine Committee’s universal applause, as emerges from a report written the day after the experiment and delivered the same day to Mikhail Pavlovich. It was written by Lieutenant-General Pyotr Kozen, a hero of the Napoleonic wars, and it confirmed that the attempt was ‘thoroughly satisfactory and completely in agreement with the intended goal’. The method, unknown in Russia, of detonating mines ‘simply through contact with a floating body’ is, it read, ‘a discovery of major importance, a conclusion which the Committee has the pleasure of communicating to Your Imperial Highness’.13 From one passage in the report, it emerged that Immanuel had planned to return to Sweden if the government had not snapped up his proposal. The Committee therefore suggested that he should be remunerated with twenty-five silver roubles per day for the further development of the mine. Immanuel had obviously been dissatisfied with the pace of his progress in Russia, but in view of the successful experiment he abandoned thoughts of leaving St Petersburg. Instead, negotiations got under way about the preconditions for his collaboration with the Mine Committee. Immanuel declared he was willing to sell his invention to the Russian state for a one-off payment of 25,000 silver roubles, the equivalent of around 100 average Russian annual salaries or about £4 million in today’s values, and he was granted that sum. In addition, he was paid twenty-five roubles a day (corresponding to a month’s salary) during the time required to train the Russian workers. However, in the autumn Immanuel fell ill and the negotiations were put on ice. Since, as Immanuel put it, ‘intrigues as a result of the method of government in Russia can never be discounted’, the Committee meanwhile commissioned naval lieutenant Carl Otto Ramstedt to develop Nobel’s mine further. Ramstedt carried out the same experiment that he had seen Nobel do, but according to Immanuel, in a wash basin,‘never thinking that there was a huge difference between developing a mine suited to its purpose and throwing some potassium into water’. Immanuel’s condescending remark about Ramstedt derived from the fact that he felt that he had been overlooked but it should also be seen in the light of his professional jealousy, in this case strengthened by the fact that his rival was only twenty-seven years old. Ramstedt, who had been born in Helsinki, was obviously a gifted inventor – for instance, in 1842 he was granted a ten-year licence by the Russian government for a method ‘for searching underwater and collecting significant amounts of metal’ with the help of magnets. When in the summer of 1846 Crown Prince Oscar visited St Petersburg to attend the wedding of Grand Duchess Olga and Prince Karl of Württemberg, Ramstedt was his official attendant and was rewarded with a diamond ring, and when in the autumn of the same year

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he visited the Motala engineering works in Sweden on a commission from the Russian state, he was honoured with the Swedish Royal Order of the Sword.14 A few days after New Year 1841, the Mine Committee informed Mikhail Pavlovich of difficulties in the collaboration with Immanuel and recommended abandoning his discovery. The motivation was that the price was too high, that Immanuel’s deficient language capabilities required the appointment of an interpreter, which also cost money, as well as the fact that a similar mine could be prepared by their own efforts (i.e. Ramstedt’s). One month later the inspectorgeneral ordered the Mine Committee to pay a one-off sum of 1,000 roubles to Nobel and to discontinue collaboration with him. However, Immanuel did not give up; that was not in his nature. The turningpoint came in June 1842 when a new experiment was carried out, this time also under the supervision of the ‘in all respects honourable’ General Kozen, in Immanuel’s words. The experiment went well. In the report to Mikhail Pavlovich it was stated that the barge’s prow ‘had barely touched the mine before an explosion resulted and the barge, shattered into tiny fragments, sank to the bottom’. The Committee’s conclusion was that Nobel’s method for the detonation of underwater mines was ‘based on clear, ingeniously adapted and experimentally confirmed physical and mechanical laws’. They wished accordingly to draw ‘His Imperial Highness’s particular attention to this matter, as something that merits a gratuity from the government’.15 According to the report Nobel’s experiment could well be repeated in the presence of the Emperor himself. This did not happen, but when a new attempt was made on 2 September 1842 it was in the presence of his son, the Crown Prince Alexander Nikolayevich (the future Alexander II) and the Emperor’s brother Mikhail Pavlovich.16 Two weeks later the inspector-general informed ‘the Foreigner Nobel’ that he had been graciously allowed a remuneration of 25,000 silver roubles for his invention.17 At the same time Immanuel was once again attached to the Mine Committee with a payment of twenty-five roubles a day. The news soon reached Sweden, where the press reported that ‘the Russian Government have paid out to the Swede Herr E. [sic] Nobel in St Petersburg a reward of 80,000 [sic] Roubles for an invention, by means of small underwater bombs to close harbours and fairways for enemy vessels, these war machines consisting, according to the description we have received, of casks of gunpowder anchored underwater which, ignited by friction on contact with a ship, blow out the ship’s bottom . . .’18 In the next few years Immanuel continued, with financial help from the government, to refine his underwater mines, for instance by a method that assured free passage for friendly vessels and only attacked enemy ships. However, his interest in explosives was not confined to underwater mines. In the course of his work with these he also suggested to the Russian government other ‘means of destroying the enemy at a distance’, viz. field- and road-mines. In the autumn of

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1841, he asked for 40,000 roubles in payment for his invention, a sum that the inspector-general agreed to on condition that the experiment went well. Such an experiment took place several years later in the presence of Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, according to Immanuel, ‘with the most successful result’. Although Immanuel thought he deserved the money he renounced it and asked only for reimbursement of his expenses, according to his own account because he realized that one experiment was not enough to demonstrate the mine’s usefulness in time of war.19 After new experiments with field mines in 1846 and 1848, however, Immanuel received two payments of 10,000 silver roubles each.20

Colonel Ogaryov’s and Mr Nobel’s licensed mechanical wheel factory and foundry In 1842, as soon as Immanuel had got the 25,000 silver roubles in his hand, he sent for his family from Stockholm. On 29 October an Åbo newspaper announced that ‘Mrs Nobel with her 2 sons’ had two days earlier arrived in the city with the steamship Solide from Stockholm. The two sons were Ludvig and Alfred. The oldest brother, Robert, was not with them. At the age of twelve he had followed in his father’s footsteps and hired himself out as a cabin boy on the North Sea. Also in the party was the maid Sophia Wahlström, who would remain with the Nobel family for twenty-five years. They were accompanied by Andriette’s brother, Ludvig, who however only came as far as Åbo with them and then returned home. Andriette and the children seem to have stayed in Åbo for almost four months – presumably with the Scharlin family – before continuing on to St Petersburg at the end of February 1843.21 During their stay there they had the company of Immanuel, who went to St Petersburg to meet up with his wife and children after five years’ separation.22 Robert joined the family in St Petersburg four months later, in June.23 Alongside the work on the different mine projects, Immanuel’s restless brain had been busy with the question of how to manufacture waggon wheels by means of automation. This emerges from a letter of December 1841 to a Swedish mechanic called Svedberg where he asks if he ‘might be inclined, given satisfactory terms, to leave his Fatherland for a longer or shorter time’ for ‘the setting-up of Machines for Wheelmaking on the French model [and] for kindly assisting with requisite information concerning this topic’.24 Before Immanuel received the money for handing over his underwater mine there was no talk of setting in motion any manufacture of either waggon wheels or machines for their production, but when the money had been paid out and his family were in place in St Petersburg the plans for a machine shop took shape.

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Russia was at this time the biggest country in Europe, with a population of sixty million and enormous natural resources. Despite the efforts of several Russian governments, nevertheless, it was economically underdeveloped, mainly because of the rigid social structure: a majority of the population were serfs and tied to the land. However, the tsars as well as the land-owning class refused to accept necessary changes as these threatened to undermine their status and privileges. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russia concluded trade agreements with several countries and exported large amounts of grain. However, instead of being used for investment in the country’s economy the income from exports mostly landed in the pockets of the state and the landowners. There was a certain amount of heavy industry, but it was very small-scale compared to that in the West and most of what the country needed in the way of technology had therefore to be imported. After the French Revolution, all foreign influence was long regarded with great suspicion, which led to limitations on the legal standing of foreign entrepreneurs in Russia. A foreign merchant, for example, could not become a member of a merchants’ guild unless he became a Russian citizen and his legal status was expressed in terms like ‘foreigner’ and ‘foreign guest’. Setting up and running businesses was something that foreigners could only do with the Emperor’s permission, but this restriction only applied to West Europeans; merchants from Asia had more advantageous conditions, which shows that the restriction was politically motivated and designed to hinder the spreading of undesirable ideas. However, the motive was not only ideological. The intention was also that, in this way, indigenous entrepreneurship might be encouraged. But this did not happen. The restrictions were therefore gradually relaxed. In the year 1807, permission was given for the founding of trading houses and firms with joint and several liability in law. Limited companies, on the other hand, were allowed only in exceptional cases, with gracious permission. This only changed in 1836, when an ordinance regarding limited companies was adopted. The rules for founding of limited companies then became identical for Russian and foreign subjects.25 Immanuel’s idea of starting up a mechanical workshop was thus not a wild one. In 1830 there were only seven machine shops in the whole of Russia, at a time when the need was enormous. When Immanuel decided to set up his mechanical workshop the competition was therefore not overwhelming, but it existed. His biggest rival was, like Immanuel, of foreign extraction: the Scot Francis (Frants) Baird, whose father Charles had arrived in Russia in 1786 with another Scot, the inventor and mechanicus Carl Gascoigne. They had been invited by the Russian government to rebuild and modernize the cannon foundry in Petrozavodsk in Karelia. In 1792, Baird founded a mechanical foundry workshop – the first in Russia – which after his death in 1843 passed to his son. The machine shop was involved, among other things, in the

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building of several of St Petersburg’s largest bridges as well as with the erection of the Alexander Column (the monument to Alexander I) on Palace Square. Baird also built Russia’s first steamboat (1815) and by the time of Immanuel’s arrival in the Russian capital he had the monopoly of all steamboat production and traffic in Russia. Even in 1850 there were only twenty-five private machine shops in Russia. Most of them were in English or Scottish ownership – well-known names are Baird, Carr & MacPherson, Wilkins, Ellis & Butts, Isherwood. The number of employees was 1,475 and the total production had a value of 423,000 roubles. This was well surpassed by the imports of machine goods which amounted to a value of fully 2 million roubles.26 Perhaps the limited company ordinance of 1836 was one of the arguments that von Haartman used as an enticement when he came with his offer to Immanuel. In any event, when Immanuel arrived in Russia he encountered a more entrepreneurial climate. Nevertheless, it was difficult for a foreigner with no understanding of Russian society to found a business off their own bat. Immanuel therefore allied himself with the ten-years-younger army lieutenant Nikolai Ogaryov (1811–67). Ogaryov was the son of a captain in the Finnish regiment of Life Guards and had distinguished himself during the suppression of the Polish uprising in 1830, when he was only nineteen years old. For these contributions he was awarded the Order of St Vladimir 4th class with ribbon, and in 1838 he was appointed adjutant to Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich.27 Immanuel and Ogaryov had met at the beginning of 1841, when Immanuel demonstrated the improvements he had made to a rifle mechanism – a commission he had received from Major-General Ramsay – to Mikhail Pavlovich, who declared himself so satisfied with Immanuel’s solution that he immediately introduced him to his brother the Emperor.28 (Immanuel’s simplified locking mechanism was seen as superior to all other systems. The rifle was test fired on several occasions and was unanimously praised by the state Rifle Committee but was not purchased, presumably because Immanuel’s main rival had the backing of the Emperor.)29 Ogaryov was a nobleman, nephew of the minister Kleinmikhel, and married to a maid of honour. So, in every respect he was a suitable partner for Immanuel. Together they set up a machine shop and in February 1843 they turned to the Department for Manufactures and Internal Trade and requested a ten-year monopoly for ‘a newly-invented method and machine for mechanical wheel manufacture’. The system of monopolies for trade and industry had been introduced in the mid-eighteenth century and constituted a sort of preliminary patent protection for inventions. The system was a way of tempting foreigners to invest in Russia; less than a fifth of monopolies went to native inventors who moreover often lacked the means to implement their ideas. Initially, inventions in the area of light industry were granted monopolies, but by the mid-nineteenth century most letters patent

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were granted in the workshop- and machine-industry. Here too foreign citizens dominated, although to a lesser extent than previously. The letters patent ‘for machines for mechanical manufacture of wheels’ were issued in April 1844 and in November of the same year permission was received to commence production, which took place under the business name of ‘Colonel Ogaryov’s and Mr Nobel’s Mechanical Wheel Factory and Foundry’. The founding of the factory was made possible by a twenty-six-year mortgage loan which was granted ‘by gracious command on the recommendation of Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich’, who was said to ‘regard Ogaryov with the utmost goodwill’.30 Thanks to Ogaryov’s contacts, therefore, right from the start the factory enjoyed protection from both the Grand Duke and his brother the Emperor, which led to their being allowed to add the Russian coat of arms, the double-headed eagle, to the firm’s name (see Figure 2.4). To carry out their operations Nobel and Ogaryov acquired a foundry workshop which belonged to the merchant Karl Greyson, a Russified Englishman.31 The factory consisted of two single-storey detached wings and was equipped with a steam engine, four melting furnaces and a forge. Of the twenty-eight employees, six lived on the factory premises in ‘a comfortable apartment’.32 It was situated on the ‘Petersburg side’, by the quay of the Great Nevka (in 1887 re-christened the Petersburg Quay). The Great Nevka is a tributary of the Great Neva and ‘the Petersburg side’ was a suburban area consisting mainly of workshops, factory warehouses, dachas, exercise areas and a number of dwelling-houses, mostly of wood (because of the fire risk such houses were forbidden in central parts of the city). The technique of manufacturing waggon wheels in series went back to a machine for producing blocks (tackles) constructed for the Royal Navy by the English engineer Marc Brunel. The machine produced as many blocks per unit of time as it took 110 workers to make. It was this idea that Immanuel picked up for the serial production of waggon wheels. His ‘wheel-hub cutter’ became particularly renowned – a machine that turned wheel-hubs on a lathe almost completely without human intervention. Spokes and segments of wheel-rings were also made automatically, while the wheel was assembled manually with specially-made tools by a largely uneducated workforce. The process meant an enormous saving of time and money.33 That the machines could be operated by untrained personnel was an important point. Finding qualified workers in an industrially backward Russia was incredibly difficult. The greater part of the potential workforce were bound to the land, and moreover the majority of the population were illiterate and drunkenness was a scourge. However sophisticated the machines were, the machine factory could not be operated solely by uneducated workers. As the Svedberg case shows, Ogaryov and Nobel were therefore forced to employ skilled workers, officials, overseers and engineers from Sweden and Finland. In March 1848, Immanuel sent a representative to Sweden to recruit workers from the best ironworks for his rolling mill, the first

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FIGURE 2.3 and 2.4 Colonel Ogaryov’s and Mr Nobel’s licensed mechanical wheel factory and foundry lay on the St Petersburg side, marked by a dot.

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in Russia.34 (The need for qualified foreign workers was also felt in other machine shops, like Baird’s and Leuchtenberg’s; the latter manufactured Jacobi’s galvanic mines.)35 Just as in the case of the underwater mine, the Russian military were the main target group. In fact, the Russian government regarded Ogaryov’s and Nobel’s activities as so important that the Ministry of War appointed a Swedish-speaking liaison officer to the factory as interpreter and contact man. Carl August Standertskjöld, born in 1814, was one of the many Swedish-speaking Finns who had distinguished himself in the Finnish cadet corps in Fredrikshamn and risen rapidly in the Russian military. At this time he was a lieutenant but in time he would advance to general in the Russian army.36 The orders received by the machine shop were apparently irregular, but the work was nonetheless profitable and Immanuel’s reputation as an inventor and designer grew. By the end of the decade his position was such that in 1848 Emperor Nicholas sent word that he intended to pay a visit to the factory with three of his sons. Immanuel expected ‘good results from this’.37 However, the visit did not come off: the revolution in Paris in February 1848 gave the Emperor something else to think about. If there was one thing that Nicholas I was scared to death of it was riots and revolutions – the Decembrist revolt of 1825 had left an indelible mark on his, with advancing years, increasingly paranoid brain. One ‘good result’ was that two years later Immanuel was confirmed as a ‘Merchant of the first guild’, a position that conferred social status and gave him an entrée to the Russian business world. His own explanation was that he felt obliged to apply for membership because of his ‘extensive business affairs’.38 For a merchant of the first guild had significant privileges, like the right to carry on foreign trade, to own vessels for international shipping and to move around freely in the country. A confirmation of the fact that by the turn of the decade Immanuel had consolidated his finances was that in January 1850 he paid the debts that had forced him to flee Sweden in 1837. That the family by this time had stable finances emerges from a letter from their son Ludvig, who in the summer of 1848 visited his maternal uncle and aunt Ahlsell in Stockholm. During his stay he fell ill and was forced to spend the autumn in the Swedish capital. On his return to St Petersburg just before Christmas he told his uncle in a letter how his parents and brothers had missed him and that Alfred’s voice had broken and he had become so tall that Ludvig hardly recognized him. The wording bears witness to a harmonious family looking with confidence to the future, but also to the strong sense of duty of the seventeen-year-old letter-writer: Mama and Papa are the same as ever, just like before, just as wonderfully good to us. They have prepared a lovely surprise for me by doing up my room in the manner I told you about already at Uncle’s; it’s very nicely papered and painted; lovely new furniture and pretty curtains; oh! everything is so pretty and nice,

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but I just think I got it all too easily, for I ought to have had some of the work of doing it myself, in order to appreciate it properly, whereas now I can just see it as a very generous gesture by Papa.39 The active partnership between Ogaryov and Nobel lasted until 1848, when Ogaryov was granted the state-owned St Petersburg cast-ironworks, which transferred to his ownership in 1855.40 Three years later Immanuel bought out his partner and re-named the works Immanuel Nobel & Sons’ foundry and mechanical workshop, or, in its French name, Fonderies et Ateliers Mécaniques de Nobel & fils à St Pétersbourg. If his sons would only stay friends and ‘together continue what I have begun, then I believe with God’s help that they will never want for bread, for here in Russia there is still much to be done’, Immanuel wrote to Ludvig Ahlsell in 1848, adding that he hoped that he himself, ‘although old’, would in a few years be able to help Ahlsell, who had done so much for him, to pay off his debts if necessary.41

Nobel & Sons By this time Immanuel’s sons Robert, Ludvig and Alfred were involved in the business, and this despite the fact that on their arrival in St Petersburg they only had a few years’ schooling behind them. Robert had gone to school for three-anda-half years before, at the age of twelve, he went to sea, Ludvig three years and Alfred one year before they moved to Russia. All three went to Jakob’s School in Stockholm. Alfred acquired an A in comprehension as well as in diligence and morals, Ludvig a B, BC and AB respectively.42 As Robert chose to leave school and go to sea, there is a final school report in his case. He had passed in every subject, was said to have ‘exhibited Satisfactory Diligence’ and ‘conducted himself in a steady manner’.43 According to one source, before the boys started school they were taught at home by their mother along with some other children,44 but there cannot have been any question of an actual conferring of knowledge.45 Preserved letters in Andriette’s hand show that, like her husband, she was unable to spell and often asked for help when she had to write a letter.46 It is unclear where Immanuel lived during those first years when he was separated from his family, but before his wife and sons arrived in St Petersburg he rented an apartment on Liteyny Prospekt right in the centre of town.47 A larger dwelling was required if he was going to put up his wife and three children and therefore he rented a house on Great Neva Quay, adjoining the foundry. According to his daughter-in-law Marta Nobel-Oleinikov, Immanuel designed and built it himself, but this is not correct.48 The single-storey wooden house in classical style was erected in the second half of the eighteenth century and belonged to a widow Yarotskaya, who owned several properties in the area.49

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During the five years that had passed since Immanuel left Stockholm he never visited his home town. As no correspondence between the spouses has survived, details of how the family lived during these years is hard to come by. However hard-pressed Immanuel was financially after his bankruptcy, though, it is hard to believe that he would have left his wife totally without means when he went to Russia. In view of the warm relations between Immanuel and Andriette’s brother, which can be inferred from their correspondence, we can assume that the latter also contributed to his sister’s upkeep. That Ludvig Ahlsell was reasonably well-off emerges from the fact that the family lived in their own house and that the household included several live-in servants and maids.50 Likewise, we may take it that Immanuel shared the income he received during his stay in Åbo. According to one story, during Immanuel’s years in Åbo his wife opened a little milk and vegetable shop; the source for this, however, is unclear.51 In any event, life in Immanuel’s absence must have been difficult. Robert stated that one of his most painful memories was being sent out by his mother to buy food for their dinner and losing the coin.52 According to Ludvig, the boys were forced to sell lucifer matches on the street to contribute to the housekeeping.53 One expression of their financial difficulties is the fact that in 1839 Andriette and the children moved into her mother’s apartment where she was to run her ‘school activity’.54 When Andriette and the boys were reunited with their father in the Russian capital the family’s financial and social position was significantly brighter. After all, Immanuel had sold his invention for 25,000 silver roubles and established himself as an inventor and businessman. An eloquent expression of the value that was placed on his talent was that, shortly after his family arrived, he was invited to become a Russian citizen and to enter the service of the Russian state. It was an invitation that his German rival Moritz Jacobi had received and accepted the same year that he arrived in Russia, 1837. However, Immanuel turned down the offer with the explanation that may have been a mere pretext, namely, that he did not know Russian and had no knowledge of Russian legislation.55 In the same year that Immanuel was offered Russian citizenship the family increased: on 29 October 1843 Andriette gave birth to their fifth child, Emil Oscar. In October 1845, Rolf followed and in September 1849 – when the mother was forty-six! – came Betty, who like their daughter Henrietta lived only to the age of two. To help with the many children they had Selma Scharlin, the daughter of Immanuel’s landlord in Åbo.56 During these years the older siblings Robert, Ludvig and Alfred were fully occupied with their studies. The educational set-up for foreigners in Russia was special. They did not have the right to go to a Russian school or to study in a Russian university. Nor were foreign teachers allowed to teach in the country without special permission. Nicholas I’s Russia was characterized by a strong, almost claustrophobic nationalism and foreign influences were regarded with great suspicion because of the risk of ideological contagion.57

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If Andriette and Immanuel had wanted to place their sons in a school, however, there were good non-Russian alternatives, e.g. one of St Petersburg’s German educational institutions, the Annenschule or the Petrischule. These also had a senior high school, while the Swedish church school only catered for the early years and was by no means on the same pedagogical level. However, the ambitious parents chose to employ private tutors for their sons. It was a sensible decision in view of their lack of previous schooling and poor knowledge of languages. In addition, the German schools were in the city centre, far from their house. Details of the boys’ early studies in St Petersburg are few and far between. Only one teacher is recorded by name: Benedikt Lars Santesson (1789–1853), who taught them Swedish and history. Santesson had served as a secretary in the Royal Chancellery in Stockholm, but sometime after 1815 he left Sweden, just like Immanuel, because of debts. In 1819 he became a Russian citizen and in 1820 he received permission from the Swedish authorities to ‘take up public service’ in St Petersburg. There he worked as a language teacher in a cadet school.58 According to Ludvig’s daughter the boys also had ‘a skilful Russian teacher, who must have been an excellent pedagogue’.59 After a while the brothers were taught together, which shows that Alfred, the youngest, had soon caught up with his older brothers. Their formal education seems to have ended in 1850. Immanuel had originally wanted Ludvig to study to be an architect, but instead he and Robert were put to work in a factory while aged only twenty. The emphasis of their education therefore came to lie in engineering skills. As for Alfred, his early bent was for chemistry, a field that Robert too in time acquired a thorough knowledge of. Ludvig and Robert got most of their knowledge through practical work in the factory, under the guidance of their father. This certainly had advantages given Immanuel’s technical expertise. Their father’s unfocused intellect, however, was no guarantee of pedagogical stringency, and when Robert reached adulthood he was strongly critical of what he did not hesitate to call ‘a perverse upbringing’. As his father acted ‘unsystematically’ in everything he did, they were inspired with ‘the desire to be everything and at the same time nothing’.60 Ludvig, who was equipped with a more even-tempered and grateful mindset, saw things quite differently and thought that not for anything in the world would he swap his upbringing with people who had attended courses and taken examinations. ‘The imperfect aspects of our upbringing have on the other hand the advantage that neither our thirst for knowledge nor our critical faculties were expunged in us,’ he wrote in direct contradiction of Robert: We never cease to be aware of the lack of knowledge that is inherent in us and we find a constant source of pleasure in studies which we can now better understand and form an opinion of, with the expanded perspective that experience of life and the world around us has enabled us to achieve. . . . As for

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myself, I am of the opinion that the small amount of moral and intellectual value I may happen to possess is the result of the setbacks and sufferings I saw our beloved mother exposed to in my earliest childhood, and that I came to suffer myself in later life. These sufferings have without doubt been of the greatest benefit to me!61 As regards language tuition, the brothers studied, as well as their native language, Russian, German, French and English. German and French were indispensable languages in the circles in which the Nobel family moved, while knowledge of Russian was not nearly so necessary. Their first tangible connection with the language came when they began working in the machine factory and came into contact with the workers. Therefore, they never became completely fluent in Russian. Ludvig ‘spoke freely and willingly in public, but he spoke with an accent and with incorrect stress on certain syllables’, his daughter has testified.62 Robert found it difficult to express himself in writing, was reluctant to write letters in Russian and even when in his thirties struggled with Russian grammar, which he found ‘incomprehensible and difficult to the point where’ several times a day he bounced the book off the wall. ‘Russian is a dreadfully hard language and the whole grammar consists of nothing but contradictions, with technical terms that no living person can either comprehend or remember.’63 The most linguistically gifted of the brothers was Alfred, who expressed himself fluently not only in Russian but also in English, which he manipulated with such virtuosity that already at the age of eighteen he composed a poem, ‘You say I am a riddle . . .’, inspired by English romantic poetry. In a letter to his brother-in-law Ludvig Ahlsell in the autumn of 1848, Immanuel characterized his sons’ different skill sets as follows: Ludvig . . . is imperfect in many things for his age but in certain subjects as for example drawing I can say that he is in fact very advanced for his age as also in everything for which judgement and taste are required he is definitely superior to his brothers I cannot complain thank God about any of my elder children and as far as I can see so far I do not believe that they will give me any grief. That which Fate has dealt out less to one of them another seems to have received in greater measure in my way of assessing them Ludvig has the greatest genius Alfred the greatest capacity for Work and Robert the greatest bent for speculation with a tenacity that has surprised me several times this past winter.64 Robert was at the time nineteen, Ludvig seventeen and Alfred fifteen, but, as time would show, these character sketches were to a large extent correct. Yet the allocation of genius and diligence is debatable. Even if it was not yet obvious, Ludvig and Alfred would demonstrate that they possessed both characteristics in equal measure. In Robert’s case, Immanuel was absolutely correct. It is not too bold

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a conjecture that, in the characteristics he ascribed to his eldest son, he saw a reflection of himself.

Daily life in St Petersburg The education of the Nobels’ sons ensured that they had no problems communicating with those around them. It was more difficult for Immanuel and Andriette, whose deficient language capabilities represented a significant handicap. Yet they did not need to feel themselves socially and linguistically isolated. Around 1840 there were as many Finns in St Petersburg as in Finland’s old capital of Åbo and its new capital of Helsinki (Sw. Helsingfors) respectively – about 12,000 to 13,000 people. This corresponded to 1.5 per cent of the city’s population. Of these, close to a half were Swedish speaking. To these Swedish-speaking Finns could be added a Swedish population of roughly 600 individuals, so that St Petersburg’s Swedish-speaking population in 1840 comprised in total about 6,000 individuals. At a time when schools were few and school attendance was not obligatory, people’s view of language norms was quite different from today. A standardized ‘upper-class language’ was the privilege of an educated minority, while many people expressed themselves in a mixture of their mother-tongue, dialects and those languages that surrounded them. The author Faddey Bulgarin noted in the 1830s that to understand a Finnish cook one needed Finnish, Russian, German and Estonian dictionaries – but no grammar book. In the same way, St Petersburg Swedish was a mixture of Swedish, Russian, German and Finnish words. Perhaps Immanuel felt at home with this lingua franca, which was reminiscent of the gibberish he survived with during his years at sea.65 A natural meeting-point for Swedish-speaking Petersburgers was St Katarina’s Evangelical Lutheran church. On arrival, most immigrant Swedish and Swedishspeaking Finns registered with the congregation, which was not subject to the Swedish Church but was a Lutheran congregation under the control of the Russian authorities. (The Finnish speakers had a congregation of their own in the same quarter, St Maria.) There was no requirement to register, but most people signed up anyway to secure practical services such as baptism, marriage, burial and the like. Immanuel, however, took his time registering himself and his family with the congregation. Not until the autumn of 1849 was there recorded in the parish registers a certificate of removal from the Hedvig Eleonora congregation in Stockholm dated 24 October 1842, according to which Mrs Nobel, whose husband ‘the Conducteur Nobel is said to be resident in St Petersburg, is now moving there . . . accompanied by their 2 Sons Ludvig Emanuel . . . and Alfred Bernhard’.66 The fact that Immanuel did not register himself on his arrival may be because he did not expect to remain so long in the city, but another equally plausible reason is that he was not much of a churchgoer.

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Roof trusses and window frames The work carried on by Ogaryov & Nobel and Nobel & Sons was not restricted to wheel manufacture but involved a number of different products, from rail spikes to roof trusses for the Hermitage and lattice work for the German church of St Anne.67 In 1849, Immanuel requested a licence for the manufacture of ‘roof trusses with cross-beams, window frames and hand-rails for stairs of iron’. His request was granted and the licence was issued in March 1851 – for ten years, just like for the wheel machines. When one of St Petersburg’s largest churches, the Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospekt, was renovated in the 1850s, the commission for window frames and lattice work went to Nobel & Sons. Nobel’s window frames were also used in the renovation of the Arsenal. Another commission was for window frames, roll-fronts, doors and iron locks for the Risbank fort which was to be erected in Kronstadt, at the entrance to St Petersburg.68 At the same time, in 1852, the workshop delivered iron gates for a dock, also in Kronstadt. It was a commission gained in competition with Baird.69 Production was not all aimed at the needs of the state or the military. In 1850, during a time when the workshop was short of orders and Immanuel was keen to keep his workforce occupied, he hit upon a new method of constructing furniture of iron.70 This met with success and at the exhibition of manufactures in Moscow in 1853 he was awarded the ‘little gold medal’ for his furniture, which according to the citation was distinguished by ‘new thinking, attractive forms, lightness, durability, purity of execution and reasonable prices’.71 He also advertised in the Finnish press, where he offered steam sawmills installed on movable barges and ‘suitable for sawing of logs in the Bay of Finland or at the outflow of a river’. If capital was in short supply but there was good access to forest, he would be willing to enter into partnership, ‘whereby the value of the sawmill would represent payment of a half-share in the place together with the forest’. Further details could be obtained ‘through correspondence with Mr Im. Nobel in St Petersburg, the Petersburg side near the Samson bridge, house no. 318’.72 Immanuel found himself constantly at the forefront of technological developments. He had a special talent for finding financially efficient and laboursaving solutions. When he cleared the Moscow Guard barracks of damp he reduced the consumption of wood by two thirds, as we have seen, and when on commission from Ramsay he improved a malfunctioning rifle, the upshot was that it both fired more quickly and weighed less. The most useful invention for civilian use was a system of central heating, with warm water from a single boiler circulating through pipes. The first experiment was made in Immanuel’s own home, then the system was introduced in hotels and hospitals and in more well-to-do private dwellings.73 The pipes were, of course, manufactured by Nobel & Sons. There had been central heating systems in England since the 1830s, but Immanuel was one of the pioneers in Russia. There, however, he was not alone in

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experimenting with water-borne heating. At the same time as Immanuel was inventing his system, the young Prussian Franz San Galli, who had begun with Baird and in 1853 had opened his own mechanical workshop in St Petersburg, was constructing the world’s first heating element. Another project that preoccupied Immanuel was the improvements to a warmair motor that had been produced by the Swedish-American inventor John Ericsson. After a Russian newspaper published the news that Immanuel had presented his modified machine to Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, son of Emperor Nicholas I, it was also reported in the foreign press, including in Sweden and America. Immanuel felt oppressed by accusations of what today would be called encroachment of patent and claimed in a letter to a Swedish newspaper that he had only made some slight improvements. He ‘had not the presumption’ to believe himself capable of ‘making any significant improvements to something that had emerged so perfect from the hand of a genius such as Ericsson’!74 The incident says a lot about both the intensive technical development of the period and the hunt for energy-effective sources of power and of Immanuel’s rather carefree attitude to questions of copyright.

The Crimean War Nobel’s workshop manufactured steam engines and factory machinery and other products for the Russian market but worked under difficult conditions. To favour ironworks in the Urals foreign raw materials such as pig-iron and wrought-iron had high protective duties slapped on them while finished machine products were duty free. The workshop was therefore, in common with other Russian machine shops, to a large degree reliant on state commissions. Despite these restrictions Immanuel had succeeded in accruing for himself a net fortune that, according to his own account in 1853 amounted to 277,000 silver roubles, or a good £5 million in today’s values.75 It was state commissions that made Immanuel rich, and it was commissions from the Russian state in the 1850s that made him expand his machine shop. The reason was the so-called Crimean War, which broke out in 1853. The war was triggered by a dispute between France and Russia about the rights of Catholics and Orthodox Christians respectively over the holy places in Palestine (which was part of the Ottoman empire), but basically the conflict was about control of the Bosphorus. The main battles took place by the Black Sea, but the Baltic too developed into a theatre of war. In March 1854 Great Britain declared war on Russia and in the summer of 1854 a large British fleet reinforced by a French squadron sailed into the Baltic. The Russian fleet, which was to a large extent obsolete, avoided battle on the open sea and instead mined the waters around the fortresses of Kronstadt at the entrance to St Petersburg and Sveaborg outside Helsinki.

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The commission for manufacture of mines went first to Immanuel’s rival Jacobi, who in 1852 had made successful attempts with an improved version of his galvanic mine. When it emerged that it would be difficult to produce such mines in sufficient quantities, however, the government turned to Immanuel, who accepted the assignment. The first contract was drawn up on 15 April 1854 and was for 60,000 silver roubles.76 For technical and financial reasons the mine that was produced was a simplified version of the one to which Immanuel sold the rights in 1842. As access to people who could work on the mines was limited, Immanuel placed the detonators in the body of the mine at the demonstration. To keep control over the men laying the mines and to avoid misunderstandings in communication with the military leadership, two Swedish- and Finnish-speaking offices were placed at his disposal. To help with supervision Immanuel also had his sons Ludvig and, in particular, Robert (who was also in charge of the bookkeeping).77 One advantage of Nobel’s mines was that they were not controlled from land by means of a galvanic cable and therefore could be laid out before the ice formed. This meant that they came to be used much more than Jacobi’s – of the 1,865 mines put in place in 1854 (at Kronstadt) and the 1,855 (at Sveaborg), 1,391 were of the Nobel type.78 This was the first time that Immanuel’s invention had been tested in battle. The enemy’s assaults were repelled but the experience was not entirely positive. To be sure, two vessels from a Franco-British squadron were damaged at Kronstadt, but ‘the employment of Nobel’s mines in battle confirmed defects that were already known and demonstrated new and hitherto unknown ones’, as a Russian mine expert has put it.79 Of the 245 mines that were laid in the waters around Kronstadt in the summer of 1854 only 210 could be recovered, the others had become loose and been carried away by the currents, leading to people being injured. Of the mines recovered, moreover, only seventy-five were in working order. There was a similar story at Sveaborg. The fact that the mines came loose was because the system of laying and anchoring them was defective. In addition, the mines turned out to have insufficient explosive force – the Franco-British warships were certainly damaged but did not sink. That no enemy ships were sunk at Kronstadt meant not only a professional but also a financial setback for Immanuel: according to his contract both sunk ships and those that surrendered on account of the risk of mines would accrue to him (with their cargoes) and he would be entitled to sell them to the Russian state or abroad. (In the contract of 20 January 1855 for another 1,160 mines, for the defence of Åbo and Sveaborg, this point was deleted.)80 As the Russian marine engineer Alexander Berg pointed out, Nobel’s mine system did not constitute an effective defence – its usefulness lay in ‘the effect on the enemy’s morale’, i.e. in its deterrent effect.81 Berg’s criticism of the insufficient explosive force is borne out in a report from the British vice-admiral Charles Napier. In The History of the Baltic Campaign of 1854 (London, 1857), he praised

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FIGURE 2.5 Ludvig and Alfred portrayed in 1854.

FIGURE 2.6 Robert.

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Nobel’s mines: ‘The construction of M. Nobell’s mines has been carefully kept secret since his connections with Russia.’ It therefore came as a total surprise for the British. The powder charge in the mines they succeeded in recovering was only four kilos, but Napier’s conclusion was unambiguous: ‘With larger charges of powder there can be no question but that this machine would prove very destructive; whilst if in contact with it, as in the shallow channels of the Russian ports it must be, the destruction of the ship may be reasonably expected to ensue. From the small charge of powder used, those ships which came in contact with these machines escaped with an abrasion of their copper and the destruction of their crockery; though in one case, still severer damage was sustained.’ (Even if the powder charge was not strong enough to blow up a ship it was sufficiently powerful to rob Rear Admiral Michael Seymour of an eye when he incautiously touched the mine’s lever.)82 Apart from sea- and land-mines, Immanuel was also working on ‘flying mines’ which were fastened to rockets and which, according to him, would ‘be of inestimable service to the fleet’.83 In January 1854, he presented a proposal to the Russian government for a mine which, when it came into contact with the enemy ship’s hull, went below the water-line, where it exploded and sank the ship. To achieve the maximum effect Immanuel had conceived of a boat that would travel under the surface of the water and approach the enemy ship without being fired at. The boat could also be used for reconnaissance operations. What Immanuel was suggesting was thus a sort of underwater boat armed with torpedoes.84 How the government regarded his suggestion is unknown, but even with a positive reception, it would hardly have been possible to carry out the project while the war was at its height. (That Immanuel was unwilling to let practical considerations interfere with his flow of ideas emerges from the fact that several years later, in a letter to Robert, he suggested that the mines could be delivered by trained seals which had learned to respond to their names.)85 Because of harbour blockades, the import of machines from abroad was rendered impossible. Nobel & Sons therefore received orders not only for mines but also for machine goods. The Russian navy, as we have seen, was very antiquated, in particular when compared with the French and British navies. While the latter was powered by steam engines and propellers the Russian warships were still sail powered. The propeller had been developed in parallel by the Englishman Francis Smith and the Swede John Ericsson and was first tried out in the American gunboat Princeton in 1842. In the plan for Sweden’s sea defences drawn up in 1847, the steam engine and the propeller were accepted as the means of propulsion and the following year the steam corvette Gefle was built, one of the first propeller-driven warships in the world. The first large warships built with propeller power were the French ship-of-the-line Napoléon (1850), which was armed with ninety cannons, and the British battleship Agamemnon (1852), which symbolically enough had ninety-one cannons.86

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Against the background of international developments in seafaring it was obvious to the Russian government that the country’s navy had to be modernized. Accordingly, in the autumn of 1853, after the outbreak of the Crimean War, a ‘contract auction’ was set in motion for steam engines of 500 horsepower each for three ships that were to be rebuilt to be propeller-driven. To supply older ships of the line and frigates with steam engines and propellers was the quickest way to modernize the fleet during this period of technological breakthroughs. It was also happening simultaneously in Sweden, where in 1854 the thirty-year-old ship of the line Carl XIV Johan was fitted out with steam power. The only machine shop that declared itself willing to take on the assignment, although such large steam engines had never been made in Russia, was Nobel & Sons. An important reason was the government’s pledge that the factory that carried out the order ‘cheapest and best’ would have access to ‘future, regular orders from the Ministry of Marine’. The contract was concluded on 16 December 1853 for a sum of 592,000 silver roubles, corresponding to £11 million today. It was more than the total value of the machine shop. The person leading the negotiations from the firm’s side was Ludvig, a mere twenty-two years old, which says something about the father’s high opinion of his son. For a model they used a ship’s engine built by the British marine engineer Robert Napier and installed in the ship Viborg. The vessels that were to be fitted out with steam engines were the ships of the line Retvizan, Gangut and Vola, all of them armed with eighty-four cannons. Two of them had a connection to the Swedo-Russian war in the time of Charles XII and Gustaf III. Gangut is the Russian name for (Swedish) Hangöudd, the Hanko peninsula, the southernmost point of the Finnish mainland, and the ship had been given that name after the Russian navy’s victory over the Swedes at Hangö in 1714. It was built in 1822 and was therefore over thirty years old. Retvizán (with the stress on the final syllable) was simply a Russian transcription of Swedish ‘Rättvisan’ (Justice), the Swedish ship of the line captured by the Russians in 1790 in the Swedo-Russian war when Immanuel’s father came close to being taken prisoner. However, this did not involve the same ship, as has been claimed,87 but a later ship of the line with the same name – apart from the captured Swedish ship, a further three Russian warships were christened Retvizan up until 1900. Nobel & Sons also helped the Russian industrialist Nikolai Putilov, who had received an order for a large number of warships, to supply a number of corvettes with steam engines.88 That the work had developed from a mechanical workshop to also embrace shipbuilding must have appealed to Immanuel, who had once dreamt of becoming a shipbuilder. The substantial increase in the amount of work led to Nobel’s workshop being expanded until it adjoined Little Vulfova Street, which ran parallel to the Samson Quay. In 1854, a three-storey stone building was erected with large and small mechanical workshops, an assembly space, a repair shop, drawing office, model

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workshop and saddlery. The following year saw the addition of, among other things, a paint-shop, workshops for iron- and copper-founding, a department for steam engines and ventilators, a boiler room and forge, as well as fourteen wooden buildings for different purposes. In addition, a railway was built to join the quay to the workshops, and it also ran into the development. When the factory was at its height it was said to have 1,000 employees and it was valued at 552,000 silver roubles or £10 million in today’s values.89 The year 1855 was very successful financially. The orders flooded in, the workshops were going at full pelt and Immanuel made a lot of money. At the year’s end, at the suggestion of former Minister of War Chernyshov, he was awarded the Order of St Stanislaus 3rd class ‘as recognition for your exceptional diligence in conscientious fulfilment of your obligations regarding the construction and delivery of various machines for the newly-erected Arsenal building which has been affirmed by the leadership to have been of significant benefit’.90 The Order of St Stanislaus was Russia’s newest order of chivalry and the 3rd class was the most frequently awarded, with over 750,000 given out between 1839 and 1917. The recipients were mainly anyone who had served for a certain number of years in the government but it was also given to other deserving people. The Order’s 3rd class was the lowest in the Russian hierarchy of orders, the equivalent of the Swedish Order of Vasa, but for Immanuel the fact that he had become the chevalier of a Russian chivalric order undoubtedly served as an important affirmation of his achievements in the new land. From a work perspective, then, Immanuel’s eventful life had developed into an unprecedented success story, but the year 1855 ended in sorrow when his ten-yearold son Rolf died in November of gastritis – ‘just when his intelligence was beginning to develop and a sort of rivalry had grown up between the two brothers, although Rolf to be sure was in age as well as in understanding far behind [the two-years older] Emil’, as Immanuel wrote to Ludvig Ahlsell. The death of his son was a presage of what was to follow on the work front. The war was about to turn into a catastrophe for Russia, which in March 1856 was forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty.

Catastrophe Russia’s defeat in the war was clear proof that the country was in need of thoroughgoing reform, at least for military and economic reasons. Nicholas I had died the year before the peace treaty. The change of monarch meant the end of political oppression and the chauvinism that had characterized his thirty years in power. During the reign of his son, Alexander II, several of the reforms discussed under the previous Emperor but never implemented were carried out. The most far-reaching concerned the situation of the Russian peasantry. Serfdom was a

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human scourge which moreover had a restrictive effect on economic development. It was abolished in 1861. One consequence of losing the war and the change of monarch was that the Russian government once again began importing military technology from the West – as so often when the country was left behind they looked abroad for help. Nobel & Sons, whose financial status was almost wholly dependent on the manufacture of armaments, therefore found themselves suddenly without any orders. The Russian government no longer wished ‘to acknowledge existing commitments’, Immanuel complained in April 1857 to Ludvig Ahlsell.91 It was a hard blow, which precipitated him into a three-month-long ‘complete state of enervation’ and came close to costing him ‘the little remnant of vitality remaining to me’. Everything he owned was invested in the workshop. ‘If the Government in accordance with written and printed statements kept my large-scale establishment – built up on the strength of their promises – in work, then my position would be good, but if not, then I would own nothing, for everything was invested in this great plant.’92 The problems were exacerbated by the fact that Immanuel, to expand the factory, had been forced to take out huge loans at a high rate of interest. The missing orders resulted in the workshop having difficulty in keeping its workers employed, but that was not the only problem. In the contract for the rebuilding of the Retvizan, Gangut and Vola it was stipulated that the fulfilment of the conditions of the agreement were dependent on the workshop’s access to imported foreign machine parts. As these were unavailable because of the British blockade, delivery of the finished ships was delayed, which led to payment being withheld. In August 1857, all the vessels were delivered complete, but payment was only made after a court found in Nobel’s favour. In view of his contributions to the Russian war machine Immanuel felt he possessed ‘the most justified expectations . . . of receiving further orders’ which could compensate him for the substantial expenses he had incurred in the rebuilding of the workshop. However, of the seven contracts that the government handed out in the years 1854 to 1859, Nobel & Sons did not win a single one, although their tenders were lower. To let himself become dependent on the Russian state was, Immanuel became convinced, risky. Russian leaders seldom see it as a priority to fulfil the promises of their predecessors. Thus, the new Russian government felt themselves to be released from all the commitments that the previous regime had made to Nobel & Sons. To save his business Immanuel was forced to seek new, private clients. In an advertisement in Morskoi sbornik (the Marine Journal), Nobel & Sons explained that during the war they had exclusively built steam engines for large propellerdriven ships, but that they were now taking orders for steam engines for large and small civil vessels, for iron-shod, flat-bottomed river boats as well as large ferries and turning lathes, planing- and drilling-machines – all at moderate prices.93

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However, to function as a private capitalist in the Russian market was almost as difficult and risky as being in the pay of the government, mainly because of the difficulty of borrowing money. One way out was converting the family business into a limited company, a step which in the year of 1857 had every chance of succeeding: the interest rate in state-owned banks had sunk drastically and many investors turned to the share market to protect their assets. ‘I have decided to issue Shares in the Factory,’ Immanuel wrote to Ludvig Ahlsell without sounding very optimistic: ‘But even this will probably be fraught with great difficulties because where efforts are needed capitalists will seldom wish to be involved. But I am hoping for an opportunity.’94 In July 1857, Nobel & Sons was converted into the limited company Samson’s Mechanical Manufactures, which delivered steam engines and steamships both to the company Caucasus & Mercury, which ran services on the Volga and the Caspian Sea, and to the Finnish Launch Company. The latter was led by Rafael von Haartman and operated on the Neva and its tributaries as well as on the stretch between the capital and Schlüsselburg, where the Neva rises in Lake Ladoga. During the next few years Robert would play a prominent role in the development of the local boat traffic.95 However, the workshop was too large to be able to exist on the basis of private orders, which is why two years later Immanuel was obliged to pay back the shareholders’ money.96 During the years 1858 to 1859, the correspondence between Nobel and the Department of Shipbuilding and the Technical Committee grew, in Immanuel’s own words, ‘unbelievably’ and orders were given and cancelled. In May-June 1859 he submitted ‘detailed appeals regarding the injustices he had suffered’ and demanded liquidation, which meant that the firm was dissolved by means of its assets being converted into cash, the debts paid and any remaining surplus being divided among the shareholders. A judgement from the Admiralty Council on 5 September found in favour of Nobel on all counts, but if he wanted liquidation he had to accept the calculation arrived at by the Department of Shipbuilding, which meant a loss of over 14,000 silver roubles, i.e. around £30,000. The liquidation was signed on 3 October 1859, under protest from Immanuel who undertook not to engage in further dispute with the authorities about it. The person who signed the document was not Immanuel but Ludvig because at this point Immanuel had left Russia and was in Sweden along with Andriette and their youngest son Emil. Still in Russia, trying to save what could be saved of the once so flourishing machine shop were Robert, Alfred and Ludvig, the latter having the main responsibility. There are several explanations for why Ludvig was given responsibility for the factory. Robert had mainly taken care of the factory’s ‘external affairs’, contacts with customers and so forth, and Alfred was taking more and more of an interest in chemical matters, even if he was sent to Paris and London to try to obtain loans to rescue the machine workshop. However, the business was not seen to be creditworthy.

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The one child who Immanuel had the greatest confidence in was Ludvig, who despite the problems of the business had also been awarded the Order of St Stanislaus in 1858. Another circumstance that made him the natural choice was that he had been married for a year and was settled in St Petersburg. His wife was his cousin Wilhelmina (Mina) Ahlsell, daughter of his maternal uncle Ludvig and his aunt Charlotte. Mina had been born in 1832 and was thus one year younger than Ludvig. They had got to know each other during Ludvig’s sojourns in Stockholm and she had also visited St Petersburg with her mother. Ludvig asked his uncle for Mina’s hand in marriage in February 1855 and in September that year they became engaged while visiting a spa in Germany. ‘If Fate blesses the young ones in such rich measure as our Hearts desire then assuredly their happiness will be complete,’ Immanuel wrote to his brother-in-law: ‘Mina is the only one of Your children that I have had the pleasure of getting to know and I

FIGURE 2.7 Ludvig’s wife Mina Ahlsell. The photo can be dated to the period after October 1865, when the studio in St Petersburg where it was taken opened.

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must honestly admit that from the first moment I saw Her my desire was to be able to keep Her among us.’ It emerges from the letter that both Mina and Ludvig had delicate health, and Immanuel hoped that ‘no obstacles may occur to prevent mutual visits to a greater degree than hitherto’.97 Mina suffered from ‘a weak chest’, perhaps early-stage tuberculosis. After a visit to Stockholm in 1856 Andriette declared that ‘Mina is not in very good health’ and that Ludvig is also ‘very poorly’, but that ‘in a few Months, with God’s help, they will have each other, and then our joy and happiness will be so much the greater for all of us’.98 The wedding took place, not ‘in a few Months’, as Andriette had hoped, but two years later. Ludvig and Mina married in Stockholm on 7 October 1858. One reason for the delay may have been Mina’s state of health, but there is also another explanation. One year after their engagement Ludvig fathered a child to twentynine-year-old Anna Lindal, the daughter of one of Andriette’s friends. The boy was born on 4 September 1856 and christened Hjalmar Podalirius. According to the birth certificate, the father was Anna Lindal’s husband Gustaf Crusell, born in Finland in 1810, a doctor of medicine, Collegiate Councillor (6th class in the Russian Table of Ranks), a leading researcher of, among other things, galvanism (the therapeutic use of electrical current) and active in Russia since 1840.99 They had married in 1853 and already had a son, Emil Malcolm, who was born in 1854 but died three years later. Gustaf Crusell died in the autumn of 1858, when Hjalmar was only two. There is no reason to believe that he suspected Hjalmar was not his. If he had, the boy would hardly have been given his unusual middle-name. Podalirius, in Greek mythology, is the son of Asklepios (Aesculapius), the god of healing, and Crusell was a doctor. That the Nobel family felt a responsibility towards the child emerges from a letter written by Immanuel to Ludvig Ahlsell in which, a month after Crusell’s death, he writes that he ‘must see if one can do something for the poor widow’, who ‘apart from having to look after herself also has a sickly little child who seems to have inherited the consequences of its Father’s Cynical lifestyle’. The ill-disguised hint that Crusell had died from the after-effects of syphilis is borne out by the revelation that for the last fourteen months of his life he found himself in a state of ‘total vacuity amounting to unconsciousness’ and was too ill even to be cared for in an ‘institution for the insane’.100 It is nowhere documented that Ludvig was the father of Hjalmar but it is an accepted truth in the Nobel family – though how many knew it at the time is unclear (see Chapter 9). That he was the father is confirmed, moreover, by the fact that Ludvig took full responsibility for the boy’s upbringing and education. From his earliest years he was treated as a member of the family, his photos can be seen in the family albums, and later he was to hold important positions in the Nobel firms, of which more in the following chapters.

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3 IMMANUEL AND ANDRIETTE

The financial losses and the conflict with the Russian authorities were uncannily reminiscent of the problems that had led to Immanuel leaving Sweden twenty-two years earlier. The clouds had been gathering for several years and Immanuel could easily have chosen to give up earlier. The fact that he only left Russia now was not only because the threat of liquidation had become acute but also because Alfred was in his sickbed with a ‘life-threatening illness’.1 In addition, Mina was pregnant and Immanuel and Andriette wanted to be there for her confinement. Mina and Ludvig’s first child was born on 22 June 1859 (10 June in the Russian calendar)2, a son called Emanuel Ludvig, who was given the pet-name Manne and in later years came to be called Male. One month after Emanuel’s birth, Immanuel travelled to Åbo, arriving on 12 July; Andriette and their youngest son Emil arrived in the autumn. With them came Andriette’s niece Charlotta, ‘Lotten’, who spent some time in St Petersburg helping her sister through her pregnancy.3 One explanation for the different dates of travel may be that Immanuel wanted to clear up some practical matters before the family took up residence in Sweden. Immanuel, Andriette and Emil checked out of the St Katarina parish on 12 September 1859.4 During the St Petersburg years, Immanuel had maintained contact with both Johan Scharlin (whom he had stayed with during his visits to Åbo) and with John Julin at Fiskars (whom Ludvig had also visited on one occasion). The sawmill advertisement shows that Immanuel also did business in Finland, poor and industrially underdeveloped as it was. Despite this he clearly saw no possibility of making a living there. In his and his family’s passport documentation their final destination was given as Sweden, a country that to some degree was foreign to them; during the twenty years they had spent in Russia, Immanuel and Andriette had only visited their homeland once, in the summer of 1856 when they stayed with Andriette’s brother.5 Shortly after returning to Sweden in the autumn of 1859, the family settled in Johannisdal, a summer residence popular with middle-class Stockholmers.6 There

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are no details of any business dealings on Immanuel’s part during their stay there; we know only that he was informed by letter about the liquidation process in St Petersburg. The lack of information about the family’s lifestyle is because Johannisdal was far from the city and they didn’t meet many people there. ‘We see the Nobels very seldom,’ wrote Mina’s sister Lotten to Robert’s fiancée Pauline, ‘they have a long way to travel and have to take care that they are not overtaken by darkness . . .’7 According to one source, Immanuel is supposed to have lived for a time in Åbo, but there is no record of any such stay in official Finnish documentation.8 Sometime during 1861 the family moved from Johannisdal to Stockholm, where they rented a property called Heleneborg, in the same neighbourhood where Immanuel and Andriette had lived in their young days. The house was owned by the wholesaler W.N. Burmeister. In the register of population Immanuel was listed as ‘former merchant’. As the three eldest sons had stayed behind in St Petersburg only Emil was living with his parents. Biographical details about him are scarce, but he seems to have been given a free rein during his upbringing. According to Robert he was a ‘dreadfully irresponsible’ young man who caused his parents ‘much sorrow’. ‘He

FIGURE 3.1 The only surviving photo of Emil Nobel, taken in 1864.

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has,’ Robert wrote, ‘a good brain, he speaks very well, but not much of a heart, is rather shallow, disorderly, extravagant in the extreme and he happily runs up debts without worrying about how they are to be paid . . .’9 Robert writes that he fears if Emil does not get a proper education but spends too much time with his father his sound common-sense will ‘be poorly cultivated’. He continues: ‘I am in no way questioning Papa’s goodwill, but I know that he acts unsystematically and that makes me sorry for Emil’.10 Emil was sent to Uppsala, where on 31 January 1863, after a year’s study, he graduated in ten subjects. This had a calming effect on Robert: ‘He seems to be working hard now and I am not a little gladdened by this for our dear Mama’s sake, for she really grieved over Dear Brother’.11 Two days later, Emil was admitted to the philosophy faculty of Uppsala University. After the first semester he was collected by Alfred, who was on a short visit to Stockholm and described his younger brother as a ‘smart boy’ and an extrovert: ‘I fished him up in Uppsala and took him with me. He seems to be acquainted with half of Sweden.’12

‘The lawsuit against the Crown’ At the same time as Immanuel, Andriette and Emil were trying to make a life for themselves in Sweden, Ludvig, on behalf of his father, set in motion what in the family correspondence is called ‘The lawsuit against the Crown’ – an attempt to get the Russian government to compensate the machine shop for losses it had incurred because of missing orders and to thereby facilitate its continued production. In his argument, Ludvig took as his starting point the government’s pledge regarding ‘future, guaranteed orders’ for the factory that ‘best and most cheaply’ fulfilled the conditions in the contract for steam engines from 1853. Against the background of the losses that afflicted the machine shop when the orders failed to appear, there was, according to Ludvig, only one way to ensure their survival: The only possibility of its being rescued lies in being commissioned to carry out the kinds of work for which the factory was built, or in corresponding monetary compensation. But here too my Father wishes to protect the Crown from all burdensome sacrifices, he hopes that if the Government gives him work corresponding to the dimensions of the factory, then he will gradually be in a position to pay the factory’s heavy debts. An annual order of two thousand horsepower would give the factory sufficient employment and provide an opportunity to work ourselves out of our current hopeless situation over several years. Only this measure can save my Father from the ruin that threatens him for his justifiable trust and bring to fruition the decree promulgated by His Imperial

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Majesty, through Your Highness, as well as protecting and encouraging domestic industry.13 The letter is dated 31 December 1859 and signed by Ludvig Nobel as per power of attorney for the merchant of the first guild, the manufacturer Immanuel Nobel.14 It was delivered by Ludvig in person on 2 January 1860 to Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich (1827–92). The Grand Duke was an admiral and minister without portfolio in the Ministry of the Navy and during the war he had taken part in the defence of Kronstadt. Konstantin Nikolayevich had the same decisive role in ordering for the military as his uncle Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, who had been Immanuel’s patron but who had died in 1849. On 31 January, his application having gone unanswered, Ludvig forwarded a new petition. It led to the formation of a committee with representatives from the navy and finance ministries who were tasked with examining the question of whether Nobel’s factory should to receive financial support from the state. The committee came to the conclusion – according to Immanuel ‘through the basest casuistry, incorrect citations and false conclusions’ – that the factory ‘did not have the slightest justification for demanding orders or other compensation for the losses it has suffered’. The conclusion was shared by the secretary of state and future finance minister Reitern (von Reutern), who thought that the Ministry of the Navy had neither a legal nor a moral obligation to help Nobel.15 However, naval experts supported Immanuel and affirmed that the factory had fulfilled all the requirements concerning ‘timescale, price and quality of work’. The former director of the Department of Shipbuilding, Major-General Grünewald, certified that Nobel ‘in every way deserves recompense and in particular protection from the Government, corresponding to the great and unprecedented expenses he has incurred in putting his factory on a footing to successfully compete with foreign factories for the manufacture of large ships’ engines’. Secretary of State Prince Obolensky also explained that ‘the navy’s obligations to Nobel are so important that in the event of their not being fulfilled, that could hardly be excused’ as well as that ‘justice and the Government’s own advantage demand that Nobel is granted support’.16 However, these expert opinions were of no avail. Immanuel’s problems seem to have been in part of a personal nature. If Mikhail Pavlovich had shown him sympathy and trust his successor’s attitude was the opposite. Konstantin Nikolayevich saw in Nobel a person ‘whom one cannot take to court but whom it is best to have nothing to do with, and therein lies the reason why Nobel has received no orders for three years’.17 There may well be something in the Grand Duke’s unwillingness to do business with Immanuel, impulsive and unrestrained as he was: an order that was almost in the bag in the spring of 1857 fell through, according to Alfred, because his father ‘made new difficulties and objections’ that ‘ruined the affair’.18

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Apart from personal factors there were other reasons for the Grand Duke’s negative attitude. They had their origins, according to Immanuel and Ludvig, in the enormous orders that the Grand Duke had placed abroad after peace was declared. These foreign orders meant that Immanuel was no longer needed and therefore they chose, according to Ludvig, ‘to ruin him by means of a thoroughgoing system of persecution, so that they could then say that the factory was not capable of taking on the work that the Navy would willingly have given it’.19 Yet another explanation for Immanuel’s unsuccessful attempts to obtain government orders was the corruption in the Russian state administration, which during the reign of Nicholas I reached epic proportions and according to Immanuel developed into ‘a habit that has almost passed into law’. So, for example, between 10 and 20 per cent of the cost of tenders must be set aside for bribes – not only to ensure receiving the order but also to buy one’s way out of ‘insults and oppression’.20 During the years 1854 to 1859, as we saw, Immanuel did not receive a single order although, by his own account, his tenders were lower than those of his competitors.21 Were his difficulties because he was short of means or because he refused to buy himself sufficient protection? The ‘lawsuit against the Crown’ went on for almost two years. ‘The seeming coldness with which I first dealt with our unfortunate predicament has gradually become real,’ Ludvig wrote to Robert: ‘I have become convinced that we cannot expect any help from the Crown.’22 He was proved right: on the same day that the letter was sent, 25 October 1861, Nobel & Sons received the final rejection of their request for compensation or subsidy. From the Crown ‘we have received a formal rejection – low, base, underhand and laboured in every way – the document that has been sent to us is a real masterpiece of Russian officialese’, Ludvig reported: ‘We must now liquidate the whole business the sooner the better.’23 According to the firm’s own calculations the missing orders from the Russian state had involved them in a loss of 551,000 silver roubles or £10 million in today’s values.24 The liquidation proceedings seem not to have been pursued during the lawsuit against the Russian government as the creditors were hoping that their claims could be satisfied through the intervention of the state. When this did not happen, Ludvig had to try to agree terms with them. ‘I have got nothing whatsoever arranged with our Creditors yet, it isn’t so easy and nor is it pleasant, so that one has to take it easy – and, as Papa likes to say, “one never knows what it can be good for”,’ commented the philosophically-inclined Ludvig in December 1861.25 After one of the creditors refused to accept the conditions the factory was declared to have gone into bankruptcy in February 1862. In this tight corner, Ludvig displayed an admirable calm combined with a marked sense of responsibility. It is these qualities that explain why his creditors, despite the bankruptcy, allowed him to continue running the factory and to try to sell whatever was not in pledge ‘for the highest possible price so that the

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creditors may not suffer too much’. Ludvig was also keen to ‘keep the Old Man out of trouble’. ‘Believe me, brother, I am not having an easy time of it,’ he reported to Robert, despite my seeming coldness, the flame under the grill feels pretty hot sometimes and it is only the knowledge that I am doing my duty that gives me courage to hold out and allows me to hope to bring everything to such an honourable conclusion that each and every one may acknowledge that the Nobels have been unlucky but are still worthy of every respect. This is certainly all that we can hope, but it is no less important for that. We will hope for the best and shout, in the words of the song, ‘Cheer up, you lads in blue’ – будет и на нашей улице праздник [in our street too we will party one day].26 In the summer of 1862, Nobel & Sons’ mechanical workshop was sold to an engineer called Golubyev. At the same time Immanuel applied to King Charles XV with a long and detailed petition in which he explained what had happened to himself and to the machine shop and asked the king to intervene with Alexander II via the Swedish legation in St Petersburg. ‘Papa is appealing again to the Emperor for compensation through the Swedish Government,’ Alfred reported to Robert, adding with a sigh – ‘but God knows, I have little hope that he will win his case’.27 He was right. Alfred himself expressed his feeling of injustice in verse. At the same time as he was hailing Emperor Alexander II as ‘an honest man’ he could not help mentioning That he and his have done a fearful wrong To me and mine – have brought my aged father To work for bread – it was a shameful deed. Still worse because an honest name was branded.28

Blasting oil Once back in Sweden, Immanuel’s thoughts continued to run along the same explosive lines as before. An important challenge was to try to improve the explosive power of the mines. They were loaded with gunpowder, an explosive that had been known since the fifteenth century, and the question was whether it could be replaced with something else. During his years in Russia, Immanuel had had contacts with the Russian chemists Nikolai Zinin (1812–80) and Yuli Trapp (1814– 1908), who were researchers and teachers at the Medico-Surgical Academy in St Petersburg. It was from these outstanding scientists that his sons Alfred and Robert received their education in chemistry. Zinin had a special relationship with Sweden as he had written his master’s thesis on Jacob Berzelius and had studied with one

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of Europe’s leading chemists, Théophile-Jules Pelouze, who was a friend of the Swedish chemist. It is not unreasonable to assume that this special relationship with Sweden played a role in the good collaboration that developed between Alfred and, in particular, Zinin. When the seventeen-year-old Alfred travelled to Paris it was mainly to practise with Pelouze, whose chemistry laboratory was in a different class altogether from the one in the under-financed and ill-equipped Medico-Surgical Academy. Zinin early on drew Immanuel’s and Alfred’s attention to a liquid which later came to be known as nitroglycerine, discovered by a pupil of Pelouze, the Italian Ascanio Sobrero, who however warned his teacher about experimenting with it because of its enormous explosive effect. Personally, he thought nitroglycerine was too dangerous to have any practical application. The difficulty was to produce nitroglycerine in a safe way. During the process, when glycerine was mixed with sulphuric and nitric acid, a strong heat developed which, if the temperature exceeded 180 degrees, caused the mixture to explode. The other difficulty concerned developing the ‘blasting oil’, as the liquid came to be called, into an effective explosive. Despite the problems, both Immanuel and Alfred were quick to recognize the potential of nitroglycerine as an explosive for constructing mines, among other things. Its explosive power was many times greater than that of gunpowder. Both the production and the handling of the explosive liquid was fraught with such risks that Immanuel, by the time he left St Petersburg, seems to have given up the idea of experimenting further with it. Yet in St Petersburg, Alfred continued with his investigations and finally succeeded in producing sufficient quantities of nitroglycerine to carry out practical experiments. The challenge was to detonate the blasting oil in a controlled manner. The problem was solved by mixing the nitroglycerine with gunpowder and lighting the mixture with a fuse. The first successful detonation took place, according to Alfred, in May–June 1863 in a trench on the Nobel machine shop site.29 When a mine was loaded with the same mixture it was possible to establish that the explosive effect was infinitely greater than if it had just been filled with gunpowder. The results were of course passed on to Immanuel, who immediately began to prepare his own mixtures of gunpowder and nitroglycerine. In a letter to Alfred in the summer of 1863 he reported that the results were so satisfactory that ‘in Russia this work ought to be remunerated with a vast sum of money’ and they therefore ‘should be able to recoup everything we have lost and more besides’. According to Immanuel, Robert should to be able to look after the Russian market so that Alfred ‘could come back as quickly as possible to help your old father to run the business here and abroad’.30 Alfred had paid a short visit to Stockholm in May and on 13 July he came there to stay.31

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Robert becomes a brewer The move home meant that the professional collaboration between father and son could be resumed, but also that, after four years’ separation, Immanuel and Andriette could have Alfred near them again – in the same way that they had had the pleasure of seeing his elder brother Robert, who stayed in Stockholm in the winter of 1862–3. Of the three older brothers, it was Robert who had the greatest difficulty finding a definite outlet for his varied talents. Alfred was a chemist and Ludvig an engineer who had both been involved in the work of the factory from early on. Robert, like his father, was more of a dilettante by nature, an inventor and a chemist – as far as one can judge, a good one – but with unfocused ambitions. As we saw, he had been involved in a number of restoration jobs in St Petersburg and for a while he manufactured bricks in the area which he tried to export, with little success. By the time of his arrival in Stockholm Robert had been married for almost a year. His wife was Pauline Lenngrén, born in St Petersburg in 1840 but resident in Helsinki and the daughter of a businessman, Carl Lenngrén and his wife Eva, née Lesch. The family was close to the Nobels and Pauline’s parents were godparents to Emmanuel at his christening in 1859. Shortly afterwards Robert proposed to nineteen-year-old Pauline, whom Alfred and Emil had also been hovering round. The rivalry led to bad feeling, in particular between the older brothers, and Pauline was asked by Robert to show Alfred ‘as much coldness as you can, that’s the best way to bring him to his senses’.32 As for sixteen-year-old Emil, his blood was up to the extent that after leaving his mother and his cousin Lotten on the journey home in the autumn of 1859, he took the return boat back to Helsinki. This made Robert appeal to Pauline not to let him ‘be so persevering as before but use all your influence with him to make him return to Stockholm’.33 Pauline responded to the appeal and on 14 October, Emil was supplied with passport documentation and put on the boat back to Sweden.34 When he continued writing to Pauline after his return to Stockholm, Robert asked her to ‘as soon as possible, in the kindest way, to break off all correspondence with Emil, for . . . every letter from you has the same result as pouring oil on the fire’.35 The battle over Pauline resulted from the fact that venues in St Petersburg where Swedish-speaking men and women with marriage in mind could meet were severely limited. The Nobel brothers socialized within a tight circle consisting mainly of Swedes and Finland-Swedes and the number of socially acceptable families with socially marriageable children were few. People met in family groups and to some extent in connection with church activities. (A more inclusive Swedish social life came about later in the nineteenth century, of which more in a later chapter.) To leave this circle and marry a Russian involved difficulties of a religious nature as much as of civil law.

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FIGURE 3.2 Robert’s wife Pauline, née Lenngrén.

When in October 1862 Robert moved to Stockholm his wife was in the second month of pregnancy and remained behind in Helsinki. The background to the move was that, ever since proposing to Pauline, Robert had been searching for an income that was sufficiently large and stable to enable him to offer her a life commensurate with her origins and social status. His future father-in-law Carl Lenngrén had, as we saw, been financially involved in the Nobel family’s business activities in St Petersburg; apart from Immanuel’s first workshop, among other things in the Northern Steamboat Company (Severnoe parokhodstvo), where

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Robert was on the board. The company did not do well, and Robert was keen to see Lenngrén recouping his money before courting his daughter. Ludvig, who had had to wait for three years before finally winning his Mina, tried to comfort him: ‘I . . . remember well the torment of having a fiancée waiting for me and no sure prospects for the future.’36 As Robert and Pauline could not yet marry and move in together Robert lived in St Petersburg and Pauline with her parents in Helsinki. During the whole long ‘lawsuit against the Crown’, Robert assured Pauline in letter after letter that everything would be fine and that the factory would be compensated for its losses. ‘That we will win the lawsuit can be taken as read, but we must still have patience,’ he wrote in November 1860: ‘When we get the money and I become rich you will see how all those who are taunting and covetous will fawn on us. Here in St Petersburg people are already talking about the Nobels winning the lawsuit against the Crown . . .’37 As we have seen, this did not happen. Nonetheless in the summer of 1861 Robert moved to Helsinki and his marriage to Pauline took place on 21 December. For a while they seem to have lived in St Petersburg, where however Pauline was not happy. They therefore moved back to Helsinki, where Robert set up a business that had already been occupying him in St Petersburg: the manufacture of fireproof bricks. In the spring of 1862, he started up a brickworks and advertised in the press for workers, but as early as October he moved to Stockholm. The reasons for the move were both work related and personal. He wanted away from Helsinki, where he had problems with manufacturing the bricks and moreover was unhappy because, by his own account, he was exposed to gossip and calumny from Pauline’s family. ‘One thing that’s certain is that I shall never again make my home in Helsinki, everything has been so hateful for me there and I would rather die than be there,’ he wrote to his wife after arriving in Stockholm.38 He also wanted to go to Stockholm, where he intended to acquire proficiency in what he saw as a profession of the future: brewing. Robert was not alone at this time in sensing the great potential for a decent livelihood in the brewing industry, where the old brewery ale was beginning to be superseded by Bavarian beer. His intention was to study the craft in Sweden and then set up a brewery business in Russia. He was supported wholeheartedly in these ambitions by his brothers. ‘From gunpowder to beer – can you tell me, dear Robert, roughly how big a building you are likely to need for the proposed brewery and how much capital you are reckoning on for fitting it out, how much for the building, how much working capital,’ Alfred asked. ‘Ludvig is involving himself in the business up to the hilt and if I can do anything for my part you can rely on it that I shall not fail to do so.’39 In Stockholm, Robert worked in several places, but mainly in the Stockholm Brewery, founded in 1859. The fact that it was just here that he gained his first experience was no coincidence. One of the founders of the brewery was Johan

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Wilhelm Smitt, who was chairman of the board. Smitt was one of the most successful businessmen of his time and one of the country’s richest men. After laying the foundations of a fortune in South America he was involved in, among other things, the founding of Stockholms Enskilda Bank, on whose board he sat. Robert’s paternal aunt Betty Elde knew Smitt through her social work, and it was presumably through this contact that he ended up in the brewery. In the early days, Robert stayed with his parents at Heleneborg but then he moved in with a family who lived right beside the brewery. He was short of money as he had to pay for his training. He was therefore forced to sell some specimens from a collection of minerals he had brought with him to Stockholm. To keep Pauline from freezing at home in Helsinki, Robert’s mother Andriette made her a present of her old fox fur coat which Robert had a devil of a job sending over to Finland. ‘Dear Mama is so good that it really distresses me!’ he wrote to his wife. ‘If you knew how well-disposed towards you the Old Man and the Old Lady are and how beloved you are you would be really pleased.’40 Robert began his profession with a will, living for a time on the outskirts of Stockholm where he learnt how to make compressed yeast, and he saw the future becoming brighter: I must tell you that I am very satisfied with my time [here] and that the preparation of compressed yeast promises me a quick and sure income. For this I require only a few workers, for I myself am the master, working capital is only needed on a daily basis, expensive apparatus is not required and the whole factory can be set up in a month. As soon as it is set up, which can be done in some rented building, the income starts coming in on the very first day and so you can see that I have every reason to hope for a very speedy improvement in our current critical situation.41 Before Robert moved over to the Nuremberg Brewery in March 1863, he was given a certificate testifying that he had ‘been employed in the manufacture of Bavarian beer and acquired all the practical and theoretical knowledge required to be a skilled Master Brewer’.42 Robert was not the only member of the family who had his eyes opened to the possibilities that the brewing industry promised. Immanuel had discovered a way of sealing bottles which meant that the same cork could be used several times. However, as ‘the Old Man has not realized the benefit one could gain from this in the trade’ Robert took up the cause, ‘and if it doesn’t succeed as he envisaged it I have myself another idea by which I set great store’.43 The discovery consisted of the usual bottle cork, which is destroyed when pulled out, being replaced by a cork which is only a third of the size and which is kept inserted with the help of a ‘cork’ of wood which is pulled out by a string. The advantage of the new method was that the amount of cork bark imported could be

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substantially decreased. According to Robert there was big money to be made from the discovery and in June he obtained a patent for seven years for an ‘improved bottle cork and consequent alteration of the necks of bottles and flasks’.44 Unlike on the previous occasion when he obtained a patent, this time he signed the application with his own hand. Although the cork patent did not lead to anything, Robert did not give up thoughts of a career in the beer industry. He left Stockholm on 28 April 1863 to be present when his son Hjalmar Immanuel was born a month later but he did not stay long in Helsinki. Only a few weeks after the birth he rushed off again to St Petersburg to try to establish himself as a brewer in Russia, where people had ‘taken up drinking beer terribly’.45 Despite the bright prospects for the future Robert was soon forced to abandon the brewery project, mainly because there were no investors willing to take a risk. There was a great lack of capital in Russia and the Nobels’ creditworthiness was damaged by the bankruptcy of the machine shop. After the failed brewery project Robert, who, like his father, was always in the vanguard of technology, took up a business project that he had already initiated before he moved to Stockholm: the sale of paraffin lamps. The paraffin lamp had been invented simultaneously in 1853 by a Polish chemist, Ignacy Łukasiewicz, and the American Robert Edwin Dietz. Paraffin, or lamp oil, was first extracted from whale oil or coal, but in the mid-1850s chemists in the USA discovered that it could be distilled from raw oil, petroleum. The first well was dug in 1859 in Pennsylvania and from then on development exploded. Petroleum as a raw material had been known from time immemorial, but it was, as one researcher emphasizes, ‘American capitalism that offered the most flexible system for developing it and linking it into a larger distribution network’ As early as 1861, the first international oil transport was under way from Pennsylvania to London by sailing ship.46 In 1863, when Robert together with a Finland-Swedish business partner Albert Sundgren opened the lamp and paraffin shop Aurora in Helsinki they were pioneers in Finland. Lamps and burners were imported from Russia and Western Europe and paraffin from Pennsylvania. However, the oil was often of poor quality and had to be re-distilled before it could be used. Soon enough, too, rivals sprang up in the Finnish market and business started to be poor. With gallows humour Robert reported to Alfred on his ‘brilliant situation’ and complained: ‘Who the hell would have anticipated such wretched prospects in former days when our star shone so brightly on us in the East.’47 Yet Robert’s nose had led him in the right direction. In Russia, too, the manufacture of paraffin had started in a small way – in the Caucasus. It was still expensive and of poor quality but according to Ludvig it would soon be able to compete with the American product: ‘Supplies are every bit as plentiful as in America,’ he wrote, adding: ‘In general Petroleum has an altogether bright future.’48

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His assertion was prophetic. The problem was that the Russian economy was not flexible but was controlled by the state, which was a major restriction on development in the oil industry. However, this would change, and those who drove the change were none other than Robert and Ludvig. More about this later.

Underwater mines in Swedish waters In parallel with his nitroglycerine experiments, Immanuel worked on producing other defence products. One such was a firearm which he called ‘the multiplicator’ or ‘the bullet-spraying weapon’ and which in a few seconds could fire off a large number of bullets. A machine gun, in other words. The weapon consisted of gun barrels enclosed in a case of sheet iron. To construct it, Immanuel had bought in scrapped barrels from Stockholm’s armoury.49 The charge was made up of cartridges containing gunpowder and a pointed bullet. Each barrel could be loaded with twelve shots. The cartridges could also be fitted with detonating compositions for setting fire to inflammable objects like ammunition trucks, houses, boats etc. In January 1863, a test firing was held in the presence of senior military officers as well as former lieutenant now major in the naval engineering corps, Ludvig Anton Fahnehjelm, the same man who had once taken over Immanuel’s rubber factory and then pursued a career as an inventor of, among other things, a field telegraph. ‘All 96 bullets hit the target, which bears eloquent witness to the qualities of the weapon, in particular as it was assembled from old and no longer serviceable gun barrels,’ the press reported.50 However, no order was placed. Immanuel laid most emphasis on the area where he could justifiably assert his primogeniture: underwater mines. According to its inventor, this means of defence was particularly suited to a country with long coastlines and deep bays. In July 1862, the first experiment was made in Swedish waters. It took place in Stockholm. A ship’s hull was towed to the place where the mine had been sunk, whereupon ‘there followed a loud explosion, a thick pillar of smoke rose up in the air and hid from the gaze of the onlooker the intended sacrifice. Shortly afterwards one saw several splinters from the ship fall into the water around the destroyed hull, which had sunk almost to the water-line.’51 The experiment was regarded as so successful that Immanuel sought and obtained access to a scrapped bomb vessel for fresh attempts.52 Encouraged by the successful experiment, and in hopes of being able to sell his discovery to the Swedish state as he had once done to the Russians, Immanuel invited a number of marine defence experts to draw up a formal report on his underwater mines. One of them was Fahnehjelm. The result was a statement, dated 6 December 1862, which recommended Immanuel’s underwater mine in the most positive terms. Among its advantages it was claimed that it was light to lay down and to lift again, that it was watertight and could lie in the water for years and also

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that loaded mines could be kept for a long time in stores without the risk of explosion as the detonation mechanism was separate from the mine itself. Moreover, it was cheap to produce. The experts also delivered a eulogy to the Russian government, ‘whose generosity gave Mr Nobel the opportunity to devote to the mines several years’ effort and thought’. In conclusion, ‘Mr Nobel’s sea mines ought to become one of the most powerful aids in the defence of the country, as probably no better means will be found to guard our most important coastal towns from surprise attack’. The state ought therefore to allot the necessary funds to answer the only outstanding question regarding the improvements that Nobel made after his return to Sweden, namely, how great the explosive charge should be at different depths.53 In February 1863, with this declaration behind him, and encouraged by highranking officers, Immanuel gave a presentation on his mine system at the Military Society before an audience of about a hundred, among them Prince Oscar (the future King Oscar II), the Minister for the Navy and the Minister of War.54 According to Robert, who helped his father to write his lecture, it all went ‘very well’ (‘Prince Oscar and the most distinguished Ministers . . . now very warmly embrace the business’)55, and on 13 March Immanuel petitioned His Royal Majesty that ‘competent men’ might investigate the usefulness of his mines.56 A month later, on 21 April, the Minister for the Navy, Baltzar von Platen, set up a committee ‘with the task of investigating not only the so-called underwater mines invented by the engineer I. Nobel with several devices designed for defence but also other inventions of a similar nature, which can be delivered to the committee for the same purpose, and for the consideration of his Royal Majesty’. The commodore of the fleet, P.E. Ahlgren, was appointed chair of the committee and the other members were Ludvig Anton Fahnehjelm and engineer captain E.G. Klingenstierna.57 Immanuel immediately took steps to gather support for his invention. Four days after the Mine Committee had been set up the report on his mine by Fahnehjelm and his co-authors was published in the Stockholm daily Aftonbladet. It was accompanied by a long and well-informed article signed B., in which several facts about Nobel’s activities in Russia were given, among them the report of the Russian Mine Committee, the mining of the waters at Kronstadt and Admiral Napier’s statement about his mines. It was also explained how, through the actions of the Russian government and Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, Immanuel had lost ‘the whole of his considerable fortune, accumulated with diligence and effort over twenty years’.58 The article, which concluded with the hope that Mr Nobel ‘will also now meet with the same success in his fatherland’ as in Russia, ‘but with a better result’, was quite clearly a commissioned piece designed to influence public opinion. Through his father’s inventions, Robert reported to his wife in Helsinki, the name of Nobel had by this time ‘become so famous that everyone knows about us’.59

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The detailed information in the article could only reasonably have come from the inventor himself. The fact that the article was published in the liberal Aftonbladet was no coincidence. Its editor-in-chief was the Scandinavianist and defence activist August Sohlman, whose wife was a close friend of Immanuel’s sister, Betty. Interestingly, Sohlman’s son Ragnar (1870–1948) would study to become a chemist and explosives technician, work as an assistant to Alfred Nobel and be appointed one of his executors (see Chapter 10). While the committee was working, Immanuel continued with his mine experiments and in August he carried out an explosion of a scrapped naval schooner. The main aim was to investigate how powerful the powder charges needed to be to put different types of vessel out of action.60

The initial ignition principle After many years of experimentation, in the autumn of 1863 the first foundation stone was laid of what would develop into the Nobel explosives empire. On 29 September, Alfred applied for, and on 14 October he received a Swedish patent for his method of using ‘an explosive fluid, e.g. nitroglycerine, ethyl- or methylnitrate, as an addition to gunpowder in order to obtain a greater effect from the latter’.61 The patent was valid for ten years and the usefulness of the method was put to the test only a few weeks later at the Karlsborg fortress, when Alfred and Immanuel, in the presence of military and civil experts, loaded a number of cannon and projectiles with the new gunpowder mix. However, the detonations were not as powerful as had been hoped and Alfred realized why halfway through the demonstration. The reason was that the charges had been prepared in advance, which had the effect that the nitroglycerine was soaked up by the gunpowder and the explosive effect was lessened. With the successful experiments back home in Stockholm there had only been about an hour between the mixing and the detonation. Alfred explained the situation to the onlookers, loaded a pig-iron bomb with half nitroglycerine, half gunpowder and asked them to take shelter. The detonation that followed was so powerful that the experts present explained later that such an explosive device was too risky to employ in war.62 Back at Heleneborg, Alfred tried to understand how to solve the problem of the nitroglycerine being absorbed by the gunpowder. The solution was to keep the two materials apart. Instead of letting the gunpowder surround the nitroglycerine he experimented with filling a glass tube with gunpowder, inserting a fuse and sinking it into a container with nitroglycerine. The explosion was enormous. Thus was the principle of Nobel’s ‘initial ignition’ discovered. The new method was tried out at the end of 1863 and during the first half of 1864 with rock blasting at different locations in Sweden, In June 1864, Alfred applied for a patent for ‘improvements in the preparation and employment of that powder’ that he had obtained a patent for in October 1863.63

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The discovery of the initial ignition principle by means of percussion cap or detonator is generally regarded as Alfred’s most epoch-making contribution. ‘With the invention of this so-called blasting cap, the “Initial Ignition Principle” was introduced into the technique of explosives, and this was fundamental to all later developments in the field,’ according to one expert.64 The patent was issued on 15 July 1864. Immediately afterwards a chemical laboratory was fitted out in an outhouse at Heleneborg.

The second lawsuit against the Crown During the winter of 1863–4, at the same time as the work on developing methods of preparing and detonating nitroglycerine was continuing, the future of the Nobel sea mine was in the melting-pot. Immanuel did not wait for the decision of the mine committee but instead offered to hand over his discovery in return for 8,000 kronor as an annual lifetime pension for himself or his widow. The question was taken up in Parliament, where one member also suggested that the state ought to buy 3,270 of Immanuel’s mines for the defence of Waxholm fortress. Both suggestions were turned down. Minister for War, Reuterskiöld, agreed that Immanuel’s mines could be very useful but thought it ‘nevertheless too early yet to decide on any pension payment for Mr Nobel’.65 (A few years later Ludvig tried from St Petersburg to arrange a pension from the government for his father, but he was also turned down.)66 Immanuel’s offer to sell his invention in exchange for a pension for life before the Mine Committee had finished its work testifies to his anxiety lest their report went against him, perhaps also that someone would steal his invention. On 24 November, the same day on which the Minister for War turned down his offer, he applied for a fifteen-year patent to protect it. The application included not only defensive mines but also assault mines of the type that he had earlier exhibited to the Russian defence high command. Nitroglycerine as an explosive substance is not named in the application, but the percussion cap is, as one of several methods of detonation.67 The patent application seems to have been put together in haste as it was forwarded without either a description or drawings of the mine. These were only sent in on 14 of January, although the patent regulation only allowed one month’s respite. In the letter that was enclosed with the documents, Immanuel explained that he had sought the patent ‘solely for the protection of my inventor’s rights against attempts that I fear may be made to rob me of them’. He therefore asked the National Board of Trade to see to it that ‘they may not be accessible to the public or unauthorized persons’ before the government had arrived at its decision.68 Immanuel obtained his patent on 12 March 1864, two weeks after the Mine Committee had delivered their opinion. As he seems to have suspected, things did

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not go his way. The members of the committee said that they could not recommend either Nobel’s mines or ‘another type of the same thing submitted by an unknown person’. Instead, the committee presented its own suggestion which had been drawn up ‘guided by the experience which has hereby [i.e. by the study of the submitted proposals] been gained’. As ‘compensation and remuneration’ the committee suggested that Nobel should receive 6,000 kronor and the other inventor 10,000 kronor for their ‘previously completed experiments with regard to the construction and nature of similar devices, whereby the members of the committee have been enabled without much working time and significantly greater expense to the state to achieve a satisfactory result’.69 On the basis of the committee’s suggestion the defence ministry ordered 2,400 mines, which however did not turn out to function satisfactorily.70 The Mine Committee’s members had, in other words, used the material sent to build their own mine. In that way they acted precisely as their Russian opposite numbers had done in 1840. What was this other than infringement of patent? The fact that the mine committee chose to deliver its verdict before Immanuel’s invention obtained patent protection was thus no coincidence. Their action was so shocking that it was commented on in the press. Aftonbladet found it ‘strange to see a committee which had been given the task of carrying out investigations into certain inventions putting itself forward as a rival . . . and taking advantage of the experience gained through the investigations of individual persons’ inventions even before, through purchase in due form, copyright had been obtained to these inventions’. The inventors, the paper wrote, had entrusted their ideas to the committee to be tested, not so that they could exploit them for their own ends.71 It is not hard to imagine Immanuel’s indignation at being, for the second time in his life, deceived by the state – first the Russian state, now the Swedish. He had, after all, requested the patent to protect himself against attempts to steal his invention from him, and now that was exactly what he had suffered, and by the Swedish state to crown it all! That the ‘unknown person’ he had competed with and who had been rewarded with 4,000 kronor more than himself was Carl Otto Ramstedt, his old rival from St Petersburg, hardly improved his mood. The fact that Ludvig Anton Fahnehjelm, who had spoken in such positive terms about his mines, was one of those who signed the report was such a heavy blow that on one occasion Alfred referred to him by the abbreviation ‘F-n’ (i.e. Fan, Devil).72 Immanuel’s response to the patent encroachment was to demand 20,000 kronor from the state in compensation, inclusive of the 6,000 kronor which he had already received. But all was in vain. On 19 April the government advised that, as the committee’s own mines ‘are completely different from the system reported by the engineer Nobel, in respect of the shape, material, composition and ignition as much as of the manner in which the mines are laid out and recovered’ no reason had been found to ‘give gracious consideration to Nobel’s humble petition’.73

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Against a ‘gracious decision’ signed by His Majesty in person there was of course nothing to be done. It was poor consolation for Immanuel that he had his opinion publicized in Aftonbladet, which found the Committee’s treatment of him obscene and published a long piece openly taking his part. For instance, it emerged from the receipt Immanuel had signed that he accepted the 6,000 kronor as payment and not as compensation, which means that the transaction could not be interpreted as meaning that he had relinquished his discovery.74 This time too Immanuel lost the battle against superior forces, but no one can take from him the historic credit for having been, in the words of an expert, the person who ‘sped up the development of naval mines in Sweden’.75

‘The Nobel bang’ As we have seen, Immanuel was not the kind of person to let himself be held up by setbacks; he was driven on by an unstoppable inner strength and an enquiring mind that had to be sated at any cost. After the setback with the mines, he concentrated on developing nitroglycerine for military and civil use. Emil was also now involved in the experiments. In the autumn of 1864, he was to start studying chemistry at the Royal Institute of Technology, and during the summer he helped his father and brother at Heleneborg. Immanuel was not a trained chemist and Alfred gradually realized that he could not continue under Immanuel’s control. The differences of opinion between them were significant and led to a serious conflict in which hard words were exchanged, not least from Immanuel’s side. Andriette had to take on the thankless role of mediator, but she took her son’s part. He deserved ‘least of all’ Immanuel’s reproaches and ‘the matter would still be unresolved if you had not taken it in hand’, she wrote to Alfred at the same time as she excused his father’s ‘sometimes over-hasty temper’ as ‘an Old Man’s disease’.76 The whole thing finished with Immanuel admitting that Alfred was right and allowing him to apply for the nitroglycerine patent. One of the reasons why Alfred returned to Sweden in the summer of 1863 was that he and Immanuel had different perceptions of how the experiments should be taken further. During a visit to Stockholm in May, Alfred had noted that Emil had achieved promising results, e.g. by showing that a mixture of granulated gunpowder and nitroglycerine gave a better result than when the nitroglycerine was mixed with ordinary gunpowder. Subsequently, however, according to Alfred the results were unsatisfactory, and on the morning of 3 September came the great catastrophe. The laboratory at Heleneborg blew up with a bang and a cloud of smoke that was heard and seen over the whole city. A newspaper correspondent was immediately on the spot and reported: Of the factory, which was of wood, stood immediately adjacent to the Heleneborg estate and was separated from it only by a stone wall and an

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insignificant space, there remained only a few blackened splinters, thrown hither and thither. In all the nearby houses and even in those situated on the other side of the sound were not only all the panes of glass shattered, but the window-frames, the cornices and more besides were partly torn off, partly more or less damaged. Most horrible of all was the sight of the mutilated corpses, thrown here and there. Not only were their clothes torn off, but in some of them the head was missing, the flesh of the legs sliced off – in a word, it was not normal corpses one saw, but shapeless masses of flesh and bone, which bore little or no resemblance to a human body.77 Immanuel and Alfred were at Heleneborg when the accident happened but not in the laboratory itself. Immanuel escaped unharmed while Alfred was hit by wooden splinters and fragments of glass. Among the dead were Emil and a young, newly graduated technologist, C.E. Hertzman, a female servant, a thirteen-year-old boy, who did odd jobs, as well as a joiner. Several people living in the neighbourhood were also slightly injured and windowpanes were blown out in several surrounding houses. It was Emil and Hertzman who had caused the explosion during an attempt to simplify the preparation of nitroglycerine and the incident was investigated by the police. When Burmeister the wholesaler was asked to explain how he could rent out premises for such a dangerous type of work, he stated that Immanuel ‘always assured him that there was no reason to fear any danger to persons living nearby’.

FIGURE 3.3 Heleneborg after the ‘Nobel bang’.

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FIGURE 3.4 Immanuel with sling after his stroke.

Immanuel thought the cause of the explosion was that the temperature, through carelessness, had exceeded the critical level of 180º, where nitroglycerine explodes by itself. To the question of why he had not registered his industrial plant he replied that he only carried out experiments and did not devote himself to commercial production.78 Emil was buried on 10 September. On the same day the municipal court received the results of the police authority’s preliminary investigations, in which Immanuel was charged with ‘infringement of the statutes concerning the manufacture of gunpowder’ and his landlord with ‘infringement of the building

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FIGURE 3.5 One of the few surviving photographs of Andriette, possibly taken in 1864.

regulations, as a result of which misdemeanour the prosecutor was of the opinion that they had made themselves liable for the taking of human lives’.79 The case was not settled till a year later, in November 1865. Immanuel was sentenced to pay compensation of 300 kronor for negligence and Burmeister 200 kronor for having rented out the premises without permission to an industrial plant that was a fire risk. In addition, they had to compensate those individuals injured in the accident or who had had their property destroyed.80 The accident at Heleneborg – dubbed ‘the Nobel bang’ at the time – was a terrible blow to the family. Of Immanuel and Andriette’s seven children, four were

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now dead, only the three eldest sons still being alive. Four months after the explosion, on 6 January, the family suffered yet another setback: Immanuel had a stroke which led to his left side being paralysed, but his right side was unaffected and gradually he recovered the power of speech. Most people interpreted the stroke as a consequence of the explosion and Emil’s death, but not Alfred, who instead blamed financial factors. Burmeister had clung to Immanuel ‘like a leech for compensation after the explosion’ and according to Alfred, his father had ‘been very apprehensive about the demands of this rascal’.81 According to Ludvig too, it was ‘financial worries’ that had ‘done for him’.82 Whatever the reason, Immanuel was bedridden for most of the winter and spring and unable to attend the court proceedings in person; which explained the delay in announcing the verdict. The spouses realized the seriousness of the situation and on 3 March drew up a conjoint will.83

Venus and Mercury Sometime before Immanuel’s stroke, the family had been visited by yet another misfortune. This time it was Alfred who was afflicted. ‘I must be brief because I am sitting with an inflamed eye as a result of an abscess which I neglected because of business,’ he wrote in the days before Christmas in 1864 to Robert in Helsinki, continuing: ‘The worst of all is that ‘Докторъ уверяетъ что старая Венера выскочила и счёлъ нужным свести ее с Меркурiемъ. Все это очень скучно’.’84 The Russian text, set by Alfred himself inside quotation marks, means: ‘The doctor assures that it is the old Venus that has popped up and he thought it necessary to acquaint her with Mercury. This is all extremely sad.’ Alfred’s wording may seem obscure but it was perfectly comprehensible to his contemporaries. It is a paraphrase of the English expression ‘A night with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury’. In English Mercury is not only the name of a god (or a planet) but also of quicksilver. What Alfred is saying, in Russian so that it would not be understood by anyone apart from his brother, is that he has syphilis and that the doctor prescribed the usual treatment of the time – a mercury cure. The wording ‘old Venus’ and ‘popped up’, as well as the description of his symptoms, shows that it is a case of syphilis that he had acquired earlier and that had now returned. In her book about her father, Ludvig Nobel and his Work, Marta Nobel-Oleinikoff states that ‘ever since the 1860s Alfred had carried with him some painful memories’ from St Petersburg.85 It was presumably the syphilis she was alluding to; that Robert should have been the only one in the family to have been informed about Alfred’s illness is hard to imagine. It was however a well-kept family secret. The source of the infection was in all likelihood a prostitute. Many young men of the time frequented prostitutes. One of Alfred’s contemporaries, the novelist

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FIGURE 3.6 Alfred photographed in St Petersburg around 1860.

Leo Tolstoy, writes openly in his diary about visits he paid to brothels before he married. Brothels had been legalised in Russia in 1843 and tens of thousands of women worked in them. Since, in addition to the registered brothels there were also illegal ones and many girls walked the streets, the total number of prostitutes in Russia was significantly higher than that. In the year 1869, 44.5 pre cent of the prostitutes in Moscow were syphilitic and 86 per cent of all syphilitic men had contracted the disease through intercourse with prostitutes.86 The situation in St Petersburg, known for its large number of streetwalkers, was similar if not worse. Primary syphilis expresses itself in sores on the site of the infection which heal after one or two months. Then comes the secondary stage, which usually involves skin, mucous membranes and lymph glands. As with primary syphilis, the patient is infectious by way of his sores during this stage. After three to six weeks the acute

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FIGURE 3.7 The letter in which Alfred tells Robert that his syphilis has recurred.

symptoms disappear, after which a so-called latency period begins in which the disease is suspended. This can last in all from three to fifteen years. Afterwards comes the tertiary stage, which expresses itself in symptoms from the heart, bones and the central nervous system, sometimes also in skin problems. The wording in the letter to Robert shows that Alfred’s ‘Venus’ was of the latter type: an old acquaintance which after a symptom-free period had made itself known again. Given the extent of the period of latency the occasion of the infection must have been at least three years previously, i.e. at the latest around the turn of the year 1861–2. This means that the disease may have been attracted not in St Petersburg but during Alfred’s trips abroad.

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The treatment consisted of the patient being shut in a warm room where a mercury ointment was rubbed into their body several times a day. Then the infected person was placed beside a fireplace to induce sweating. This procedure was continued for one to four weeks and during this time the patient was not allowed to leave the room. If so desired, the procedure was repeated. Hence the expression ‘a life with Mercury’. The effects of the procedure are disputed, and a not uncommon outcome was that the patient instead of being cured died of mercury poisoning. The fact that Alfred followed the doctor’s suggestion and underwent the cure is shown by the verbal tense-form – ‘thought’. If the question had still been open for discussion, he would have used the present tense, ‘thinks’. Many of the health problems with which Alfred was afflicted over the years were of such a general nature that they could very well have been syphilis-related but not necessarily so: headache (migraine), stomach pain, heart problems, mouth sores and skin eruptions, along with problems with his gums, eyes and nerves. To establish which of his complaints may have been the result of syphilis is therefore difficult and also of little interest. The important thing is that Alfred was afflicted with an illness that was deeply stigmatizing. It did not affect his intellectual capacity but his self-esteem and outlook on life, and not least his relations with the opposite sex. Syphilis at this time was a fairly common but no less a shameful illness. Even if he was cured how could he, with honour intact, think of marrying or even entering into an intimate relationship without mentioning it? Perhaps he was – or feared that he was – sterile, a less common effect of syphilis but one that did occur. Alfred was the only one of the brothers who did not marry and had no children. This, despite the fact that he was quite interested in women. As we saw, he courted Robert’s fiancée with such passion that it led to bad feeling between the brothers, and as a twenty-six-year-old he took lessons in English in St Petersburg with the aim of meeting women, although he already knew the language. He explained to Robert ‘how he is admired by women for his great successes, and for the verses he composes in their honour’. He thought that poetry would help him to ‘catch some rich and pretty girl’,87 and when Alfred was visiting St Petersburg in 1871 Pauline thought he was there to get engaged to ‘his old flame’, whoever that was.88 Alfred mixed with women, naturally, but his relationships were few and were mostly played out in the form of letters. This also applies to his only known relationship with an erotic tinge, the one with the considerably younger Sofie Hess, a distinctly Pygmalion relationship distinguished by ‘avuncular care’.89 It is reasonable to believe that Alfred also had sexual contacts after his syphilis diagnosis, but none of these involved relationships, all of which were conducted largely at a distance, by correspondence.90 Instead, his mother seems to have filled the female vacuum in Alfred’s life. Alfred was Andriette’s favourite son, something that she didn’t hide from the rest of the family. In letters he is referred to even when in his fifties as ‘my own little

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Alfred’, ‘my dearly beloved special Boy’ and so forth, and in one place she writes quite openly that he is the one among her sons ‘that I love the most’.91 It is hard not to see this gushing mother-love as an expression of sympathy with a son who had been deprived of what had been granted to his brothers, namely, family and children. The feelings were mutual. When Andriette died Alfred wrote that she ‘loved me as no one loves in our day’.92

The Nitroglycerine Company Ltd As soon as Alfred obtained the patent for his initial-ignition method in July 1864 he and Immanuel began working on introducing nitroglycerine onto the market. The explosion at Heleneborg was, of course, an unforeseen major obstacle. Alfred was therefore quick to act in his own defence and in defence of nitroglycerine. This happened by way of a long letter to Aftonbladet as early as four days after the accident. He acknowledged that it had been careless of his father ‘to manufacture a substance of such immense power in the neighbourhood of a dwelling-house’ but that they had calculated the risk to be pretty well non-existent because of the explosive’s ‘singular characteristics’. Nitroglycerine, ‘blasting oil’, can in fact be ignited without exploding and in contrast to ordinary oil goes out by itself when the source of the flame is removed. A blow from a hammer causes a powerful explosion but only just at the site of the blow, the remaining oil does not burn. In fact, according to Alfred, it is very difficult to cause a ‘total explosion’ without a complicated procedure involving an igniting mechanism. By way of explanation of why ‘a substance that is so harmless with regard to fire’ could have given rise to such an accident, Alfred pointed out that during the preparatory process his brother Emil ‘seems to have committed the unfortunate error of making a fresh attempt on too large a scale and without a thermometer’. This, even though he knew of the danger involved in heating nitroglycerine to 180º and that ‘such a heating is the only thing that makes it necessary to be careful when handling it’. According to Alfred, Emil must have experimented with raw glycerine, which on contact with the oxygen mixture had led to an increase in heat from the normal and harmless (at most 60º) to 180º. However, this mistake too would not have meant any danger if ‘the mixture, according to the directions, had immediately been poured out into cold water instead of letting the reaction continue’. The normal gunpowder that was used in the Swedish mining industry claimed many lives every year and Alfred’s hope was that the new explosive would ‘put an end to the miserable litany of the victims of mining’. Despite ‘the grief of family and friends at the losses they have suffered’ at Heleneborg, he thought, ‘from the standpoint of humanity and the national economy as regards the saving of life and effort, all the advantages are on the side of blasting oil rather than gunpowder’.93

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For Alfred it was vital to show that the Heleneborg explosion was an accident caused by a faulty handling of the explosive and not something specific to the substance itself. The plans to form a limited company must not be disturbed. To realize his business idea Alfred needed capital. Editor-in-chief Sohlman’s wife Hulda was not only Betty Elde’s close friend but was also very close to J.W. Smitt, who was her cousin on her mother’s side. In the same way as Betty had helped her nephew Robert to come to the Stockholm Brewery, she now put her other nephew in touch with the wealthy businessman. Smitt, who was something of a venture capitalist, decided despite the accident at Heleneborg to invest in Alfred’s business idea. Alfred found another partner in Carl Wennerström, a captain in the navy’s engineering corps, who led the experiments in the use of nitroglycerine with test explosions in some mines in the hinterland. The first contacts with Smitt and Wennerström had probably already taken place in the summer immediately after Alfred obtained his patent. It is hard to believe that it had been possible to arouse any enthusiasm for his business idea after the accident. The notable thing is that they chose not to withdraw from the project, something that can be put down to the potential of Alfred’s project as well as his power of persuasion. Nor did the State railway company, which took the decision to use his method in blasting out a train tunnel in Stockholm on 10 October, a good month after the explosion. As well as Smitt and Wennerström, the board of the Nitroglycerine Company Ltd. – the firm founded on 22 October 1864 and approved by the government on 11 November – also included Immanuel and Alfred, the latter as managing director. The 125 shares at 1,000 kronor each were divided up with thirty-one each to father and son and to Wennerström together with thirty-two to Smitt. The money was collected by Alfred selling his patent to the firm for 100,000 kronor (£500,000 in today’s values), which was paid in sixty-two shares and 38,000 kronor cash. Moreover, Wennerström and Smitt were to inject 25,000 kronor in working capital; whether this later commitment was carried out or not, however, is unclear. In connection with founding the company, the old schism between Alfred and his father bubbled up again. According to the company regulations, the board should consist of three directors and Immanuel insisted on being one of them, against Alfred’s will. The report that Robert, who at this time was on a visit to Stockholm, wrote to Ludvig in St Petersburg starkly illuminates the conflict between father and son: A company has been founded and I have tried to the best of my ability to persuade the old man to abstain from the position of director. I pointed out his lack of talent as a writer, speaker and chemist, and he had to admit that I was right, as well as promising not to take up this position but to stand aside in favour of Alfred. Papa is dreadful when he gets started; he can goad stones into dancing, and I certainly couldn’t stand it for as long as Alfred does. But apart

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from that, I don’t really approve of Alfred’s way of doing things. He is both too excitable and despotic, and one fine day they will be at loggerheads with each other. Just to give in to the old man won’t do either, for from a financial point of view he will ruin all the good in the business. Alfred’s position is in truth very difficult, but yet mama’s is the most pitiful, for in the interests of justice she has to take Alfred’s part and thereby put up with all kinds of unpleasantness from papa.94 The conflict was solved by a compromise: Immanuel was made a deputy member. Considering the explosion in September, which could very easily have upset everything, the formation of the company proceeded very quickly. This demonstrates the potential in the new explosive and the hopes of profit that it aroused. The problem was to get production going. If the state in the shape of the Railways Board was willing to invest in the invention, the city was all the more hesitant. After the accident, the preparation of nitroglycerine was forbidden within city limits, and it wasn’t easy to find suitable places outside the town. A solution was found in a barge that Alfred hired and that was anchored in Lake Mälaren. The local people protested, however, and the barge was forced several times to change location. ‘The world’s first industrial production of nitroglycerine undoubtedly took place with peculiar birth pains,’ as a technical expert has expressed it.95 In the winter of 1865, with money from Smitt, the Nitroglycerine Company bought a property immediately south of the city boundary, an old farm called Vinterviken. Here, a stable was fitted out as factory premises, where the nitrification apparatus was installed. At this time Alfred was not so involved in the production, devoting himself instead mainly to development work. With that in mind he had a chemical laboratory set up in a greenhouse. Since the detonator as described in the patent was not suitable for mass production he worked out a new variant, in which the test tube glass was replaced by a lead capsule filled with mercury fulminate. The advantage with this substance is that it is completely harmless when wet. It was therefore poured into the capsule in a liquid form, after which a fuse was inserted into the capsule which was then closed with pincers. This discovery meant that the detonators could be produced on an industrial scale. The fact that in principle it looks similar today is a measure of Alfred’s genius. The problem of the nitroglycerine being dangerous to store, and transport was solved by blending it with a type of sand which was very absorbent, by geologists called ‘kieselguhr’ or diatomaceous earth. The new explosive substance, which was practically risk-free to handle, was given the name ‘dynamite’, from the Greek dynamís which means ‘power’. Alfred’s plans for his discovery went far beyond the Swedish market. The Norwegian patent brought in 11,000 kronor (around 700,000 kronor today, or £55,000) and in the summer of 1865 a factory was set up at Lysaker in Norway. By that point, Alfred had moved to Hamburg from where he planned to introduce

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nitroglycerine into the rest of Europe. He had obtained the money for the expansion by selling his Norwegian patent rights to the Norwegian firm. During the following decades his product would spread over the whole world and make him a rich man. He spent most of his time travelling. It would be thirty years before he acquired a house in Sweden again. After his departure, Alfred’s seat on the board was taken up by his father, but on health grounds he could not take over his son’s role as managing director. That post went instead to Wennerström, who however left the board in the autumn of 1865 and was succeeded by a person who inflicted major losses on the company and died after only a few months. ‘We have ended up with the worst board we could ever have had and one that is shameless into the bargain,’ Immanuel reported to Alfred.96 In this situation, Immanuel succeeded, in the spring of 1866, in persuading the board to offer Robert the position of managing director, a suggestion that was supported by his brothers. According to Ludvig, Robert had no future in ‘povertystricken Finland’.97 Alfred had made over the Finnish patent rights to Robert, who since the autumn of 1864 had been running a factory making nitroglycerine on an estate outside Helsinki. There he made attempts of his own to improve the nitration process and among other things he discovered a method of cooling down the end product that lessened the risk of explosion. Robert had also been involved in the setting up of the Norwegian company. When it became known that the manufacture of explosives was to be totally forbidden in Finland, Robert chose to accept the offer of taking over the direction of the factory in Vinterviken. He got a guaranteed income of 6,000 kronor (around £30,000 today) per annum and 10 per cent of the company’s net profits, which was well over the average salary for a leader of industry at that time.98

Shared honour Even if Alfred was the more skilled chemist and the one who refined the preparation of nitroglycerine, Immanuel’s contribution was also judged significant by contemporaries. So, for example, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Letterstedt Prize for 1868 went to ‘Mr I. Nobel and his son Mr Alfred Nobel jointly, the former for his services in general in the application of nitroglycerine as an explosive, and the latter especially for his invention of dynamite’. In the original motivation Immanuel was also named as the inventor of dynamite, but Alfred succeeded in having the text re-worded. ‘. . . I think the joint award is quite justified but the way in which it was first arranged was compromising both for the Academy and for me and for Papa too, who would always have found it hard not to correct the mistake,’ he wrote to Robert, who at his request asked the Academy to change the wording.99 Made to choose between a sum of 996 kronor

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and 42 öre (£4,500 today) and a medal each (to the same value), the prize-winners chose the latter. After Andriette’s death, Alfred inherited his father’s medal, along with a note from his mother. ‘I understand very well my Mother’s intention with the note that it “belongs to Alfred Nobel”,’ he wrote to his cousin Adolf Ahlsell, who was arranging his mother’s estate after her death: ‘My Mother was aware of a few things that were unknown to the rest of the world.’100

Shavings for the benefit of the homeland For the first four months after his stroke, Immanuel was strictly confined to bed. In a couple of letters to Alfred in the spring of 1865 he reported that the movement in his hand and foot were beginning to come back, but that his rehabilitation was taking a long time as he could not afford a water cure. Although Alfred’s financial position was shaky, he sent his parents money so that they could travel to the spa resort at the town of Norrtälje, one of the most popular at the time. ‘Next to God we have my little Alfred to thank for the fact that we can be here and bathe which I cannot deny has already done us some good,’ Andriette wrote to Alfred from the spa. ‘Old Papa cannot walk a single step but he believes himself that he has become a little stronger and I also feel rather better myself.’101 At the beginning of September, Ludvig came to Heleneborg, where he saw his parents again for the first time since 1859. From his report to Robert it emerges that the water cure has done ‘Old Dad . . . no end of good’: He can move his arm and leg a bit although not enough to make use of them, but the most important and the best thing is that otherwise he is pretty well, he is in good form, has a good colour and a happy frame of mind, as well as a good appetite. All of this together means that the old boy is resigned to his fate without suffering too much as a result. For his own part he cherishes hopes of being well again and I cannot deny that I myself entertain the same glad expectation when I see him still so full of life. If God grants us success we ought to agree to meet in Sweden next year with our families to afford the old boy the joy he is longing for so much, to see all his children and grandchildren gathered around him. Mama is also the same as ever, endlessly kind and patient, thinks of everything and achieves everything. She complains a lot about her back, but nevertheless she is up and about all day.102 Andriette and her wheelchair-bound husband also spent the following two summers at the spa hotel in Norrtälje and the next year they often travelled to another health spa. If Immanuel’s body was broken his mind was as feverishly active as ever. It was not long after his stroke before ‘the little Old Man’, in Andriette’s words, began once

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more to ‘fantasize’ – ‘nor can one wonder at it, such a monotonous and anxious life as poor papa has now, to lie in bed for 4 months and even there not to be able to make a single movement without others’ help, it’s a trial of a poor old man’s patience’.103 In January 1866, Andriette complained that Immanuel was ‘now beginning to speculate a great deal about all kinds of things, setting many people to work but to my mind without any purpose naturally a consequence of the Old Man’s great activity in years gone by which now wishes to manifest itself ’.104 Despite his reduced mobility Immanuel was present in the spring of 1866 when a hilly area in Stockholm was removed by blasting in the presence of the king, the queen and other royals.105 Weak of body but restless as he was, he continued to come up with ideas. One of the most ingenious was presented at the beginning of 1870 in the brochure An attempt at the procuring of earnings for the prevention of the current forced emigration fever caused by lack thereof. It was no coincidence that the brochure came out when it did and with that title. The crop failure that afflicted Sweden in 1867–8 was devastating and led, in Immanuel’s words, to a veritable ‘emigration fever’ directed towards America. The emigration reached a climax in 1869 and the question of how to halt or reduce it and keep the labour force in the country was of the utmost relevance. With its combination of innovative thinking, social responsibility, fantasy and business sense, the brochure is typical of Immanuel. He was in fact presenting not just an idea but also suggestions as to how the setting up of a company should proceed. According to Immanuel, jobs could be created for the refining of a raw material that was both cheap and readily available, but that was now just being burnt up: the detritus from sawmills. This should instead be planed down to shavings that ‘by means of glue suitable for the purpose can be combined into a most valuable material’ that in turn could be used in the manufacture of a number of different products, everything from cigar boxes to large and small ships. It was a question partly of a sort of wood shavings pressed together so that the fibres crossed over each other, and partly items made from bent wood. Such a production would both prevent the ‘shameful plundering’ of the raw materials and give employment to the many tradesmen and women (farmers, seamen, bricklayers) who have work in the summertime ‘but during the long winter are near enough lacking their daily bread’. Some of the products could be disposed of in the domestic market while others were mainly designed for export. One good market, according to Immanuel, would be Nizhny Novgorod in Russia, where the products could be sold on to Persia and Asia. Immanuel promised to invent the machines and tools required to manufacture the products, while the operation of the new enterprise, because of his poor health, would be taken care of by other owners of the firm. Conscious of the fact that, in Robert’s words, he was no ‘writer’, he concluded his appeal for the new material with the hope that potential interested parties would pay less attention ‘to the manner of writing in which a 69-year-old paralysed old man expresses his thoughts than to the actual purpose of his writing’.

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The new material would become an international product under the name of laminated wood, but long after Immanuel’s death and not in his name. As so often earlier in his career as an inventor he was far ahead of his time. If Immanuel had got it right in terms of the material itself, the long list of sixtythree potential products was ‘a mixture of foresight and fantasy that sometimes ran riot’ – exactly like, once before, the list of rubber products.106 Among the constructive proposals was ‘portable houses’ of the type that Immanuel had formerly designed. Because of the lightness of the material, they could be delivered to far-off places, for example the Suez Canal, which had recently been opened and whose shores were in the process of being populated. When the demand in Egypt lessened, the same type of house could be erected by the Panama Canal (which was in the planning stage but had not yet begun to be built). As the houses were portable they had obvious advantages in expansive areas like those by the canals. In the case of Egypt, Immanuel suggested that pipes could be manufactured that would convey water under the ground to the desert. Among the stranger products on the list was a coffin that ‘could be so arranged that a person who had been prematurely buried could himself lift the lid from inside, the lid having essential airholes for breathing and a bell-pull connected to a signalbell’. However, the idea that someone prematurely buried could attract attention with the aid of a bell was not new. So-called ‘safety-coffins’ of different types had been around since the end of the eighteenth century and in 1829 the German doctor, Johann Gottfried Taberger, suggested a similar construction: if the corpse moved, strings fastened to the head, legs and arms would ring a bell by the tomb. The fear of being buried alive was popular at this time and was also described in literature, for example in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial (1844).107 It was shared by Alfred, who in his will provided that his arteries should be cut after his death and that ‘clear signs of death’ should be attested by ‘competent doctors’ – which was in fact done. The reason for this precaution was, according to Alfred, that ‘in our family there is a tendency for physiological reasons to apparent death’.108 Examples or rumours of apparent death should thus have been part of the family history. What grounds Alfred had for this claim is unknown. The novelty with Immanuel’s coffin equipped with a bell pull was thus not the idea itself but the material, that it could be made from wood shavings. Specimens of items made from shavings under Immanuel’s supervision were exhibited at craft associations and agricultural societies and, according to one newspaper report, won ‘justified recognition’.109 Among the papers Immanuel left behind there is a detailed draft of a contract between himself and a companion, Gustaf Gabriel Bengtsson Oxenstierna, who was to invest in the project in return for being allowed to share in the patent. A number of pencil sketches are preserved but no finished drawings, and no patent application was ever made; perhaps, as Ludvig had hinted some years earlier in a letter to Robert, ‘the old man’s power to carry things through’ was simply at an

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end.110 It emerges, nevertheless, from the archival material that has been preserved that ‘boxes, tubes together with a photograph of a ship made of shavings’ were intended to be shown at the great Polytechnic Exhibition in Moscow in the summer of 1872.111 The wood shavings project was Immanuel’s last invention. As usual, constructive projects co-existed in his fizzing brain with ideas which at best can be described as imaginative, at worst simply bizarre. Whether or not these should be seen to be a consequence of his stroke is, however, uncertain. The illness does not seem to have affected Immanuel’s intellect and he had come up with fantastic projects in the past, for example the trained and torpedo-bearing seals. The correspondence between Immanuel and Alfred during the years when Immanuel was ill also show that the father not only followed with interest and engagement the economic development of the Nitroglycerine Company but also put forward technical suggestions regarding the manufacturing. He also negotiated, independently of Alfred, with the Austrian government about patents for dynamite.112 When Teknisk Tidskrift (The Technical Journal) began to appear in 1870 he was not slow in subscribing to it to be able to follow international developments in technical matters. The articles were pasted with pedantic precision into a clippings book.113 One of the most imaginative projects during Immanuel’s final years was his ‘Thoughts regarding the future of northern Sweden and Finland’. Because of the mountain chain between Nordkap, the northernmost point in Norway, and Norrland, the northernmost province in Sweden, Sweden and Finland have a more severe climate than Norway. If part of the Gulf Stream could be made to flow through Lapland the southern part of the Gulf of Bothnia could be warmed up like the Atlantic. Just as there had been serious discussion about a tunnel between England and France, according to Immanuel it was equally plausible to excavate a canal under the mountain ridge from North Norway to the Baltic. The biggest and most expensive obstacle was the mountain ridge, but with the discovery of nitroglycerine and new methods of boring, hewing and cutting stone, according to Immanuel, blasting the mountain ought to be cheaper than digging out a canal on the Swedish side. The three countries that would gain from the canal could also be expected to contribute to the costs. If moreover convicts, ‘of whom there is unfortunately such a rich supply’ were used in the works ‘they could afford the State a clear profit in place of the damage they now cause’. Guarding the prisoners would become easier as soon as they had blasted their way sufficiently far into the mountain. As well as benefit to the climate the canal project also had commercial advantages: ‘The northern wilderness would thereby yield riches, through the large amounts of ore that could then be supplied from several places. The northern region might therefore become for Sweden what the Urals and certain parts of Siberia are for Russia, namely, its goldmine.’114 ‘The old man is writing to me with some incredible ideas,’ Alfred reported to Robert. ‘He should make less of a fuss for he definitely needs to rest, otherwise he

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will lose his mind altogether.’115 If the aim was to stir up ‘passion for that poor country [= Finland]’, Alfred himself believed more in ‘tiled stoves and beautiful eyes’.116 Like so many of Immanuel’s projects this too was a mixture of fantasy and realism. The very idea of leading the Gulf Stream to the Gulf of Bothnia must be assigned to the former category. However, the idea of the commercial advantages for ore exports that a transport route between Sweden and Norway would bring was not so wild. It became reality in 1903, when the ore line between Kiruna and Narvik was opened. Among other late projects we must mention one that is sketched out in a letter from Immanuel to Alfred in the autumn of 1871. ‘I have things that I want to discuss with you before my last hour dawns so that anything effective or useful in what I have thought up and in a small way carried out through experiments may not be lost for society at large,’ he wrote: ‘I do hope that the black diamonds – the procurement of which together with the electric apparatus I have burdened you with – will be of a usable nature for particularly large enterprises, properly used with the help of natural forces that are always available,’ i.e. wind and water.117 The project, we may suppose, had to do with the new technique of boring through mountains which had its breakthrough at the same time as the nitroglycerine and which used ‘black’ diamonds inserted into the point of the drill, but what it involved in concrete terms is unknown.118 Also dating from the same time is a method of warming up rooms with a lamp ‘expressly constructed for the purpose’ and which he described to both Alfred and J.W. Smitt.119 Many of Immanuel’s most ingenious inventions had, as we have seen, a military application. This is also true of an idea he lists in a memorandum of possible future projects, namely ‘a method of spreading death or infectious diseases by touching certain objects which one can calculate that the enemy will touch, after invading the country, so cheap that the cost of each piece will not exceed 5 farthings’.120 A chemical or biological weapon, in other words. A mysterious form of words in a late letter to Alfred belongs in the same genre. Immanuel writes that he wants to sell his American shares to ‘get cash in hand to carry through things that would afford me the opportunity to become Dictator of war and peace [Immanuel’s italics] for the whole world at least for the next few centuries’. He is planning to tell Alfred how this can be accomplished next time they see each other.121 It was similar dictatorial ideas, coloured by delusions of grandeur, that made Alfred, in a letter to Robert, to note that ‘The old man is upsetting as best he can everything that is called the art of war and experimenting with burning the seas and lakes and thereby acquiring supplies of fuel that the Creator himself might envy him’. Their father had money from both Alfred and Ludvig and, Alfred added ironically, there was a risk that the experiment would show that this was ‘consumed more easily than the inflammable water’.122

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‘One of the men representative of their century’ Immanuel Nobel died at Heleneborg on 3 September 1872 at the age of seventyone – eight years to the day after the explosion. His death must have occurred suddenly – only a few weeks earlier he and Andriette had stayed at a health resort. He was buried in the New Churchyard (now the Northern Burial Ground) on 11 September. According to the newspapers one of his sons was present – presumably Alfred, who according to his own account was staying in Stockholm in September, or possibly Ludvig, who arrived in Stockholm on 10 August to demonstrate a machine-gun for the Swedish military leadership.123 Immanuel’s death received a great deal of attention in the Stockholm papers and his life’s achievements were unanimously applauded. Given that he lacked theoretical education ‘one must be astonished by a mind that was able to solve the hardest problems and find the key to secrets that the deepest studies have tried in vain to investigate’, Aftonbladet wrote, adding, with reference to nitroglycerine: Short-sighted people have rejected this discovery because of the damage that has resulted from it. However, it is certain that this discovery alone is sufficient to preserve Nobel’s memory for posterity, in particular since his son Alfred has succeeded in making this incredibly powerful explosive less dangerous by giving the liquid oil a solid form, which explosive, under the name of dynamite, has now been adopted over pretty well half the earth and which undoubtedly, of its kind, belongs among one of the century’s most important inventions.124 Immanuel, who – apart from the successful time in St Petersburg – had struggled throughout his life with financial problems, died, if not rich, far from poor. Of the original thirty-one shares in the Nitroglycerine Company he had been forced to sell six, but at his death he had twenty-five left. They were worth 1,000 kronor each and represented the greater part of his estate, which revealed a balance of 28,701 kronor, £120,000 today. His debts amounted to only about 4,000 kronor and his loose cash was valued at 3,575 kronor, which says something about Immanuel and Andriette. The family lived a simple and unostentatious life. According to his biographer Henrik Schück, Immanuel was ‘diligent to a fault, and the work interested him in and for itself, more than the financial profit’.125 The letters show that both Immanuel and Andriette were heavily involved in the affairs of the Nitroglycerine Company. Yet any profits would be used to finance new discoveries, not for private consumption. This was, as we shall see, an attitude that would be inherited by their sons. There are many testimonials to Immanuel’s and Andriette’s sense of humour, generosity and loving consideration for their sons. Without any proper schooling themselves they made a point of obtaining good teachers for them, brought them up

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to a life in work and involved them from an early age in the family business. Immanuel knew what problems deficient education and poor theoretical knowledge could cause and wanted to give their sons a better grounding. His last letter to Alfred, written on Boxing Day 1871, ended with a form of words that were a good reflection of the relationship between the Nobels and their, at this point, successful children: ‘Sending you a hearty embrace, the last one for the year, from your old parents, who rejoice to have such sons who are just a source of joy to us and never sorrow.’126 How should Immanuel Nobel’s achievements be assessed? He was a person with an unusually wide-ranging and rich talent. He started working life as an assistant architect, but it was not as an architect that he distinguished himself – the houses he designed show no signs of any originality – but as a building technician, problem-solver and inventor. Immanuel was a born mechanikus, and he made his great contributions in mechanics. He was, in Henrik Schück’s words, ‘a real natural genius, who without actual technical education, solely through his inborn ability, became a significant inventor’. Immanuel’s problem was that, on account of his deficient education, he could not always ‘distinguish the wild ideas from those that were practically feasible’ and he ‘did not always take sufficient heed of possible difficulties and actual obstacles’.127 At the same time, it was because of this that, despite serious setbacks, he never gave up but was active to the very last. He was ‘one of the men representative of their century, who inherited nothing from the previous century apart from an inherent spiritual strength with which they were able themselves to generate what made the nineteenth century rich and productive’.128 Immanuel Nobel was in essence an eighteenth-century man, for whom all horizons were open and nothing seemed impossible. At the same time, he was undoubtedly a difficult person to live with. He was good-natured and generous with a sense of humour and was very much a family man, but at the same time he was choleric, moody, impetuous, unwilling to compromise, touchy and hyperactive. Today his nature would surely have been described with the help of a combination of letters. That the load that Andriette had to carry was sometimes unbearably heavy emerges from letters and other evidence. In the year 1867 the writer Josefina Wettergrund, pen-name Lea, wrote a poem on the occasion of Immanuel’s and Andriette’s fortieth wedding anniversary.129 Andriette, she writes, draws out ‘from the rich recesses of the heart / A fragrant rose for every new-born day’ – But behind the leaf a thorn itself conceals, In silence she withholds it for herself, And often thus a wound she covers up, Whose depth and pain none other gets to see.130 Yet, most of the evidence points to Immanuel’s and Andriette’s marriage being on the whole a good one. On each trip to Rosendal they stopped to view the little

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house beside the palace where once Immanuel had proposed to her. The last time was on 1 May 1872, a few months before Immanuel’s death. ‘They looked at the place with such delight, the Old Man had tears of happiness in his eyes and spoke about how lucky he had been throughout his life by the side of his dear and never sufficiently appreciated Old Girl,’ Pauline reported to Robert. ‘The dear little Old Girl looked so deeply contented with all the praise that her admiring Old Man was doling out to her.’131 Immanuel’s and Andriette’s life together had been extraordinarily eventful. Andriette had brought up their children for five years on her own in difficult circumstances while her husband was in Åbo and St Petersburg. A successful career in Russia had then ended in an unjust and degrading bankruptcy that robbed the family of their fortune and split it geographically. Not only the adults in the family had experienced this, but their sons too, from their earliest years. The experience of having jointly lived through these privations and setbacks was the force that welded the family together so strongly. The relationship of Robert, Ludvig and Alfred to their – to judge from all accounts – genuinely good mother was touchingly affectionate. On her birthday on 30 September, she could almost always count on seeing all or some of her sons present. ‘Mama was just her usual self, unchanged, lovable and gentle like a lovely twilight in the evening after a sunny summer’s day,’ Ludvig reported to Alfred in the summer of 1883, shortly before their mother’s eightieth birthday.132 These feelings were reciprocated in the highest degree. ‘My lads are the best sons you could find,’ Andriette assured one of her friends.133 The boys’ feelings for their genius of a father were naturally more complicated but were characterized by respect and a deep and honest desire to obtain redress for him for past injustices. In their stated ambition to become rich and successful there was a strong and clear element of desire for revenge. As soon as they got their finances in order, they did what they could to make their parents secure in their old age. The correspondence with them was for the most part open, but certain letters were delivered in person to ‘dear little Mama’ – they contained money meant for their parents’ household expenses, for which Andriette was responsible. ‘The Old Man,’ they knew, would find it difficult to accept the contributions or alternatively would use them for his experiments. A typical letter (from Ludvig to Robert) reads: ‘I am not thank God in such a position these days that I need to deprive myself of anything at the same time as I make their life at least bearable, if I cannot make it happy. I assure you therefore, dear Robert, that just the thought that the old folk are having problems is far harder for me to bear than the expenditure of some thousands of kronor a year.’134 Thanks to her sons’ generosity their mother could live out her years of widowhood without financial worries, but she held on to her simple ways. Alfred’s suggestion that he and Ludvig should make her a present of a horse-drawn carriage received a sceptical response from his brother: ‘The old lady, not being used to

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spending large sums on herself, would likely end up finding the upkeep a burden and the pleasure more expensive than it’s worth.’135 The horse and carriage were bought, but their mother seldom used it on her own account but instead put it at the disposal of those who needed it more.136 Andriette stayed on at Heleneborg until the house acquired a new owner in 1874. A few years later in 1878 Ludvig thought about buying her a villa, but those plans came to nothing. Instead, his mother rented an apartment in the centre of Stockholm.137 She died on 7 December 1889, at the age of eighty-six. The funeral took place nine days later in the presence of Robert and Alfred and other family members. The newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that ‘seldom, surely, has a better relationship existed between mother and sons than was the case here’.138 The fact that the death was reported in the press reflects the position that the Nobel family occupied in the general consciousness. When Andriette died, she was a rich woman, with a fortune of 840,000 kronor, £4 million in today’s values.139 Alfred, her favourite son, used 50,000 (around £240,000 today) of his inheritance to set up the Caroline Andriette Nobel foundation for experimental research at the Karolinska Institute in his mother’s memory. The foundation still exists today.140 Between the 28,701 kronor in Immanuel’s estate and the large inheritance that Andriette left behind lay the exceptional business successes of the three sons in Western Europe and Russia. The latter in particular would have gladdened Immanuel, who was the one who laid the foundations of the Russian business. In fact, Immanuel’s place in Russian industrial history is equal to his standing in the industrial history of Sweden, if not more so. It was in Russia that Immanuel had his big breakthrough as an inventor and factory owner, it was there that he spent the longest continuous period of his adult life, two decades, and it was there that his sons continued and completed his work. Not only Ludvig, who had remained in St Petersburg, but also Robert, who returned there in 1870, and Alfred, who settled in France but contributed financially to the family’s Russian businesses. It is time to turn our attention back to Russia.

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PART TWO

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4 LUDVIG

When Immanuel left St Petersburg in July 1859 he left his three sons ‘2,000 roubles each, his friends and a good reputation’.1 That corresponds to about 40,000 Swedish kronor today each. Ludvig and his family lived on the Petersburg side, but exactly where is unclear – possibly in their family home which had now become empty or even in a neighbouring house. Robert rented an apartment on the Liteyny Prospekt on the other side of the River Neva.2 For a while in 1861 Alfred also lived there, so that they could share the expenses. The generational shift meant that the Nobel family’s work in Russia entered a new phase. From having been an immigrant Swedish family they were now a family of Russian industrialists – albeit with strong links to Sweden. The most important role in this process of change was played by Ludvig, who in contrast to his father was not only an inventor and factory-owner but also gave evidence of a significant analytical ability and a strong commitment to industrial and social issues. In the same year that Immanuel left the field Ludvig published two articles in the Zhurnal aktsionerov (Shareholders’ Journal) in which he discussed the challenges that the industrially under-developed Russian nation faced. One of them had the title ‘On the slow pace of development in the Russian workshop sector,’ the other ‘Some thoughts about the present state of Russian industry’.3 Ludvig here gives an account of the more recent history of the Russian workshop sector, from the period before the Crimean War to the situation at the present day, and suggests measures needed for development. These include, he believes, contributions not only of a political-economic nature but also from the school and education sector. Before the Crimean War, according to Ludvig, there was no real workshop industry in Russia, even if there were individual factories. Their operation was almost wholly dependent on government orders and production was therefore irregular. Another explanation for the weak development could be sought in the customs regulations. As no workshop machinery was manufactured in Russia such imports were allowed in free of customs duty. Foreign metals on the other hand, as

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FIGURE 4.1 Ludvig.

we have seen, had almost prohibitive duties imposed on them, all intended to protect the ageing and inefficient ironworks in the Urals, originating from the seventeenth century. When the harbours were blockaded during the Crimean War and imports were stopped, orders from the Ministry of the Navy ensured that simple forges developed

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into large machine shops. Within the space of two years steam engines were built for three liners, two frigates, fourteen corvettes and 100 gunboats. According to Ludvig, this showed that there was no need to import machines but that they could be built in Russia. After the war, however, most businesses went back to ordering machines from abroad. Partly because the Russian iron, which was not exposed to competition, was expensive, and because orders had to be placed a year in advance, without a guarantee that delivery would take place in time. From England, on the other hand, everything could be obtained in two months. Ludvig’s conclusion was simple: for a workshop industry to develop and survive in Russia foreign machinery must have customs duties imposed and import duties on raw materials must be lowered. The new workshops that would be built after the customs duties were changed would not, according to Ludvig, be state owned but would be owned by private individuals and could be run without complicated commitments to render accounts. They should be developed in free competition and the state’s role should be limited to contributing with loans for start-up capital. As examples Ludvig pointed to Finland and Sweden, where Järnkontoret (the trade organization for the Swedish steel industry), with scientists and foundry-owners in its leadership, saw to the education of people in schools and in foundries, rewarded inventions and lent out money at low interest rates. The workshop industry’s other great problem was the lack of trained indigenous workers. ‘Most of the foremen are Germans, Swedes and Finns; no Russians as far as the eye can see.’ The problem could only be solved by the abolition of serfdom (a reform that had already begun to be planned and that was carried out two years later). It was above all from this social class that the workshop industry’s labour force would be able to be recruited, but as most peasants were illiterate, they would never get beyond the level of apprentices. Russia’s youth, according to Ludvig, should have the opportunity of an elementary school education, if possible, in connection with the factories. No one would be forced to attend school, but the factory-owners would be obliged to give those who wanted to study leave from work for the necessary number of hours. Partly, the articles were based on Nobel & Sons’ own experiences. The steam engines for liners that Ludvig cited as examples of positive achievements were, as we have seen, built by them. The idea that the future workshop industry should rest in private hands and that the role of the state should be restricted to that of a lender was a logical conclusion given the state’s treatment of Nobel & Sons after the end of the Crimean War. Ludvig was of course not alone in his ideas about customs tariffs. Free trade as against protectionism was a question that was debated energetically during those years, and not without result. The policy changed gradually in the direction of reduced tariffs. In 1861 import duties on cast-iron and pig-iron for workshops with steam engines were abolished and in 1864 they were abolished for all machine factories specializing in the manufacture and repair of machine parts, ships,

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bridges etc.4 In contrast to Immanuel’s last years in St Petersburg, the Russian state once again began to encourage domestic manufacturers.

The Ludvig Nobel Machine Factory In the first years after the liquidation, Ludvig had the company of his brothers in St Petersburg, who were just as interested as he was in the ‘lawsuit against the Crown’ being crowned with success. In Robert’s case, moreover, his marriage plans were dependent on the factory being saved so that he would be able to provide for his future wife. It emerges from the surviving correspondence that Robert as well as Alfred fought at Ludvig’s side to keep the factory afloat by, among other things, chasing up orders. As we saw, in 1861, when they lost the case, Robert moved to Helsinki and two years later Alfred moved to Stockholm. Ludvig stayed behind. Despite his youth – at the time of the bankruptcy he was thirty years old – he had earned a good name in St Petersburg business circles. Instead of leaving Russia, on 1 October 1862 he leased a small mechanical workshop situated opposite the old factory, on the other shore of the Great Nevka, the ‘Viborg side’, with the address Great Nevka Quay 15. Ludvig’s start-up capital was 5,000 roubles (around £8,000 today).5 The factory had been founded in 1849 by the Englishman John Isherwood and since 1855 had been run by his son. It consisted of a foundry, a mechanical workshop and an assembly shop as well as a dry dock for repairs to small ships, but at this point in time it was badly run-down. The site also contained a grey-painted one-storey house of around 200 square metres, built a few years earlier. Ludvig now moved there with his family, which in the week before taking over the lease of the factory had been enriched with a son, ‘a fine boy, a first-class screamer’.6 He was given the name of Carl and would come to play an important role in the history of the machine factory. The Viborg side, like the St Petersburg side, was dominated by industrial sites. It was a small world and the Isherwood and Nobel families had lived and worked within sight of each other for a decade or so. That they also met privately can be seen, among other things, from the fact that Alfred sent one of his poems to Mrs Isherwood, who replied with a complimentary letter.7 Next to the Isherwood factory were the large König sugar factory and Lessner’s machine shop, founded in 1853 and specializing in printing presses, factory machines and steam engines. The Nobels’ friend and patron, Carl August Standertskjöld, also owned a property in the immediate neighbourhood. ‘I hope you will be pleased to hear that I have broken free of the old Factorysourdough . . . in order to establish myself in my own right,’ Ludvig wrote to Robert on 1/13 October 1862, just as the latter was about to move to Stockholm for his brewery studies. ‘I have rented Isherwood’s factory from him and hope to make my

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way – if God only helps me not to have to get into debt – one should avoid the first debt in business like the first quarrel in a marriage.’8 In the beginning, Ludvig’s factory specialized in iron ovens, heating radiators, water pipes and other products for civilian use. Like his father, Ludvig and his engineers also drew and constructed the machines that made them: planes, boring machines, milling machines and more besides, as well as steam hammers and hearths for the foundry. After a few years the factory also resumed manufacture of wheels and cart axles, which had once been Immanuel’s speciality. The wheels, with hermetically sealed wheel bosses (part of the hub) that stopped sand and other dirt from penetrating, were soon in great demand because of the inferior carriageways in Russia, not only in the country areas but also in the capital, where only a few streets in the centre were laid with wooden blocks or asphalt while the rest consisted of rough cobblestones. When many years later, in 1882, the factory was granted the right to display the Russian national coat of arms on signs and products it was for ‘a broad development of machine industry, special production of mechanical tools of high quality . . . together with the exquisite workmanship of wheel-axles, wheel-rings and other carriage parts of Russian iron, leading to imports from abroad ceasing entirely’.9 In the early years, however, Ludvig was short of working capital and was constantly forced to chase new orders – there is ‘a lot of trouble and running about before one gets something new to do and gets this new thing under way’.10 He was therefore careful with his expenditure. On one occasion when he spent 1,000 roubles to buy paraffin on Robert’s behalf, he urged his brother to manage his lighting-oil project in Finland ‘with the utmost ardour and prudence’ so as not to involve Ludvig in losses that he would not be able to handle. According to Ludvig, it was the machine factory that had the best prospects among the family’s enterprises: ‘However it may be with all Papa’s and Alfred’s prospects, it cannot be denied that the only sure thing is the little business that I have, and if it is neglected, or if I deprive myself of the so absolutely essential little working capital I have so that the thing comes to a standstill, then for sure the outlook for all of us will be quite dire.’11 ‘Success encourages the Nobels more than adversity,’ Ludvig noted a year or so after taking over Isherwood’s factory. ‘We have now had to put up with so much out in the world that it’s about time the wind changed – if not exactly a following wind, then at least so that one does not always have to beat to windward.’12 When the wind did change some years later it came once again from the military, just as in Immanuel’s time. And it was following. The Ministry of War was led by the capable and technically competent general Dmitri Milyutin, whose aim was to make the country independent of supplies of foreign weapons. This meant that, among other things, the Russian machine shops were tasked with manufacturing grenades in chilled pig-iron (a new technique), which otherwise were imported from Germany. The projectile that Ludvig produced turned out to be not only superior to the German one but also cheaper to produce. ‘I have a great deal to do and am working

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every day like a manual labourer, for I have bombs to mould and one has to keep on working until the thing is underway,’ he reported in March 1864.13 Despite a successful first delivery of 13,100 grenades it took until the autumn of 1865 before Ludvig obtained more orders from the government. One reason was that one of his rivals offered 33 per cent less than Ludvig’s tender.14 The fact that Ludvig had a problem with competition was because he had difficulty getting loans against zalogi, i.e. bank securities. ‘You are perhaps surprised that I have had such difficulty obtaining zalogi,’ he wrote to Robert, ‘but you don’t know how many vacillators there are here . . ., who make use of zalogi simply in order to get money in hand and to exist only on credit, and who thereby ruin credit for others.’ His own talent for obtaining zalogi was, Ludvig added, as poorly developed as his talent for music.15 The fact Ludvig finally obtained an order was because he had another weapon in his arsenal – quality and guaranteed delivery. These were important arguments in his dealings with the state, which, like before, was the only major source of orders that could be counted on in Russia. ‘You know,’ he wrote to Robert, from my oral utterances that I do not regard civil servants as more fundamentally honest now than in former times, but that their interests are now managed in many other ways. Against all of this we have only one expedient, that is to see to it that the Crown receives a truly good and irreproachable performance [from us], and that the civil servants are satisfied. Therein lies our only true interest and our best security for the future.16 Until 1867, Ludvig’s machine factory produced a further 50,000 grenades on commission from the Artillery Committee. At the same time gun shields of steel were being produced – during the years 1866–78 to a total of almost 8,000.17 Despite the large order the machine factory continued operating without any noticeable profit. Ludvig wrote to Robert on 1 January 1866 that he was still short of money and was only just ‘getting along’.18 Yet 1866 was the year when everything changed and two months later, he reported that he was ‘beginning to approach rather brighter prospects money-wise’. Now he could help Robert with the loans he had refused him earlier and he paid Robert’s last outstanding bill for 1,000 roubles.19

From muzzle-loaders to breech-loaders When the Nobels’ luck finally turned it was because of war-related events in Europe with a German signature. In 1864, Prussia grabbed Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark and in 1866 Austria saw itself besieged. In the wake of this German expansionist politics, several European states, including Russia, began to look over their arsenals of weapons. The most revolutionary change in the arms industry

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during these years was the conversion of muzzle-loaders to breech-loaders, or ‘firing-pin rifles’. The new method of loading was simpler and meant that the shot could be fired more quickly. Firing-pin rifles were also of smaller calibre, which made both them and the cartridges lighter. Just as in the rest of Europe, the stock of weapons in Russia was full of old muzzle-loaders, a type of rifle that had demonstrated its ineffectiveness during the American Civil War. The task facing the military leadership of the country was thus a double one: partly to convert old muzzle-loaders to breech-loaders, partly to decide which type of firing-pin rifles to bet on in future. All over the world inventors and armourers were working to refine the new technique. The conversion of 270,000 Russian muzzle-loaders began in 1867. That was roughly the same time that the change-over was carried through in other countries, among them France and Sweden. Orders were given out to several factories. Ludvig Nobel’s order was for 80,000 rifles while an order for 50,000 went to Carl August Standertskjöld, who was head of the arms factory in Tula that he rented from the state.20 ‘I have recently taken on a very considerable piece of work on the conversion of rifles and this requires so much money that I am obliged to employ all my resources for the purchase of machines and materials,’ Ludvig reported to Robert, adding that he hoped ‘to make a good profit from the enterprise’.21 For the conversion of the old rifles the Artillery Committee chose a system that had been constructed by the German Johannes Carle and further developed by the Bohemian weapons technician Sylvestr Krnka. Ludvig’s factory further refined Krnka’s mechanism by, among other things, making the chamber of phosphor bronze – a material that Ludvig knew well from manufacturing taps and other components for his heating systems. Phosphor bronze is an alloy with great durability and good mechanical qualities, but special machine tools were required for working it. Ludvig now had precision turning lathes produced in his own workshop. It was the first time that bronze had been formed by machine in Russia and success was not long in coming. Ludvig received orders for turning lathes for the three state-owned arms factories in Tula, Izhevsk and Sestroretsk (Sw. Systerbäck), where they were to replace the earlier British ones. The turning lathe was entirely Ludvig’s invention, from drawing to finished product. He also supervised the work down to the smallest detail. This all-embracing control of the production process was Ludvig’s distinguishing feature and in time would come to be seen as a guarantee of quality.

Vladimir Baranovsky Ludvig was a prominent inventor, engineer and designer, but of course the successes of the factory were not solely down to himself and his knowledge and capabilities. He knew how to surround himself with the leading experts in

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mechanics and weapon technology. Most of them were brought in from Sweden, some from Swedish-speaking Finland: during the years 1862 to 1887, thirty-two of the engineers and four of the department heads were Swedes.22 Among his trained personnel there were, with a few exceptions, no Russians. One of them, on the other hand, was a brilliant engineer: Vladimir Baranovsky (1846–79). Baranovsky was born and brought up in Helsinki, where his father Stepan was a professor of Russian language. The father was a man of extraordinary talents: a polyglot, statistician, historian, hygienist. He was also an inventor and from the age of eleven Vladimir was allowed to accompany his father on his foreign travels, for

FIGURE 4.2 Some of the arms factory’s leading men posed by Baranovsky’s mitrailleuse (breech-loading machine gun). Sitting from left Vladimir Baranovsky and the factory’s managing director Harald Berg (1872–88). Among the others can be seen, standing left, Ernst August Hülphers and Ludvig (on extreme right).

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example, to Paris to learn about the latest discoveries regarding pneumatic motors. At the age of fifteen Vladimir helped his father to construct a pneumatic engine and when he was sixteen he took part in designing a submarine powered by compressed air. Thanks to his father, then, Vladimir received a solid technical grounding to base himself on, but he never passed any examinations. This may well have impressed Ludvig, who also lacked certificates and was convinced that practical work was preferable to formal qualifications. ‘I see usefulness only in that education that achieves something, and sometimes I find it necessary to take my boys out of school to make them work in the factory.’23 After several years in a rival machine shop Vladimir was taken on in 1867 by Ludvig and was given the job of producing a Russian breech-loader. Vladimir Baranovsky became best known for his quick-firing gun. In 1863, Ludvig had recommended to the authorities the machine gun that Immanuel had developed and that went under the name of ‘multiplicator’, but without gaining a hearing. Instead, the government decided in 1870 to invest in the American engineer Richard Gatling’s model. The manufacturing was entrusted to Ludvig, who by this point had established a solid reputation as an engineer and maker of firearms. Baranovsky’s gun was a further development of Gatling’s – a six-barrelled machine-gun that was considerably lighter than the American’s and that fired up to 300 rounds a minute. There are striking similarities between the Baranovsky and Nobel families as regards talent, education (or rather lack of it) and the concentration on weapon technology. However, there is also a more sinister parallel. Just as Immanuel had lost his son during an experiment, so Stepan Baranovsky lost his during a test firing in St Petersburg in 1879; when Vladimir was about to load the gun the projectile fired prematurely and he died on the spot.

The Russian Technological Society As we saw, the Nobels’ financial fortunes had already begun to turn in 1866, when Ludvig reported that he was beginning to approach ‘rather brighter prospects money-wise’. The following year the family left their one-storey wooden house and moved into a newly-built stone house in the factory precincts. During the next few years Ludvig Nobel’s mechanical workshop and gun factory – that was the official designation –expanded substantially and both his own finances and those of the firm stabilized. This meant that in the spring of 1870 Ludvig could at last buy Isherwood’s factory, which he had been leasing since 1862, as well as two adjacent plots, including that belonging to Standertskjöld. It contained several two-apartment dwelling houses of wood designed by Theodor Mellgren (see below) and one of brick.24 ‘I got the whole lot for about 140 to 150 thousand,’

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he reported to Robert in Stockholm. ‘As I allowed myself to take that much capital from the business you can see that my affairs are going not too badly.’25 One token of the factory’s success and Ludvig’s personal status within the Russian machine industry was that he was elected a permanent member of the Russian Technological Society when it was founded in 1866. The society, which in 1874 was granted the title of Imperial Russian Technological Society, was one of the many associations founded in the wake of Alexander II’s reforms in the 1860s. Despite the rapid industrial development that Russia underwent during these years machinery, as we have seen, was in most cases imported from abroad. Of the sixteen steam engines that plied Russia’s first railway, between St Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo, for example, only two were built in Russia. In the same way there was a lack of a forum where engineers, leaders of industry and other persons with experience of the factory floor could exchange opinions with academics and people in authority and in the best cases even influence economic policy. The Russian Technological Society was created on the initiative of specialists in the civil and military spheres of activity, among them several professors at St Petersburg university, and it was planned as such a forum. As a foreigner, Ludvig could not join in as one of the official founders but he was one of the Society’s most zealous promoters. It cannot be ruled out that his ideas about the need for an institution on the lines of the Swedish Järnkontoret (see above) may have informed its design and purpose. Ludvig was also one of the Society’s most active members and over the years delivered several lectures dealing with engineering as well as organizational and political-economic issues. The lectures were always listened to, a member recalled, ‘with rapt attention, both because of [Ludvig’s] talent and expressive language and because of the lecturer’s solid and deep knowledge of his subject, which always concerned some urgent question in the technology industry’.26 Ludvig also participated in several of the Society’s committees: on child labour, excise duty on paraffin, the development of the oil industry, the drawing up of regulations for railway schools, research into lubricating oils, and more besides. In addition, he made many donations of money, particularly for educational purposes. In most cases the gifts were anonymous. The first lecture was held in 1866 and the subject was ‘Machine forming castiron’. Other lectures had titles like ‘On the importance of government orders for the development of the private engineering industry’ (1874), ‘On the reasons for the stagnation in our engineering industry’ and ‘On the necessity of taking correct precautionary measures for the development of the mining industry’ (both in 1875). Ludvig was constantly at the cutting edge of development; he saw the problems and suggested solutions, sometimes long before they became reality. As early as 1875, for example, he was emphasizing the need to introduce the metric system in Russia, whose measures and weights (‘verst’, ‘pud’, etc.) were different from those of other countries. For four years, through the agency of Axel Gadolin, a member of the Academy of Sciences, Ludvig made anonymous annual donations

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of 5,000 roubles to the Society, which meant that the committee investigating the introduction of the metric system could finish its work; only in 1899 was there a ruling from the government and the reform was not introduced until after the revolution in 1917. Ludvig showed the greatest interest in the welfare of the Russian engineering industry. In March 1867 a discussion took place in the Society’s second section, ‘Mechanics and mechanical engineering’, on the theme of ‘Measures for the expansion of the engineering industry in Russia and the development of our engineering workshops’. The keynote speech was made by Ludvig, who believed that the domestic engineering industry must be protected from foreign rivals as these were not averse to using dishonourable methods to put Russian factories out of the running.27 The remedy was raised import duties on any steam engines, factory machinery and steam locomotives that were also manufactured in Russia. According to Ludvig, the tariffs should be so high that Russian producers could compete with the foreign ones. This suggestion was strongly supported by the Technological Society and won quick acceptance. That same summer, a government commission was set up with the remit of scrutinizing the customs tariffs. Similar commissions had operated before, what was new was that this one also consisted of engineers and leaders of industry. In the customs regulations that were brought in the following year higher customs duties were introduced for steam locomotives, internal combustion engines and steam engines as well as for machine parts. These measures, however, turned out to be insufficient and Ludvig returned to the question on several occasions, for example in the lecture about stagnation in the Russian engineering industry. The only way to create solid private industrial enterprises in Russia, according to Ludvig, was an overarching protectionist policy, not one directed at individual products and furthermore allowing exceptions. In the absence of such a policy, the Russian private firms would still in future be dependent on orders or subsidies from the state. Although Ludvig’s suggestion did not gain a hearing the Russian engineering industry underwent a significant development at this time. In 1850, as we have mentioned, there were twenty-five private engineering workshops with in all 1,475 employees – twenty years later the number of workshops was 145, with close to 30,000 employees in European Russia alone.28 Ludvig’s election to the Technological Society meant a final recognition of him as a Russian leader of industry, only four years after he had taken over Isherwood’s run-down machine factory. Not only that – he was also recognized as a patriot. ‘He was not a Russian, but we are proud of him!’ as a member of the Society declared in his memorial sketch of Ludvig.29 In the midst of all his work-related successes, Ludvig was afflicted by a great sorrow. In May 1869 his beloved wife Mina died in childbirth in her thirty-seventh year and twelve days later the new-born child, Charlotta Wilhelmina, also died. Ludvig took his loss extremely hard. His and Mina’s marriage was, to judge from

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the many declarations of love and tenderness to his wife that fill his letters, unusually harmonious. ‘Today is our 5th Anniversary and happier can no mortal be than I have been in my marriage,’ he wrote in September 1863 to Robert, whose own marriage was characterized by friction caused by a lack of self-belief, suspicion and jealousy, particularly on his part.30 ‘The memory of the grieving spouse and the motherless children around her bier can never be erased,’ reported a close acquaintance. ‘Nobel is changing and altering in his home, and coming and going, in one word, he has no peace. Yesterday evening he was with us and said that he couldn’t stand it any longer but was aiming together with Selma [Scharlin] and the children to travel abroad via Sweden. That will perhaps be a healing distraction for him that he certainly could more than do with, so ill and disturbed as he looks.’31 Mina had borne Ludvig six children, of whom three were alive: Emanuel (ten), Carl (seven) and Anna (three) – the others had died in infancy. To be sure he had help from the children’s nurse Selma, but he was working round the clock and the children needed a mother. It was not long therefore before he met a new woman. Her name was Edla Collin and she had been born in Stockholm in 1848. When she was only one year old her father died, and her mother became solely responsible for her and both her sisters. The family were so poor that she was sometimes allowed to take the school food home. When Edla was seventeen her mother died. Both her sisters were then living in St Petersburg. Lilly was married to the architect Theodor Mellgren, who had been born in Stockholm but grew up in Helsinki, and Hildegard was working as a teacher in St Katarina’s Swedish parish school. As she was to be married in the autumn of 1869 to the Finland-Swedish road- and water-engineer Alfred Nyberg and give up her teaching post she asked for her sister Edla to be appointed as her successor, which was accepted by the school management. The Nyberg and Mellgren families had for several years belonged to Ludvig’s and Mina’s circle of friends and Edla was soon introduced to the new widower. The wedding took place just over a year after her arrival in St Petersburg, on 1/12 October 1870.

Robert returns to St Petersburg While Ludvig had expanded the business in St Petersburg, Robert had done good work at the Nitroglycerine Factory in Stockholm. He was of the opinion that without his attention it would have been ‘a trifling affair’.32 However, he would gradually fall out with both J.W. Smitt and the factory’s head of engineering, Alarik Liedbeck. It is unclear who was to blame but when Robert got into a dispute it was most often his unbridled temperament (‘my morbid disposition’, as he himself describes it in his letters) and his inability to submit to the will of others that were the cause:33 ‘The independent position that I have enjoyed throughout my life and that I now have in the Nitroglycerine Company makes it very hurtful when

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someone takes a kind of authoritarian tone with me,’ he explained.34 Robert’s disputatious frame of mind plagued not only those around him (not least his wife) but also himself. ‘With a disposition like mine,’ he noted insightfully, ‘an injustice of a few words can destroy my composure for several days, which in combination with all the other annoyances seems to play some little part in the illness that is now consuming me and more than once I have wished that I had never allowed myself to be enticed here.’35 Added to his personal and technical setbacks with the factory was the fear that he and his family, who had their home at Vinterviken, would become victims of an accident. The risk was great; there had been an explosion in 1869, although without any deaths. However, several accidents with explosives having a deadly outcome had occurred in Alfred’s dynamite factories around Europe, among others at Krümmel in Germany in 1866. We are living, Robert wrote, ‘like on a volcano and moreover we are surrounded by mere drunkards and to find sober and hard-working people for this work, so near the city with a tavern on every corner, is near enough impossible. If we succeed in finding a sober fellow, then he is a blockhead. I am both exhausted and fed-up with the whole business . . . which is so little rewarding.’36 Tired of personal conflicts and unwilling to expose himself and his family to the risk of explosions any longer, Robert chose to leave his director’s post at the Nitroglycerine Company and to work for Ludvig in St Petersburg. The operation there had grown so quickly and become so wide-ranging that Ludvig, who suffered from a weak heart and other ailments, was played-out and needed help with running the business. Robert moved to St Petersburg in August 1870 after almost a year of discussion about his plans for moving. ‘However you look at it,’ Ludvig explained to Robert in October 1869, ‘a factory needs a lot of attention, in particular with the variety of things that crop up in my case, the number of workers is currently around 700 and the value of the daily output amounts to 4,000 (four thousand!) roubles. One cannot afford to have weak nerves or a bad temper to put up with all the minor and major irritations that such an accelerated production inevitably must bring in its wake . . . I have no reason to be dissatisfied with the pace of production but I cannot deny that it results in an abundant source of anxiety, which in no way improves my mood.’37 One month later he wrote again to Robert: ‘I also hope that next spring my affairs will be in such a state that I will not be committing an act of folly if I offer you employment and a good outcome in that business which will be too demanding for myself alone in the future.’38 Robert had stayed six weeks in St Petersburg around the turn of the year 1867– 8 to supervise firing exercises with guns and dynamite charges against tough armour plate, but the results were negative, and he suffered large financial losses; possibly it was the memory of these losses that made him take so long to accept Ludvig’s offer. Another explanation for his tortured decision-making was that he was unhappy in St Petersburg, this ‘swampy dump’, ‘his cold chaos’.39

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In May 1870, the great All Russian Manufacturing Exhibition was opened in St Petersburg and several of the machine factory’s products were shown there. The exhibition was a great success for Ludvig, whose factory was for the first time given the right to attach the Russian national coat of arms to the firm’s name (the second time this happened, as we saw, was in 1882). The motivation for this included, among other things, ‘breadth of manufacturing’ and ‘the praiseworthy reputation that the exhibitor has won through the meticulous and precise execution of the factory’s products’. He was also honoured with the Order of St Anne 3rd class.40 Ludvig would have liked to see Alfred and Robert come to St Petersburg for the exhibition.41 He wanted to show off the machine factory’s successes and persuade Robert that he should to move to St Petersburg, but no visit seems to have taken place and it was only while visiting Stockholm in August that Ludvig succeeded in making Robert realize the good sense in accepting his invitation. Once the decision had been taken, Robert had the nitroglycerine factory outside Helsinki demolished. ‘My whole capital is irretrievably lost,’ he commented, ‘but I have thereby been liberated from a grasping annual charge for the lease of the site.’42 The overlapping motive for the move was Robert’s wish to achieve an ‘independent position’. By that he meant, partly, independence from superiors; partly, but most of all, financial independence. At this time there were neither pensions nor social care. Both Ludvig and Alfred were by this stage financially independent, but Robert found it difficult to save and despite a good salary and a share in the profits of the Nitroglycerine Company he did not have enough money to secure his family’s future. As soon as Robert settled in St Petersburg his wife gave a sigh of relief. ‘It makes me very happy that you decided to stay. Now at last you have left this dangerous occupation, which I have so long wished for,’ she writes.43 Conscious of his inability to hold on to his wallet, Pauline urged him at the same time to live frugally and ‘take dear Ludvig as an example and remember how frugally and prudently he managed his affairs before he achieved his independence’.44 Pauline stayed on in Stockholm, meanwhile, with the three children, Hjalmar, Ingeborg (born in 1865) and Ludvig (born in 1868). Robert was the sibling who found it hardest to impose some order on his life and his finances, but family solidarity was strong and his brothers did what they could to help him. In the same way as Alfred found him the post of managing director of the Nitroglycerine factory, Ludvig now tried to help him to financial security by making him a partner. There were to be more rescue attempts of a similar nature.

Ludvig’s honeymoon trip On the evening of the same day as the wedding, Ludvig and Edla set off on a honeymoon trip that was planned to take three months but lasted for nine. All

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three brothers suffered from poor health, exacerbated by large doses of hypochondria. ‘The Nobel and Ahlsell families are really miserable races, doomed to have a short existence,’ Alfred complained to Robert.45 Ludvig had constant problems with his respiratory organs (bronchitis, laryngitis, asthmatic difficulties), which in turn affected his heart. Even when young, according to his mother, he suffered every autumn ‘from a cough in this nasty and unhealthy climate’.46 The climate in the swampy Neva delta was in truth unhealthy and as soon as his finances allowed, Ludvig, like other prosperous Russians, made annual excursions to Europe’s leading health resorts, which meant that his health at least temporarily improved. ‘My health has settled down somewhat while travelling abroad, but the St Petersburg climate soon destroys it again” ’, he wrote to Robert after staying at a health resort in the autumn of 1869, adding: ‘But as to my mood I am more like myself again – always calm and from time to time cheerful.’47

FIGURE 4.3 Edla photographed in Naples on her honeymoon.

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Ludvig’s trip with Edla was thus a combination of honeymoon and health cure. After their first stop, which was Berlin (where they met Alfred), they continued further south, to Palermo in Sicily. The day before Christmas Eve Ludvig wrote to Robert that he was feeling much better ‘in this climate than in any other since we left St Petersburg and were my presence not necessary at home I would prefer to remain abroad the whole winter until friendlier winds blow in your far North’.48 Robert replied that Ludvig’s presence was not necessary, which Ludvig was grateful for, as he feared ‘that a journey to the north now would have the most harmful consequences for me’.49 A few months later Robert assured his brother again that he ‘can safely stay abroad’ till it becomes warmer in St Petersburg – ‘a pleasant consideration’, Ludvig replied from Naples, ‘for I should not unless really forced to now wish to betake myself to the cold and the snow’.50 During their nine-month-long trip the newly-weds visited – apart from Palermo –Catania, Naples (where Vesuvius erupted in January), Florence and Rome. They also made a detour to Malta and Tunis, a visit that made such a strong impression on Ludvig that he ventured into the realm of travel-writing. ‘I have put together a few pages about Africa,’ he wrote to Robert, ‘but am doubtful about whether I should send them off because they seem to myself so devoid of content and so colourless compared to the reality that I fear you will scarcely cast an eye over them.’51 This, however, Robert did, praising the reportage and suggesting that the piece might well be published in some Stockholm newspaper – a thought that Ludvig rejected, although not too forcefully.52 There was no publication, but the text bears witness to a talent for narrative and capacity for observation. This is true not least of the humorous and tenderly ironic depiction of a Jewish wedding in Tunis, where the fourteen-year-old bride had been fed up like a turkey for several years to become as fat as possible, as this was a mark of beauty. It was not until the end of July that Ludvig and Edla came back to St Petersburg. In his brother’s absence Robert had run the factory in the best possible way. Among other things, it had fallen to him to complete the work on the converted rifles, an enterprise that was beset with major production problems but which at the end of February was brought to a conclusion. ‘I am currently completing my brother’s large rifle order, which has been as troublesome and tedious as it has been profitable,’ he reported to J.W. Smitt in Stockholm.53 In the autumn of the same year he was honoured with the Order of St Stanislas 3rd class; several of the factory’s employees were also rewarded, as was Ludvig himself.54

The Berdanka When Ludvig returned a new, major weapon project was waiting. Converting muzzle-loaders to breech-loaders was one thing. A more important question concerned what system should be employed for the manufacture of new rifles. To

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investigate which type of rifle was most suited to the needs of the Russian army, in 1866–7 two Russian weapon experts, Colonel Alexander Gorlov and Captain Karl Gunnius were sent to the USA. There they made contact with Colonel Hiram S. Berdan, founder of the American sharpshooter movement and innovator in rifle technique. After making certain improvements to Berdan’s model, Gorlov and Gunnius recommended the rifle to the Russian government, which ordered 30,000 rifles from the Colt factory in Hartford, Connecticut, and in addition 7.5 million cartridges, also of Berdan’s design (with casing of metal instead of paper). The rifle, which was called model 1868 or Berdan 1, was adopted by the Russian army in 1869. In Russian the rifle was called Berdanka. In the spring of 1869, Colonel Berdan paid a visit to St Petersburg to introduce a new model of rifle to the Russian military leadership. It had a better-functioning bolt with a cartridge expeller and was more quick-firing than the first version. After thorough test firings the government decided to invest in the new model and the order to the Colt factory was cancelled. The rifle, which was given the name Berdan 2, was produced in four variants, for the infantry, the dragoons, the Cossacks and the cavalry. This time the order for 30,000 weapons went to the Birmingham Small Arms Company in England. Those specimens of the Berdan 1 that had not yet been delivered were sold on the American market where, because of Gorlov’s and Gunnius’s modifications, they went under the name of Russian guns.55 The Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1 meant that the equipping and modernization of the Russian army’s arsenal of weapons was further accelerated and that production of Berdanka rifles was transferred to Russia. As with the conversion of the muzzle-loaders, the government chose to place the order in private hands. It went to a young officer and ballistics expert, Pyotr Bilderling, who came from an old Baltic-German family, von Bilderling, that had been active in Russia since the second half of the eighteenth century. Like Gorlov and Gunnius, Bilderling had made tours of inspection in the USA and had visited Gorlov during his time at the Colt factory. He was also inspector of the manufacturing of Berdanka rifles in Birmingham. The manufacturing was placed in Izhevsk, an ironworks from the eighteenth century that since 1807 had also included an arms workshop. It was thus well suited to the production of rifle barrels. Bilderling, an artillery officer, was young, only twenty-six but already a leading weapons expert, when on 31 December 1871 he signed the lease with the state. In the lease it was stipulated that the Izhevsk factory would be fitted out with machines for the serial production of Berdankas and that 200,000 guns would be produced during the period of the contract, which was for seven years. The whole profit was to accrue to the leaseholder, who at the expiry of the lease would return the factory with the whole assembly of machinery and functioning production to the state. Bilderling also undertook to fit out a steelworks that would provide the arms factory in Tula with metal parts for gun barrels – earlier, these had been imported from Germany, but

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FIGURE 4.4 and 4.5 Left: Pyotr Bilderling. Right: Ludvig, Carl August Standertskjöld and unknown.

after the Franco-Prussian War the government decided that Russia should produce its own steel for military use.56 Bilderling was familiar with the technical aspects but lacked capital as well as experience of running a business. He therefore turned to Ludvig and suggested that they should collaborate in the production of Berdankas. Ludvig would be responsible for the manufacture and delivery of machines, technical knowledge and capital, and the profits would be shared equally. That the choice of business partner fell to Ludvig was no coincidence; they knew each other well; Bilderling was the liaison officer with Ludvig’s machine workshop – the same function that Carl August Standertskjöld had had in Immanuel’s time. ‘I was well acquainted with the technical side of the business,’ Bilderling recalled, ‘but I needed people who could lead the work, I needed money – for turnover and to cover the initial outgoings, and in general I needed someone with experience of factories.’57 A key person in this context was the above-named Carl August Standertskjöld (1814–85). Not only had he risen to the rank of major-general – since 1870 together with Ludvig and the Swedish mining engineer Jonas Wåhlstedt, who was active in Russia, he had also owned a little iron foundry in Lupikko, on the northern shore of Lake Ladoga, which supplied the machine factory with raw materials. Standertskjöld had been head of both the arms factory in Tula and the one in Izhevsk and since September 1871 he had been inspector of all Russian arms and munitions factories. The decision to give the contract to Bilderling and Ludvig was therefore taken with his direct involvement. During Ludvig’s honeymoon trip

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Robert was in regular contact with Standertskjöld and when the latter was appointed weapons inspector and could no longer act as a rival for weapons contracts Robert declared that he could now be ‘all the more useful’ to his friends.58 That Izhevsk had advantages cannot be ignored, there were iron foundries there as well as arms workshops and access to water. However, the town was nearly 1,200 miles from Moscow, in Udmurtia, north of the Tatar capital Kazan, and the journey there involved enormous hardships. However, to place production in the arms factory in Tula, which was significantly closer, was not possible as it was busy with production of other weapons. Moreover, Carl August’s younger half-brother Mauritz had been in post as assistant to the head of the arms factory in Izhevsk since 1867, which may have influenced the decision to locate production there. If the choice of Izhevsk can possibly be seen as an instance of nepotism, the idea of letting Ludvig take charge of the technical production part of the contract was in the highest degree commercially motivated. He had not only handled the conversion of the muzzle-loaders in a creditable way but had also in later years produced and delivered hundreds of guns and gun carriages to the Russian army. The existing factory lacked all practical prerequisites for manufacturing firingpin guns; everything had to be built up from scratch. Ludvig’s machine factory served as a mechanical workshop for the Izhevsk factory and the St Petersburg office was responsible for contacts with the Artillery Committee and the foreign suppliers of steel for the gun barrels and walnut wood for the butts. Workshop machines and other machinery were produced in St Petersburg, during the first two years more than 1,000 workshop machines were made, while larger machines were manufactured in Izhevsk. Several of the factory’s top engineers, mechanics, technicians and foremen were also sent there. Standertskjöld predicted profits of one million silver roubles each for Bilderling and Ludvig for the lease.59 This promised a good income but was at the same time a huge challenge associated with enormous logistical problems. Izhevsk was not only a long way from St Petersburg but totally isolated, 600 miles from the nearest railway line and up until now lacking a telegraph wire – yet such a means of communication was necessary if the project was to be realized and it was opened a few months before the lease took effect.60 Because of the geographical distance, Ludvig could not supervise the project on the spot, which he was used to doing. He therefore invited Robert to take over the management of Izhevsk. The reason was his brother’s feeling of unhappiness in St Petersburg, something of which he made no secret. Moreover, Robert had developed a grudge against Edla. The cause is uncertain but perhaps, as so often with Robert, it was ‘a few injudicious words’ that had provoked him. Pauline, who knew her husband, defended Edla and informed Robert that he was ‘always too stern and extravagant as much in praise as in blame’.61 Robert however was not interested in continuing to work for Ludvig but wanted to ‘find work for himself by his own efforts’.62 He therefore turned down the offer,

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FIGURE 4.6 The workshop for manufacture of gun-butts in Izhevsk.

and although the aim of Robert’s stay in Russia was ‘to put together a little money for an independent old age’63 Pauline was pleased at his decision: ‘I wanted to kiss you a hundred times, and thank you! for the fact that you do not care to settle in Izhevsk and take over the running of that place,’ she wrote: ‘May whoever wishes to settle there do so and gather the fruits, in that unenviable place, I could not be more happy that you, my Dear, are not allowing yourself to be led astray by tempting prospects to bury yourself there for 7 years, in an unhealthy and unpleasant den. From Ludvig’s letters to my Father I have heard such a description of that region that one can be glad to be far from it and to willingly sacrifice the brilliant prospects and advantages that this enterprise promises.’64 Behind Pauline’s reaction lay not only consideration for her husband but also a desire to be reunited with him, in St Petersburg or Stockholm; that she and the children should accompany him to Izhevsk was out of the question. Instead, the person who succeeded Mauritz Standertskjöld as manager of the factory in Izhevsk, on Ludvig’s suggestion, was Hugo Standertskjöld (1844–1931), the son of Mauritz’s and Carl August’s cousin, who since 1866 had been ordered to the arms factory in Tula. He took up the position in November 1872.65 The Izhevsk contract yielded large profits, but the road to success was paved, as we saw, with difficulties of a geographical as well as a technical nature. Nor was the

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relationship between the two partners, Ludvig and Bilderling, always free of friction. The arms production soon got underway, but the question of the construction of a new steelworks became, as Bilderling put it, ‘a bone of contention’. Because of the competition from abroad Ludvig was against building it, but had to give in, and the first open hearth oven arrived in 1877.66

Profit-sharing and reform of working conditions That Ludvig was not only a skilful engineer and inventor but also a far-sighted industrialist emerges from his articles and lectures about the organization of the work and the conditions of the workers. As we have said, as early as 1859 he was discussing measures to ensure a qualified workforce and suggesting that Russian youth should be given the right, and access, to an elementary school education. One of Ludvig’s most important and innovative reforms was intended to involve the qualified workforce by giving them a share in the profits. The aim was partly to interest the workers in the development of the factory and its future, partly a desire to free up time to be able to travel abroad and look after his health. ‘For many years,’ he confided in Robert, ‘it has been my innermost, constantly cherished desire to reach that point where I have an income so substantial that I could share it with my assistants to such a degree that they would find their own interests intertwined with mine.’ However, his ambition to also interest the workers in this system is something that he ‘must doubtless leave . . . to a future date when there will perhaps be more education among the masses’.67 Ludvig’s first thoughts on this issue can be dated to the spring of 1867, when he sketched out a profit-sharing scheme that would give his ‘masters’ 20 per cent of the net profit alongside their salary.68 The system, which presupposed a financial transparency that was not self-evident in the business culture of the time, was introduced into the machine factory some years later. This was why Ludvig could allow himself to be absent from the work during the whole of his long honeymoon. To be sure, Robert was on the spot, but as in Immanuel’s time he was answerable mostly for the ‘external business’, i.e. contacts with the authorities and other customers. That the factory’s internal workings functioned so well was in large part due to Ludvig’s profit-sharing scheme. On 28 January 1871 he wrote to Robert from Palermo: With the lead we have, we cannot now be without work. We need only to constantly urge all the master craftsmen to maintain with the utmost conscientiousness the reputation that the factory has built up and which constitutes our real capital on which, in the future, we can draw interest. To this end I have given the masters part of the profits, for their sakes I am making no

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secret of the balance-sheet. I have striven to realize this idea for many years and I am returning to this theme now, because we cannot too often keep an eye on our dear masters to ensure that they ought to regard the factory’s interests as their own, but the real interest for the factory can only be in being utterly honest, as well as treating both workers and clients with justice and consideration. That a great shortage of workers will become evident in Russia is quite natural, and it will bring in its wake great difficulties for others, but for us it is rather a gain, for our trick ought, henceforth as heretofore, to consist in the fact that we ourselves train new workers and establish new ways of working, precisely therein lies the merit of Nobel’s factory, that it has been able to do better and cheaper than others and therefore we do not need exceptional prices.69 Ludvig’s ambition that the workforce should ‘feel their own interests intertwined’ with his was also realized at the plant in Izhevsk and provides an important explanation for their financial and technical successes. Behind these ideas, naturally enough, lay not only idealism but also commercial self-interest, but according to Bilderling ‘one of Ludvig Immanuilovitch’s basic principles was, in the organization of every business, to strive to couple together the interests of the workers with the fate of the business and to make payment for the work dependent on the success of the business’. It is not difficult to imagine the astonishment this philosophy caused in far-off, backward Udmurtia. Yet the system was implemented ‘in the strictest and most consistent way’ in Izhevsk, where not only officials and foremen but also pieceworkers received a part of the profits.70 This reform was not the only one that was carried out under Bilderling’s and Nobel’s leadership. An important change was the abolition of the system with middle-men – entrepreneurs, agents, contractors and commission agents – which along with the extra costs it involved meant that the distance between the factory management and the shop floor became so great that Ludvig’s ideals were impossible to implement. ‘Ludvig Immanuilovitch replaced this system with a system of work-sharing, guided by the idea that a factory-owner “also” has responsibilities and that these include direct contacts with the workers without intermediaries’ – was how Ludvig’s business model was summed up by Nikolai Snessoryev, who was a member of the executive committee for re-equipment of the army and advisory member of the Artillery Committee’s weapon section as well as one of Ludvig’s closest contacts in the Russian armaments authorities.71 As with all significant structural changes the abolition of middle-men caused major opposition, but Ludvig stood his ground – some of them were fired, while others were moved to the factory floor as waged workers. A simultaneous change was to the system of wages which were from now on being paid punctually and more often than before. Before, payment had been made every six months; now, wages were paid out every two weeks.

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Another innovation concerned education, a question that indeed lay close to Ludvig’s heart. Russia had the most poorly educated population in Europe. In the European parts of Russia only 12.9 per cent of boys and 2.2 per cent of girls attended school. The regime’s unwillingness to carry out school reforms was a consequence of its obsession with preserving the status quo. At the same time knowledge of reading and mathematics was necessary in a changing market economy.72 Through an agreement with the workers and officials at the factory in Izhevsk a percentage of their wages – except for manual workers and day-labourers – was set aside for a school fund, and in 1875 a three-year vocational school was opened with instruction in drawing, wood-carving, modelling and decorative arts as well as joinery and smith-work. When in 1884 the Izhevsk factory returned to state ownership, the state refused to take on the costs of the school, which nevertheless continued to function thanks to contributions from Ludvig and Bilderling.73 In an appearance at the Technological Society (where Bilderling was also a member) in 1875 Ludvig related that on his first visit to Izhevsk he had heard that the people were impossible to teach manners to, that every kopek went on spirits. On a visit three years later, he was able to state that great changes had occurred. Drunkenness had decreased and the workers no longer spent so much time in the tavern. The local people were also significantly better dressed than before. According to Ludvig this was mainly because wages were being paid more often, which meant that the employees looked after their finances better, did not get into debt and ‘had begun to have needs’. ‘Permit me to say a few words in defence of our Russian people. . . . I have conscientious and sober people, and I am convinced that wherever the factory is situated (there are no special alcohol-prone places), people can be well brought up just as long as they find their work rewarding.’74 In return for the improved working conditions that the workers were being offered Ludvig demanded rigorous discipline at work. In the machine factory’s ‘Rules for Workers’ (1879) the latter bound themselves to ‘obey their foreman and carry out his instructions exactly, to be polite and generally to behave decently’. If the workman allowed himself to be coarse or impolite or to show up at work in a state of intoxication, he would have to pay a fine of between 50 kopeks and 3 roubles and might also be sacked.75 The seven-year lease was gradually extended to eight years and during this time Ludvig and Bilderling built up a model workshop in Izhevsk. The original order was for 200,000 guns, but on the eve of the Russo-Turkish war in 1877 the lessees of the state arms factories were offered increased orders on condition that the weapons could be delivered quickly. Ludvig and Bilderling accepted the challenge and by the end of their lease the state had received a good 450,000 guns. Despite its profitability Ludvig and Bilderling did not wish to renew the lease when it expired on 31 December 1879. The main reason was that they had recently

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become involved in another profitable activity, of which more in the following chapters. The running of the factory was taken over instead by ‘the upright, honourable and capable’ Hugo Standertskjöld, whose participation in the ‘great, rather risky business’ Ludvig congratulated himself on having secured.76 Hugo Standertskjöld was an outstandingly skilful entrepreneur and in time became one of Finland’s richest men. His elegant palace on the Esplanade in Helsinki now houses the Supreme Court.77

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5 ROBERT

The gun production in Izhevsk became a financial success story in which that Robert had no part. Everything points to the fact that he continued to be unhappy in St Petersburg, in the shadow of his ever more successful brother. Ludvig – it is important to stress – was on the spot the whole time in the capital and only paid the occasional yearly visit to Izhevsk during the duration of the lease. Since Robert had turned down Ludvig’s invitation to take over the running of Izhevsk he tried to find a career of his own. He speculated in buying up pig-iron in bulk and raw glycerine from Kazan; he was involved in the building of a tunnel in the vicinity of Sebastopol and in blasting with dynamite for building a canal.1 Along with an engineer, Leonard Bolin, he also founded a company for steamboat traffic in Pargolovo outside St Petersburg, for which a steam launch was purchased from the Motala Workshop in Sweden, and he had discussions with a Swedish matchstick Factory about the setting-up of a factory in Russia, but it was never built.2 ‘I am unhappy here and would therefore gladly drag myself all the way home again,’ Robert wrote to Alarik Liedbeck around New Year 1871–2, ‘but I know of nothing rewarding that would be suitable to turn my hand to and that could give me the standard of living that I lay claim to.’3 Robert had a share in the growing profits of the machine factory and his unhappiness was not therefore in the first instance due to financial considerations.4 The main reason was the position of dependency that he found himself in and that he found difficult to accept. Ludvig realized the problem and decided to help Robert to a more independent position. In January 1873 he told his brother that he had come to the conclusion that it would be ‘most acceptable’ for Robert if he obtained ‘a completely independent situation’, i.e. if he ‘were to enrol as a merchant and trade in his own name’. Ludvig would supply financial guarantees for this and if necessary, contribute ready money.5 What this meant in concrete terms was the production of gun-butts for the Berdanka. The government had decided that not only the steel for the gun barrels but also the butts would henceforth be produced in Russia. In Russia, only walnut

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FIGURE 5.1 Robert.

wood, which grew in the Caucasus, was sufficiently hard for the purpose. The idea was that a factory for the production of butts should be set up in the area. The offer made Robert take an optimistic view of the future, especially as it coincided with the government’s decision to allow imports of dynamite to Russia – imports, not production; that could not be allowed because of the risk that the product would end up in the hands of terrorists. ‘I have been offered a contract for gun-butts to be produced in the Caucasus,’ he told J.W. Smitt in the days before the New Year 1872–3, ‘and if I decide in favour of this business, it is quite natural that I should introduce dynamite into that country as well as possibly, on my own

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account, taking on bigger explosives projects which will also mean more sales for the [Nitroglycerine] Company’.6 The job that Robert had been offered was thus the manufacture of gun-butts. In January 1873 Ludvig wrote to his brother: Here accordingly a major undertaking awaits you and I wish from the bottom of my heart that it may lead to your independence and future gratification. The undertaking is of a wholly commercial nature – thereby answering, as such, the wish you have so often expressed. You can carry out your long-cherished plan to be able to visit the blooming regions where the nut tree grows and where Nature offers so many unsullied means of sustenance. Your own workforce and your consideration, your remarkable ability to, with force and fervour, engage with a new undertaking are for me a solid guarantee that not only am I not myself risking anything with the surety I am providing for the success of the undertaking but that your own future will thereby be assured. The letter is interesting not only in a business sense but also bears witness to Ludvig’s strong family feeling: To me personally it would bring great satisfaction if success were to crown this enterprise and if it gave you reason for contentment and future well-being. However matters may have stood between us, I must nevertheless say in fairness to myself that the only guiding rule for my actions and wishes was to maintain brotherly love and amity, both between us and our families. Mistakes and miscalculations may have occurred, as in all human endeavours, but they have never been able to reach the root of that feeling that unites us, and this feeling is something that signifies strength and success, if we both unite with the same feelings to work for the safeguarding of our families’ welfare and the maintenance of the good reputation that the name of Nobel hitherto, in truth, has made itself worthy of.7 To be able to carry out the commission for gun-butts Robert had to first acquire some knowledge of the process. He went about it thoroughly. At the end of January 1873, before leaving for the Caucasus, he travelled to France and Switzerland to acquaint himself with the arms factories there. His first stop was Paris where he met up with Alfred, who was about to settle for good in the French capital. The meeting was important in view of his brother’s contacts in the international arms industry. Robert got an introduction from Alfred to the arms factory in St Etienne south of Lyons, which he visited. From there he travelled to Switzerland, where he studied ‘how the nut-tree is treated in the forest, its steam baking, drying and sawing, etc., as well as how the waste products are treated and made use of ’.8

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The Caucasus After his reconnaissance trip round Western Europe Robert continued to the Caucasus.‘I hope that your travels through the magnificent scenery of the Caucasus will do you good in all respects and that I may see you again in good spirits and with positive prospects for the future,’ Ludvig encouraged him before he set out.9 At the end of March, Robert arrived in Tiflis (Tbilisi), the administrative centre and capital of Transcaucasia in present-day Georgia, where he remained for a few days before resuming his trip eastwards. It was a long and tiresome journey which was conducted by horse and carriage. The walnut forests were waiting on the other side of the Caucasus in the area around the Caspian Sea in what was then the Baku guberniya, present-day Azerbaijan. During his three months in the Caucasus, Robert visited several places in his hunt for suitable wood, but the results of his efforts were depressing. The best wood was found in the area around the town of Lenkoran in southern Azerbaijan, not far from the border with Persia. However, the forests were not sufficiently large to satisfy the army’s needs and moreover it was difficult to make good-quality butts for the price dictated by the government. There was also a scarcity of first class wood. ‘The walnut-trees one finds in the forests in the Caucasus are either too old to supply fresh wood or they are very young trees at their best age which have been destroyed by neglect,’ Robert reported to Ludvig.10 There was one possibility to make a profit from the gun-butt business, namely, to import the wood from Persia – but this was out of the question because of the government’s declared ambition to end their dependency on other countries.11 Despite the challenges – which along with the lack of access to wood also included transport problems and other logistical difficulties – Robert sketched out plans to set up a gun-butt factory. ‘I intend to site the factory in Baku, which, since Mirzoev’s Naphtha monopoly has ceased, is going to become a lively spot,’ he wrote to Ludvig in April 1873.12 Baku was an ancient port and commercial city on the west coast of the Caspian Sea that over the centuries had been controlled in turn by Persian, Turkish and Russian conquerors and that since 1806 had been part of the Russian Empire. Because of the many problems associated with the business the factory was never set up. Robert’s investigations had convinced him that a gun-butt project was not something to invest in, neither for his own part nor on his client’s account. (Because of the difficulties in sourcing high-quality walnut trees in sufficient quantities the government finally decided to have the butts made from birch.) There was, however, another and more important reason for the gun-butt project being shelved, and it can be found in the statement that ‘Mirzoev’s Naphtha monopoly has ceased’. The area around Baku was exceptionally rich in oil and the statement referred to the new legislation which had just come into force. Hitherto, the trade in oil had been based on a contract system which depended on the

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government granting monopoly rights to parcels of land of around three hectares for a period of four years. Irrespective of how many parcels of land anyone owned there was no guarantee that the lease would be renewed; on the contrary, it could be terminated at any time. This meant that the holders of the contracts tried to extract as much oil from the land as they could in the shortest time possible and lacked the incentive to modernize and improve the extraction methods. Ivan Mirzoev was a giant in the oil industry and a major producer of paraffin, which at this time was the most important oil-based product – oil as a propellent was still far in the future. He was also the first to drill for oil with American technology while other producers were still digging wells with a spade and gathering the oil in leather sacks. These inefficient extraction methods meant that the oil was not exploited in an economical way, but that much of it was spilt while it was being handled. When Robert arrived in Baku the conditions for extracting the oil had just radically changed. Three months before his arrival, on 1 January 1873, the contract system ended and 3,350 acres of state land in Baku and its environs was auctioned off to private speculators. The biggest buyers were Ivan Mirzoev and the TransCaspian Trading Company. The latter was owned by two other large-scale oil producers, Vassili Kokorev and Pyotr Gubonin, who now joined forces with Mirzoev and founded the Baku Oil Society. By this time, there were 415 hand-dug wells in Baku. Half of the oil was exported to Persia where it was used as grease for waggon wheels and leather goods as well as for lighting. The abolition of the contract system led to an explosive development within the oil industry: between 1873 and 1878 the number of boreholes grew from two to 301. The city of Baku is situated on the west side of the Caspian Sea. The largest oil fields lay six miles north-east of the city in the vicinity of the towns of Balakhani and Sabunchi. At the eastern edge of Baku there was a district called the Black City because of the smoke from the oil refineries that were concentrated there. From time beyond memory, the area had been known for its oil resources. It is no coincidence that Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the gods to give it to mankind, was bound fast by Zeus to a cliff in the Caucasus.13 Naphtha (from Persian naft) is a mixture of hydrocarbons formed over millennia from animals and plants that have not managed to decay. It is a thin liquid which is found in bedrock and is therefore also called rock oil. In the Old Testament (2 Maccabees) it is described how the Jewish people in their search for the holy fire chance upon a ‘thick water’ that flames up when the sun shines – it was christened Neftar, which means ‘purification’. Naphtha is also named by ancient chroniclers like Plutarch, Herodotus and Pliny. The latter relates, among other things, how Medea – originally from the Caucasus – threaded onto the head of her rival a crown smeared with naphtha which burst into flame on contact with the holy fire. Naphtha around the Caspian Sea is known not only from the Bible, the Prometheus legend and ancient chroniclers. It also has a central significance in

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FIGURE 5.2 The Fire Worshippers’ Temple.

another religion, Zoroastrianism. Around 1200 bce the prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra), who lived in the region east of the Caspian Sea, founded a cult based on worship of light and fire where fire was regarded as holy. The cult was widespread and was the state religion of Persia until in the 650s ce it converted to Islam. In the village of Surachani, thirty kilometres north-east of Baku, there was the so-called Fire Worshippers’ Temple, where the fire was lit by gas that seeped up out of the ground. (At the time of Robert’s arrival in Baku the gas had begun to give out, largely because of oil extraction in the area, and in 1880 the temple ceased to exist as a cult-site.) An early European traveller in these parts was Marco Polo, who on his way to China at the end of the thirteenth century was struck by a remarkable phenomenon: oil that gushed out of the earth in such quantities that it would take thousands of camels to transport it. The liquid burned very well and was used by the local population mainly as fuel, the traveller noted. It was taken by camels all the way to Baghdad to be used as lamp oil.

The de Boer Brothers That the area around Baku was rich in oil, or naphtha, was not news to Robert. Some of the paraffin he bought in for his lamp business, Aurora, in Helsinki in the

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1860s came from there. Now that he was on the spot he soon realized, with his nose for potentially profitable projects, that there was big money to be made. ‘Baku must have a certain attraction for every person with any imagination and a lively temperament although it is a treeless promontory where the wind always blows and the dust stands in piles,’ he wrote to Ludvig.14 After his return to St Petersburg at the end of May/beginning of June, Robert did all he could to pass on his impressions and his enthusiasm to Ludvig – who had prophesied as early as 1864 that ‘Petroleum has an altogether bright future’15 – and to persuade him to invest money in the business that Robert saw looming on the horizon and that promised large returns. His attempts at persuasion were successful and Ludvig decided to make a financial contribution so that Robert could return to Baku and take the project further. ‘Ludvig is taking part in all the ventures I have proposed, I have that in black and white from him,’ Robert reported in a letter to his wife, at the same time as he was worried about the state of health of the source of his financing: ‘If by bad luck he should not live until everything is more fully implemented, then of course the aforesaid agreement will be null and void.’16 It was not the first time that Ludvig had had to take up a position on a ‘Robert project’. The fact that, despite being aware of his brother’s impulsiveness and his history of rash and often loss-making business ventures, he nevertheless supported Robert’s naphtha plans, shows that he found them promising. ‘I am the one among you who has inherited most of dear Father’s sanguine temperament, I am delighted by any big idea that is feasible to carry out but I proceed to its implementation extremely slowly and only after much consideration,’ Robert himself commented on his new pet project to his brother: ‘If I have once made a start in any direction I then stay there and embrace that one thing with great fervour.’17 At the same time Robert described to Alfred an ambitious plan for ‘lighting of towns with naphtha’ which the brother was expected to contribute towards by obtaining capital in England.18 Robert returned to Baku around 1 November 1873. Getting there was the opposite of easy. The previous time he had travelled via Tiflis in Georgia. Another route went via the Russian river systems, mainly the Volga, which south of Astrakhan runs out into the Caspian Sea, and that was the route that Robert chose this time. As well as its promising business opportunities, Baku meant a welcome change for Robert, who after all was unhappy in the Russian capital, where he found himself in the position of being dependent on Ludvig. In Baku he was his own man, and his enthusiasm knew no bounds. ‘Here in Baku I am happier than in any other place in Russia – not excluding St Petersburg,’ he reported shortly after his arrival. The people are ‘enterprising, industrious and quick and there is no conceit, class-distinction or any such Russian wretchedness here. It is not unusual to see colonels and persons of the same rank in company with our Swedish engineers, Finnish sea-captains and steersmen. The society is truly American! Long live equality! Only the authorities with their bureaucracy and slowness are reminiscent of the old world.’19

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His enthusiasm was a result of his nose for business and unquenchable desire to be financially independent. His positive attitude would, over the course of time and in view of his experiences, become muted, but the comparison with America was not far-fetched and was repeated in several letters. Another circumstance that fuelled his enthusiasm was the large number of Swedish speakers in Baku. ‘Swedish is spoken in every office and nowhere in Russia is the number of our fellow countrymen & of Finns in proportion to the local population as great as it is here,’ he wrote to a business colleague.20 It may have been an exaggeration, but the fact remains that the number of Swedish-speakers constituted a large group. For example, the engineer Gustaf Bengtsson’s engineering workshop had been here for several years, fetching its workers from Eriksberg’s workshop in Gothenburg.21 However, most Swedes in Baku were connected to the steamboat company Caucasus & Mercury, where they worked either in the company’s engineering workshops or as ship’s engineers. The company had been founded in 1858 to improve communications between the Caucasus, Transcaucasia and the Volga guberniyas and it dominated traffic on the Volga. Many of Caucasus & Mercury’s boats were built at the Motala yard in Norrköping in Sweden, which as early as 1844 had delivered a screw steamer to the Russian Emperor and had a large market in Russia.22 Because of the lack of Russians with knowledge of engineering the boats were often delivered with a Swedish crew. One of Caucasus & Mercury’s first vessels was moreover powered by a steam engine from Immanuel’s machine workshop, which as we have seen delivered several boats to the company. Caucasus & Mercury were not in other words an unknown quantity for Robert, when, on the journey between Astrakhan and Baku, he became acquainted with the boat’s captain, a man by the name of Bruno de Boer whose brother Leon (Lev) was head of the Baku office of Caucasus & Mercury. The surname is Dutch but the brothers were born and grew up in a sea-captain’s family in Libau in Kurland (now Latvia).23 The conversations with Bruno de Boer were to have far-reaching consequences for Robert. The de Boer brothers were the owners of the Tiflis Company, a little oil company that owned several parcels of ground on the oil field and that was in the process of setting up a paraffin factory. Robert became interested and having after his arrival in Baku investigated conditions on the spot, he and de Boer decided to combine their interests. On de Boer’s part the motive was obviously financial. The shortage of money was even greater here than in St Petersburg and there were no banks – presumably the brothers quite simply lacked the capital needed and that Robert with Ludvig’s assistance could help with.

Logistical challenges For Robert a lot was at stake –his future and that of his family. At the age of fortyfive he was to show himself and others that he possessed the same flair for business

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as his brothers and that he could make himself financially independent. At the same time, this was a project for which, through his accumulated professional competence, he was particularly well suited; after all, he was not only a businessman and entrepreneur but also a trained chemist and he had not inconsiderable knowledge of engineering. As Robert was late entering the field, he found it difficult to acquire ‘naphtha land’. The large oil producers had already commandeered large parts of the auctioned-off crown land and private individuals willing to sell land often lacked the papers to show they owned it, which complicated the transaction. Nonetheless, a month later Robert got his hands on seven desyatins (about seven hectares) of land and later more again, but the parcels of land were not adjacent but rather spread out. In the meantime, Robert was forced to buy raw materials for distilling paraffin from other producers, but his aim was to work with his own oil and for that he had to begin drilling. The first borehole in Baku had been opened by Mirzoev, who in 1871–2 came across oil at a depth of thirty-five metres. Several oil deposits ‘gushed’, i.e. spurted oil uncontrollably out of the ground through the natural pressure of the earth. The first fountain was the Khalafi Company’s ‘Vermishev fountain’ which for four months in 1873 shot out oil quite out of control. Millions of pud ran back down into the sand, but enough could be captured for the oil price to plummet from 45 kopeks to 2 per pud (a pud corresponded to 16 kilos). Other fountains were to follow, they were depicted in photographs and postcards and exercised an irresistible temptation for anyone who saw in oil a source of ready money. In March 1874, Robert acquired a piece of ‘naphtha land’ from Lev de Boer, to whom, according to the contract, he would hand over a tenth of the oil extracted for a period of twenty-four years.24 A master smith by the name of Fredrik Axling from the machine factory in St Petersburg was taken on as drilling master. ‘My drillings are making rapid progress,’ Robert reported to Alfred in April. ‘I have already got 170 feet down, the oil has begun to show itself and with depth its quality increases.’ If the drillings succeeded, he would have ‘provided for wife and children for the future’.25 Robert also applied – prophetically! – to the authorities for permission to drill in the seabed, but nothing came of it. Robert’s first aim was to devote himself to paraffin manufacture, an operation he had been indirectly acquainted with previously, but he soon realized that there were just as great if not greater profits to be made in other sectors of the oil industry. After paraffin distillation (which took place between 150 and 280 degrees) large quantities of ‘oil residue’ (or mazut, as it was called by the local people) were left over. Mazut oil was valuable and could be sold for fuel or distilled into other naphtha products, in particular different types of lubricating oil. As there was a shortage of storage facilities, however, the mazut was not conserved but was allowed to run back into the ground or was burnt off. Building reservoirs for these oil residues therefore became a priority task. ‘As you already know from my latest, the factories for want of reservoirs are still

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FIGURE 5.3 A ‘mazut lake’ at the oil fields in Sabunchi.

throwing away this valuable product, so that in the winter-time we could buy it at a very cheap price,’ Robert wrote to Ludvig, continuing: ‘To start with we [de Boer and Robert] are setting up just one reservoir with a capacity of 100 thousand pud, but in this we can have 3 to 4 turnovers a year. Mercury needs around 400 thousand pud a year and will be forced to take at least some from us. So the business is both secure and profitable and the initial capital expenditure is not more than 10,000 roubles.’26 That the new production conditions, where the exploitation was in private hands, should result in a quick and profitable development of the oil industry was obvious for anyone with eyes to see. At the same time the logistical problems were enormous. Production of paraffin could certainly yield large profits, but even more money could be made by a rationalization of the whole process from extraction and refining of the oil to storing and transporting it. Robert was not alone in realizing this, but he was one of the few who – through Ludvig – could obtain the necessary capital. Perhaps the most important question concerned transport. The oil deposits in Balakhani were a good ten kilometres from the refineries in the Black City. The oil was carried between them either in leather sacks or in barrels containing between 350 and 450 litres. The form of transport was an arba, a two-wheeled cart pulled by a horse or a mule. For thousands of local people these oil transports were the main means of making a living. But the procedure was both slow and expensive. A pud of oil cost 3 kopeks but the freight from the oil field to the Black City was more than five times as much. The trade was moreover dependent on the weather as much as on strikes. When the oil could not be delivered the refineries stopped

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FIGURE 5.4 A typical arba for transporting barrels of oil.

working, and of course, grazing was required for the carthorses and factories for production and repair of barrels. Coopering was an important trade, the coopers knew their worth and were handsomely paid. As there was a shortage of wood most of the oak had to be imported, sometimes all the way from the USA. To cut down on expenses, Robert planned initially to set up his own cooperage in order to subsequently go over to a completely new system, namely to replace the arbas with pipelines. In the USA, where the oil business was in private hands and entrepreneurship was not held back by bureaucratic apathy and incompetence, pipelines had begun to be used in 1863 for the transport of oil. However, when the famous chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (the man behind the periodic table) suggested that same year that a pipeline should be built in Baku, he was talking to deaf government ears. The prerequisites for a pipeline between Balakhani and the Black City were in fact excellent as the oil field was situated sixty metres higher than the city and therefore no large pumping mechanisms were required. In the USA, the pipes were of iron but the difference of levels in Baku meant according to Robert that instead the oil could be directed through ‘brick-built channels and clay pipes, which will be much cheaper’.27 The pipes became reality, but not until five years later. Robert also had a solution for the onward freight, out to the markets. The paraffin was transported in barrels from Baku to the cities in Russia by sailing ships, which were not suited to this type of freight. The movement of the sea could cause the barrels to crack open and leak, with the consequent risk of fire. Robert

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saw the solution in specially constructed steamships, and he didn’t delay. Already during his visit to St Petersburg, between his two stays in Baku, he had contacted the marine engineer Göthe W. Svenson, manager of the Karlskrona machineworkshop and one of Sweden’s leading shipbuilders, to discuss the question. ‘It is very difficult to forecast how things here will turn out in future,’ he wrote, ‘but to judge from the work that is going on here, Baku will become the actual capital of paraffin distilling . . .’.28 Already in the autumn of that same year, Svenson completed a ‘Drawing of the rigging of Iron steamships for sailing the Caspian Sea’ which could carry 25,000 pud of naphtha in cisterns. It must have been one of the world’s first drawings of a tanker. Robert had been afflicted by ‘naphtha fever’ and he soon realized that the only way to get anything done was to settle in the area himself. ‘That I am staying here for so long will no doubt surprise you,’ he wrote to Ludvig, ‘but, you see, I proceed from the principle that it is necessary to acquire a comprehensive knowledge of a place in which one intends to conduct business, but above all to get to know the character of people with whom one will in future have dealings.’ Robert said he already knew ‘all the prominent people of the place’ and ‘that will not be without its advantage’.29 He was therefore determined to settle in Baku for some considerable time.30

A St Petersburg interlude After five months in Baku, at the end of March/beginning of April 1874, Robert returned to St Petersburg. During his second stay by the shores of the Caspian Sea he had built up a good picture of conditions in the place and identified what prerequisites were needed for the oil project to be profitable. He was not lacking in self-belief. ‘Through my long sojourn here I have a good head start on all future speculators,’ he reported to Ludvig, ‘so far I am the only one who has arrived here with some reputation and knowledge.’31 At the same time it was clear to Robert that his savings would not be sufficient for the necessary investments. He therefore asked Ludvig to open an account for him with credit corresponding to his post in the Pargolovo business and his ten shares in the Nitroglycerine Company, worth 1,000 kronor (around £4,000 today) each. As the plots of land he had bought would within a few years be ‘worth ten times as much’, the investment, Robert thought, involved no risk. In letter after letter, therefore, he urged Ludvig to join him in the project. ‘If you want to be included in this project then give me a definite answer! We are agreed in principle how it should be done.’ Not the least of his arguments was the children’s financial security: ‘Like me, you have sons and this will provide for their future.’32 In St Petersburg, Robert was still in contact with Svenson the engineer in Karlskrona about the planned vessel and with Lev de Boer in Baku about their oil

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dealings. In May there was an explosion at Vinterviken and twelve people were killed. ‘May your next telegram bring news of good naphtha in large quantities!’ Robert wrote to de Boer, with whom surprisingly enough he corresponded in Swedish. ‘Such a piece of news would be very welcome to me, for yesterday I received a telegram from Stockholm with the sad news that the dynamite factory had blown up, whereby the steamboat Platen – probably unloading or loading in the factory harbour – has also been destroyed by fire. After such a palpable loss it would be nice to be able to supplement one’s deficient income through success with the drilling.33 The drillings were going well, Robert reported some weeks later to Alfred, they had now reached a depth of nearly 360 feet. Most important of all: ‘I have arranged with Ludvig that he will take a half share in my oriental speculations.’34 As we saw, Robert had initially a very positive view of Baku, but after his second stay in the city his enthusiasm was markedly deflated: ‘The Asiatic sluggishness and indolence have never ceased to test my patience most severely: my six-month stay in Baku has often enabled me to realize the truth of the saying: “East, west, home’s best”. What with us can be done in one year takes 10 in Asia.’35 Despite his reservations, after five months in St Petersburg, Helsinki (where he called on his family) and Stockholm (where he visited his mother on her birthday), Robert set his course once more for Baku, where he landed in October 1874. He travelled on his own, unaccompanied by his family. Pauline and the two youngest children were in Helsinki, and his eldest son, Hjalmar, had been boarding for several years with the Adlersparre family in Stockholm. Baku was not an ideal place for children to grow up in, not least because there was a lack of schools, and that his wife Pauline should wish to set up house in a dirty and dusty provincial city on the Caspian Sea was unthinkable. Sometimes in letters Robert mentioned that he was missing his family, but the fact is that he lived apart from them for years without seeming to have suffered particularly. In his world work came before family – ‘the demands of duty’, as he put it in a letter to Ludvig, ‘are a man’s most cherished feelings’.36

Bad Kube – City of the Winds The city that Robert decided to settle down in was the capital of the Baku guberniya, which bordered on Persia to the south. Although Baku was a halt on the Silk Route, its situation to the east of the Caucasus meant that it was almost untouched by Western influences. The Caspian Sea was to all intents and purposes an Asiatic and, in particular, a Persian sea, and the east side of the Caucasus, in contrast with Christian Georgia, had been Muslim for centuries. Through its position as a trading town Baku’s population was exceptionally mixed. There were Persians, Tatars (as the local population were called), Turks, Kurds, Russians, Armenians,

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FIGURE 5.5 Caucasian pictures: 1) lodging-house, 2) tea house, 3) street in the Baku bazaar, 4) Persian merchants, 5) mules laden with charcoal.

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FIGURE 5.5 (Continued).

Jews and more – an ethnic mixture not found anywhere else in the Russian Empire. In the 1870s the population was around 20,000. Baku lies in a bay shaped like an amphitheatre, with the sixty-kilometre-long Apsheron Peninsula as a protective breakwater and windbreak to the north, providing a natural harbour in a good southerly position. The bay is around ten

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kilometres long. The British engineer and journalist Charles Marvin, who after a visit to the Caucasus in 1883, wrote the book The Region of the Eternal Fire – a well-informed and factual account of the oil industry – was struck by the area’s wealth not only in oil but also in fish: The bay is full of fish, and there are plenty of craft to sail in. . . . The water in the Caspian is clear and salty, and for the greater part of the year maintains just the temperature that suits most people’s taste. There are only two drawbacks – the bay is so full of fish that one never loses the impression that he is in an

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FIGURE 5.6 Geological map of the Apsheron Peninsula.

aquarium; and when the wind lies in a particular direction, it blows inland the oil spouting up to the surface outside, causing a black scum to gather on the top of the water and prevent bathing for a day or two.37 Robert often complained in letters about the weather in Baku, and with justice. The summers are warm and damp, the winters cold, and strong winds blow throughout the year. Baku is not so named in vain: it can be derived from Persian bad kube, ‘City of Winds’. The rainfall is slight, around 200 millimetres annually, which made water supply a problem. The water was fetched from wells which through constant

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use became salty; for foreigners the water with its high salt content was difficult to get used to, but the inhabitants were so used to the taste that they used to salt their tea when they came to a place with cleaner water. If the city of Baku itself was, thanks to the oil boom, in a state of positive transformation during these years, communications between the city and its oilrich surroundings were, as we have seen, extremely primitive. Not until 1880 was a rail connection opened between Baku and the oil field, before that there was no alternative to horse and cart. There were no real roads, only ‘a place used as a road, two deep wheel-ruts that have been created over thousands of years and that are only – in a time of utmost necessity – cursorily repaired’.38 Marvin relates: The drivers are Tatars, and a superior class of men compared with the isvostchiks usually met in Russian towns. The charge for driving to any part inside Baku is 15 copecks, or 4d. The journey to Balakhani or Surakhani occupies more than two hours. For going there and back, and waiting at different points while his fare inspects the wells, the driver expects three or four roubles. As no refreshments are to be had on the road or at the wells, the traveller should take something with him, particularly something to assuage his thirst, the journey most of the year round being a warm and dusty one. . . . The track, for there is no road, lies the whole way across sheer desert. The surface consists of rugged limestone, the ruts and the jagged projections being eased here and there by a layer of dust. Vegetation there is none, save the everlasting camel-thorn, which, when thick, imparts occasionally a green tint to the landscape. . . . No villages or settlements exist between Baku and Balakhani. . . . But although there are no habitations, there is plenty of traffic along the track. Crowds of donkey-boys are passed – with panniers crammed with grapes going to Baku, or returning with empty ones from it. Now and again a black patch is seen; this is one of the numerous petroleum springs dotting the Apsheron peninsula. Close to Balakhani depressions are observed, covered with a dazzling white efflorescence; these are salt lakes, of which there are any number in this part of the Caucasus. When one gets into Balakhani itself, the white lakes are replaced by black ones – lakes of crude petroleum oil, in many of which there is plenty of room for boats to row.39 Having once arrived in Balakhani, the oil fields awaited – trackless, needless to say – where the visitor, in Marvin’s words, ‘can hardly escape having his helmet and coat splashed with oil, and even if he turns up the bottom of his trousers he is sure to soil them in traversing the sand, ankle-deep, and moist with oil, round about the wells’.40 The same held true for the Black City in the outskirts of Baku, with its 200 refineries. In Baku itself, the situation was hardly better, but there it was not the oil that was the problem: ‘The streets are unpaved and the mud or rather the sand is now so deep that it is absolutely impossible to walk down a street with the shoes customary in towns,’ Robert complained to his wife.41

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FIGURE 5.7 Baku harbour.

During his first stay in Baku, Robert had lived in primitive fashion and slept on rugs in an unfurnished room without either sheets or quilt, which made him feel like ‘a natural man, which is the same as a pig’. On his second visit he camped out in ‘a filthy hotel’.42 Now when he travelled to Baku for the third time, on this occasion to establish himself for a longer period, he sent on furniture and household utensils from St Petersburg. ‘I have grown tired of hotels and now want to have a sanctuary where I can keep house myself,’ he wrote to de Boer, continuing: ‘I therefore require an apartment as large as yours or at least five rooms and a kitchen and in addition a stable for 2 horses, coach-shed, etc.’ For his paraffin project, moreover, he needed ‘a large hall in an isolated house of one storey for the installation of a scientific laboratory with a steam boiler and all kinds of retorts of such sizeable dimensions that the laboratory experiments will yield results on an industrial scale . . . .’ ‘Having made all my dispositions I am now therefore pretty well obliged to regard myself as, for some considerable time or for all time, as a citizen of Baku,’ Robert added in the letter to de Boer.43 And so it turned out – apart from a few detours to St Petersburg or Western Europe, the City of the Winds would be his fixed address for six years. Now that Robert had settled in Baku with the intention of remaining there he began to concentrate his endeavours in three main areas. He continued to look for parcels of land where he could drill for his own oil, so he would not have to

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purchase it from others, and he worked on methods of refining the technique of distillation – partly with a view to extracting a higher percentage of paraffin from the crude oil, partly to improve the quality so that it could measure up to the American product. A third challenge, of an administrative nature, was the excise duty that was imposed on oil extraction and that put a damper on willingness to invest and made it harder to compete with foreign producers. In the spring of 1875 Robert acquired de Boer’s newly-established paraffin factory, according to himself ‘the best-situated of all industrial plants in Baku’.44 The situation was certainly excellent: the factory lay in the Black City, near the sea and the station that was planned for the railway between Baku and the port city of Poti on the Black Sea in Georgia which, when it was finished, would open the way for exports to Western Europe. Discussions about buying the factory had begun in January and were concluded at the end of April/beginning of May. During the negotiations, Robert, by ‘bending the bow till the string was close to snapping’, succeeded in beating down the price from 24,200 to 18,650 roubles, money that he got from Ludvig.45 ‘After six months’ efforts I have finally become the owner of a paraffin factory so that I am now established but the difficulties that are placed in the way of every development here are so great that you grow dizzy just thinking about them,’ Robert reported to Alfred when everything was ready.46 The factory had then been in production for only a week. The reason for the de Boer brothers selling it was that the price of paraffin had sunk by 50 per cent because of over-production in the USA and hopes of making quick profits from it had thereby come to nought. However, the collaboration with de Boer continued.

FIGURE 5.8 Robert’s first paraffin factory which he took over from the de Boer brothers.

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De Boer also let Robert take over the lease of several parcels of land on the island of Cheleken on the east bank of the Caspian Sea, in Turkestan. The presence of oil here was reported as early as the mid-eighteenth century, but the island was situated in uncivilized and dangerous parts where Turkmen tribes ruled and harried and where ‘infidels’ were unwilling to go. With the founding of the garrison town of Krasnovodsk in 1865, however, the interest of the oil producers was awakened and in 1872 the first well was drilled. The town was of major military importance as it served as a base for the Russian army’s operations against the Khanates of Khiva and Bukhara as well as against the Turkmen tribes. If this area could be pacified the way to India lay open. Drill master Axling was sent – with a wage rise – to Cheleken, where a little Swedish colony grew up and where the drilling, after a while, resulted in a fountain of naphtha. The oil on the island had different qualities from that in Baku and, according to Robert, the naphtha that was extracted was even superior to the American variety. The results in his laboratory turned out to be ‘spectacular, to say the least’ and the experiments in retorts on a scale of 1/20 guaranteed that the whole thing would also work when produced on an industrial scale – ‘when the principle is established its execution is not difficult’.47 To find buyers for such a good paraffin would not be difficult and expanding the factory to produce half a million pud a year would, according to Robert, be a trifle.48 ‘If I succeed at Cheleken as I did with the purchase of the factory then within 2 years we will have an industry of inestimable value,’ he declared to his brother in St Petersburg.49 During his short time in Baku, Robert had made many influential acquaintances, which was not surprising. Thanks to Ludvig’s successes in St Petersburg and Izhevsk, the name of Nobel functioned as a first-class door-opener, not least in military circles. Good contacts in the highest political and military leadership – including grand dukes and tsars – were something they had had ever since their father’s time, with naval mines and the Crimean War. ‘Nobel’ was quite simply a solid brand, something that Robert knew how to take advantage of. During his prospecting on Cheleken he had the unqualified support of General Nikolai Lomakin. Since May 1874 he had been head of the army in Trans-Caspia and commander of the garrison in Krasnovodsk, and according to Robert he was a man of honour. Thanks to him, Robert was able to take over de Boer’s contract on Cheleken (which other interested parties would have liked to lay claim to). Lomakin’s support also included purely practical contributions. He put a government ship at Robert’s disposal for the crossing to the island and when Robert said he was afraid lest some ‘hostile Teke [a Turkmen tribe] should take it into their heads to stroll over to Cheleken’, the general sent a sailing ship armed with cannons to those waters.50 Behind Lomakin’s goodwill lay not only respect for the Nobel name, but an honest admiration for what Robert had managed to achieve in a short time. During his visit to Cheleken the general was ‘absolutely delighted with the building’, in which the rooms and kitchen were heated with oil, something rare in Baku, and where ‘even

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the baking of bread took place with this fuel, something which it has still not been used for anywhere’.51 That Lomakin’s admiration was genuine is evident from a letter to the Russian consul in Astrabad in Persia where he writes: ‘On Cheleken, on Nobel’s parcels of land, the extraction of oil is already taking place according to correct, rational principles. The oil gushes up in fountains out of two boreholes, in the first from a depth of ten fathoms and in the other, larger one from twenty fathoms. There is already a whole small Swedish colony there with neat little houses.’52 Having no previous knowledge of paraffin distillation Robert had not only taught himself the process in a short space of time but had also, in his own words, ‘even succeeded in making some improvements therein’.53 He is said to have been the first person in Baku to use caustic soda to purify the paraffin, a method that had been discovered by the German chemist Hermann Frasch.54 Robert reckoned on being able to produce 150,000–200,000 pud of prime paraffin a year with poor Baku oil and 400,000 pud with oil from Cheleken (which yielded at least 50 per cent paraffin). Prospects for the future were, in other words, ‘brilliant’ (to use one of the Nobel brothers’ favourite adjectives on the subject of oil). According to Robert, the affair was ‘big’, and he wrote triumphantly to Ludvig that he felt within himself ‘apart from great superiority to all the others here, all that strength that is necessary to turn this business into our monopoly’.55 ‘It is my conviction that within a few years Russia’s whole production of paraffin will lie in our hands. When the railway from Baku to Poti is ready, moreover, the world market will be open to us.’56 Few prophecies have turned out more accurate.

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6 ROBERT AND LUDVIG

Robert’s intention in 1876 was to found his own firm, Robert Nobel & Co., and for that he needed Ludvig’s technical advice and continued financial support. In 1875 he travelled to St Petersburg to discuss the further development of the business with his brother, to whom he had earlier sent detailed calculations of the costs of constructing oil reservoirs, water pipes and more for a total sum of 50,000 roubles. Robert was not counting on any profit for 1875 but already the following year the firm should be ‘a considerable business’, in the course of a few years becoming ‘one of the most splendid in the country’.1 It was the third time that Robert had travelled to the capital to brief Ludvig and to discuss the future with him. One reason why he decided to make the arduous journey was the slow postal service. During the summer, it took two weeks for a letter to arrive, during the winter, six. As the letters moreover often crossed each other, exchange of views as well as decision-making was rendered more difficult. Since during the summer months ‘only 6 ideas can be exchanged and during the remaining 6 winter months only 3, making a total of 9 for the year’ Robert was sometimes forced to act without asking Ludvig for advice, which he regretted.2 Nine ideas a year was naturally starvation rations for individuals with the Nobel brothers’ propeller-driven intellect. That Robert, during this visit, finally succeeded in convincing Ludvig of the potential of his project emerges from a letter which Ludvig wrote to Alfred after Robert’s departure and in which he urged Alfred to join in the oil business: Robert has returned to Baku after his trip to the East coast and has found excellent naphtha at a depth of 10 fathoms on the island of Cheleken. He is now as a result supplied with raw materials. We shall now see if he knows how to manage the production and the sales on a large scale. It is on this that his future success and happiness will come to depend. For my part I have done what I can, by assisting him with money & advice of a technical nature. Robert says himself that he has made new discoveries in the distillation and purification of the oil. I

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cannot judge their value, as I am not well-versed in the field. . . . The main thing is and remains, however, to understand how to prosecute the work on a large scale and in a sensible way. I keep thinking that we, i.e. you and I, ought to travel there together to see if we cannot help him in some way. We after all have succeeded in becoming independent and we ought therefore to try to help Robert to also achieve the same status. Think therefore about travelling to Baku with your devoted Ludvig.3 Ludvig’s exhortation to Alfred to visit Baku fell on deaf ears. He remained in Paris. Ludvig himself had been tempted to keep Robert company when he left St Petersburg in November, but he decided to stay in the capital. It was late in the year; he was apprehensive about ‘filthy weather for the return journey’ and therefore decided to postpone his trip to the spring.4

Excise duty One thing that the brothers discussed was the excise duty on paraffin. The tax was not particularly onerous – over the years it oscillated between twenty-five and five kopeks per pud – but it hit producers of good paraffin hard as it took longer to produce than the inferior product. The excise duty thus constituted an obstacle both to improvement of the product and to expansion of the oil industry in general. It also represented a significant disadvantage in competition with American paraffin, which because of the lack of good transport facilities in Russia was cheaper to import to St Petersburg, Moscow and even Tbilisi (formerly Tiflis) than that made in Baku. As long as the excise duty was in force, Robert’s efforts were concentrated on trying to manufacture high-quality paraffin with a distillation time as short as that for the poor-quality product, and he was successful in this. His paraffin was, as we have said, as good as the American stuff, if not better.‘The very fact that I can produce a distillation superior to the American one is something that I would like to make use of to overcome the excisemen’s zeal for regulations. I therefore intend to send some pud to the Imperial Russian Technological Society in P-burg with a little explanation of their advantages over the American product . . . with a request that the Society will undertake to save this industry, so important for Russia, from ruin.’5 The question of the excise duty was so urgent that a government commission was set up, based in Tbilisi. Robert took an active part in its work, his views were quoted in the press and together with three other industry practitioners he was invited to the Caucasian capital to present his ideas to, among others, Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich, brother of the Emperor and governor of the Caucasus. They had met earlier, and the Grand Duke showed Robert, ‘in his capacity of expert on the Naphtha industry in Baku’, such goodwill that he felt embarrassed. He also

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received praise for his work on Cheleken. ‘Overall I had the satisfaction that they turned to me first of all and with the greatest degree of trust. We have every reason to believe that my stay in Tbilisi will result in improved legislation and in addition I have the satisfaction of being the first Swede in this place on whose behalf something like this has happened.’6 The Technological Society’s Caucasian section in Tbilisi was also involved in the effort to do away with the duty on paraffin, but the most important contribution was made by the parent society in St Petersburg, which set up a commission tasked with examining the question. It was led by the Duke of Leuchtenberg and among the members were Ludvig, the oil producer Kokorev and the chemist Mendeleev, who already in the 1860s had forecast that the oil industry in the Caucasus had the prerequisites to achieve ‘not only Pennsylvanian but even more comprehensive and constant dimensions’.7 Robert sent examples of his paraffin to the Technological Society in Tbilisi as well as to the capital and urged Ludvig to work ‘in the direction I have suggested’ through his contacts in the Society.8 This Ludvig did, on numerous occasions in discussions about the oil industry emphasizing the harmful effect of the excise duty on the development of the industry.9 He also published a long article in the Society’s transactions, ‘Views on the oil industry in Baku and its future’, which may in fact have contributed to the abolition of the duty on 1 September 1877.10 Like the abolition of the contract system four years earlier, the tax concession had a speedy and positive effect. During the following decade production of paraffin in Baku increased from 4.5 million pud annually to more than 32 million at the same time as it became four and a half times cheaper.11

‘Brilliant results’ Robert bought de Boer’s factory primarily to expand it – as well as for the site itself; it was too late for him to acquire a site of his own in the Black City. From the perspective of the future, he had mapped out the de Boer factory was too small and shortly after its acquisition he began work on expanding it. Its profitability – he and Ludvig were convinced – was wholly dependent on the scale of production. As soon as the acquisition was completed, he ordered necessary materials from St Petersburg: gas-taps, valve cupboards and connecting links for gas pipes, gas lamps of pig-iron, fireproof clay, and more besides. To pay for the expansion, from the summer of 1875 onwards he asked Ludvig for around 10,000 roubles a month. Apart from coopers, watchmen and other workers Robert’s fellow workers, like drilling master Axling, were almost all Swedes: the engineer Martin Westvall, who began as a coppersmith in St Petersburg in the 1860s and had been employed in an engineering workshop in Baku before becoming manager of Robert’s little workshop; the head of production, mining engineer August Awelin, who came to

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Baku immediately after graduating from the Technological Institute in Stockholm in 1874, and Samuel Dahlgrén, who kept the books.12 Robert also sought out a good chemist from Sweden and tried to persuade Alarik Liedbeck, who was about to leave the Nitroglycerine Company, to come to Baku, but Liedbeck chose instead to move to Paris and take up a post with the French Dynamite Syndicate (Syndicat des fabriques de Dynamite). The work of extending the factory took longer than expected, for practical as well as administrative reasons. ‘The accomplishment of my programme here in the East is progressing slowly, but the difficulties are so many that no-one in Europe can have the faintest idea about it,’ he complained to Alfred in the spring of 1876. ‘The higher authorities as well as my rivals are beginning to realize that I conduct my affairs quite differently to what is usual here. The former are very attentive to me here and the latter exert all their power to damage me.’13 Robert had hoped that the factory would be ready by the summer of 1876, but it took until September. Ludvig, as we have mentioned, had asked Alfred to contemplate a journey to Baku to get an on the spot impression of the oil industry and Robert’s contributions. In the spring of 1876, Robert did the same. ‘Come here soon!’ he urged his brother.14 The exhortation fell on deaf ears yet again, Alfred did not come – but Ludvig did. In mid-May 1876, when the factory was as good as finished, he travelled down to Baku with his seventeen-year-old son Emanuel.15 There are no details of his stay, but that Ludvig was impressed by what he saw is beyond doubt. From now on he no longer contented himself with sending monthly sums of money but took an active part in the development of the business. Through conversations and correspondence with Robert, Ludvig was well-prepared when he came to Baku. He had also read up on the subject. When he had visited Paris earlier in the spring Alfred had given him a book about prospecting for oil in the USA, which he pounced upon: Andrew Cone’s & Walter R. Johns’ Petrolia: A brief history of the Pennsylvania petroleum region. ‘Ever since we parted I have been almost exclusively occupied with studying the petroleum question,’ he wrote to Alfred. ‘The book you gave me . . . not only gave me a whole lot of interesting details but strengthened me in my plans and calculations for methods of transport and showed that in all respects I have calculated and thought correctly about the way in which to transport and store the oil.’ Everything that Ludvig wanted to do in Baku had already been done in the USA and was described in detail in the book of 650 pages, not least the transport and storage questions. ‘In America such an enterprise has already been carried out on a large scale and everything they have done there on those lines is characteristic of the most profitable businesses to be found in America,’ he wrote to Alfred. ‘The model is to hand – calculations easy to make and clear as day.’16 Ludvig was now so convinced of the business’s potential that he devoted the summer, which he spent in Stockholm, to working out ‘a detailed essay on the subject’ intended to show ‘the advantages of the business’. To get a better understanding of conditions in Baku as well as ‘some of the authorities in the

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Caucasus’ he travelled there again in October of the same year.17 With him he had an engineer who was to help him to work out his ‘major proposals, to set up a line of communication to transport the oil on a large scale from Baku to the Russian market’. The enterprise would not be difficult to bring to fruition and the profit would be ‘enormous’. To cover the costs of preparing the paraffin he and Robert had taken on as a partner ‘Old Man Standertskjöld’, who had invested 150,000 roubles in the form of securities for a bank loan. However, the big outgoings were on the transport side and to cover these Ludvig envisaged founding a limited company or limited partnership company with a capital of around 2.5 million roubles or 10 million francs. ‘You mustn’t think I am exaggerating, or that I am counting on unusually favourable trading conditions!’ he wrote to Alfred, who still had to be convinced. ‘I can prove to you the accuracy of my calculations and claims – and I am happy to be able to tell you this, as it will please you for Robert’s sake, as he has had more than enough unpleasantness to endure and a good many difficulties to overcome down there in that rather disagreeable hole called Baku.’18 One of the ‘authorities’ that Ludvig met in the Caucasus was Grand Duke Mikhail, who granted him an audience in Tbilisi on his way home and who promised to do all he could to promote the success of the business. After his arrival home Ludvig reported to Alfred that Robert had achieved ‘brilliant results’. While the other producers of crude oil extract ‘30% heavy and poor product, he is getting from the same naphtha 40% excellent and light paraffin, which can perfectly well match the prime quality American product’. Right from the start, therefore, the business should be able to offer the market a product ‘that will give the firm a “brilliant” reputation’. The factory’s production capacity was already considerable but could ‘with an increase in the size of the machinery’ be quadrupled.19

‘Views on the oil industry in Baku and its future’ The activity that Ludvig set in motion after first becoming acquainted with Baku is deeply impressive. His report on the future of oil, ‘Prospectus for the formation of an Oil-producing and transportation Company in Bakou’, was intended to be used to persuade investors to invest in the brothers’ oil project, and he sent it to Alfred in the form of a brochure in several languages. The thoughts coincided with those that he presented in the abovementioned essay ‘Views on the oil industry in Baku and its future’, in which he sketched out a detailed programme for how Russian oil extraction could be developed into an enterprise on an international scale. The resources, according to Ludvig, were infinite, the opportunities great and the problems that stood in the way of such a development were easy to identify. For comparison he cited the oil industry in Pennsylvania, which in only fifteen years

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had developed into an extremely profitable enterprise thanks to the introduction of efficient means of extraction and transport. On several occasions Robert’s contributions in Baku are also mentioned, especially in the distillation of paraffin. The most important points in the sixteen-page-long essay concerned the extraction of oil, its transport to the refineries and markets as well as storage issues. In Baku, as we mentioned previously, the methods of extraction were very primitive and oil gushed out of the boreholes that there was no capacity to use. From a fountain or by pumping out the boreholes, the oil was collected in pools dug out of the ground, from where it was pumped into barrels which contained around 25 pud (around 400 litres) or poured into leather sacks. The barrels were then secured under an arba with a wheel-height of fully two metres while the sacks were loaded onto the cart. The oil was then transported from the oil field on nonexistent roads the ten kilometres or so to the refineries in the Black City. In the USA, on the other hand, for several years the oil had been pumped from the oil fields to the refineries through cast-iron pipes. There they had also built tanks of iron for storage of the oil, something that not only eliminated the risk of leakage but also allowed the oil producer to await better market conditions instead of having to sell his product immediately. At the same time in the USA, they were beginning to build railway lines designed exclusively for oil transportation. None of this could be found in Baku, which according to Ludvig was because of insufficient enterprise together with a lack of knowledge as well as capital. As regards the financial rewards of oil manufacturing, Ludvig pointed out, Baku oil contained only 33 per cent of light oils (suitable for producing paraffin) while the corresponding figure for oil in Pennsylvania was between 60 and 80 per cent. In the USA, moreover, the remaining percentage was collected and used for the gas-lighting of towns and as lubricating oil. In Baku on the other hand, mazut was sold for next to nothing or burnt off because of the fire risk. This surplus oil was valuable in itself and could be used, for example, for making asphalt – which according to Ludvig could, among other things, solve the problem of paving the streets in Russia’s southern regions where there was a lack of stone. Because of the excise system, however, there was no profit in manufacturing asphalt. The biggest problem, as we have already mentioned, was the delivery of oil products from the refineries out to the markets. It took place in vats which held twenty pud or 320 litres, but this method of transport was both impractical and costly. A whole cooperage industry was needed, wood was a scarce commodity in unforested Baku and the vats were therefore expensive. The costs of these actually exceeded the value of the finished product. Moreover, they leaked, particularly if they had to be stored for a long time in the oil depots, which was the case during the winter, when navigation ceased because of the ice. Then the barrels became leaky and leakage amounted on average to 15 per cent of the contents. From the harbour, transport was by sailing ship to the Russian markets over the Caspian Sea and then up the Volga. The difficulties, as we saw, were many –

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including the heavy seas, which meant that the barrels were often smashed and caught fire. The biggest problem, however, was caused by the so-called nine-foot roadstead. The northern part of the Caspian Sea, by the outflow of the Volga, is very shallow. Ships must therefore stay out on the open sea for trans-shipment onto flat-bottomed barges with tugs that carried the oil over the shallow roadstead. As the depth of the water, in certain wind conditions, was only two feet, the oil sometimes had to be reloaded yet again. Every such reloading took several days and required a good deal of manpower, the barrels received knocks and the risk of leakage and fires was imminent. Depending on weather conditions the sailing ships could make between five and eight trips a year and only during the summer, when the demand for oil for lighting was at its lowest. If storage depots could be built on the other side of the nine-foot-roadstead a major logistical problem would be solved. What Ludvig suggested as a rational means of transport between the refineries and the markets was a system of tanks, pipelines and specially built steamboats. Hand carts would be replaced by pipes which with the help of steam pumps would carry the oil from Balakhani to the refineries in the Black City. There, after being refined, it would be kept in iron tanks, after which it would be conveyed down to the harbour and over in steamboats which in their turn were furnished with tanks. Such a vessel would be able to make about forty trips per season and the transshipment would take two hours instead of two days and nights. Once past the nine-foot-roadstead iron tanks would also be built in Astrakhan, mainly for storing mazut oil. The paraffin on the other hand would be transported further on the Volga on barges fitted out with tanks to places with railway stations, where it would be pumped over into tanks on land that were big enough to cater for Central Russia during the winter half of the year where no deliveries could be made. From these depots the paraffin would then be transported further out into the countryside by rail in specially built tankers. ‘The implementation of the suggested methods of transport and storage of oil and its by-products should not only safeguard the Russian oil industry against crises and difficulties, caused by dependency on [price fluctuations on] the American market,’ Ludvig concluded his essay,‘but should also create opportunities to develop in a correct and independent manner to a level where Russian oil products could also compete successfully with American paraffin on the European market.”

Ludvig’s programme The completion of Robert’s factory coincided sadly enough with a rise in the price of oil so great that the reserves were emptied. As Robert did not have access to his own oil, he could not therefore produce any paraffin. Moreover, freight costs on

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‘the damned arba carts’ rose by 50 per cent and coopers’ wages went up so that ‘these robbers will not content themselves with less wages than 5 to 6 roubles a day’.20 The laboratory experiments continued, however, and Robert reported to his nephew Emanuel that he had succeeded in producing a paraffin that was more or less odourless and colourless: ‘If you take two glass cylinders of white glass and pour paraffin into one and water into the other, it is only the light refraction that reveals in which one the paraffin is contained.’21 In only a few years Robert had shown that he was perhaps the best paraffin distiller in Baku. The lack of raw materials meant that instead of immediately starting up production on a large scale, Robert was forced to reduce the number of his workers. Although the position was ‘tricky’ he did not want to invest the last of his own resources, as his wife and children, in the event of his death, would then be ‘beggars’. To find capital in Russia was impossible, but the prospects of interesting foreign capitalists were great and from Alfred, ‘it sounds good’, Robert told his bookkeeper Dahlgrén.22 In February 1877, he took himself off to Paris to discuss the future with his brother and later in the spring Ludvig travelled there on the same errand. Meanwhile the price of oil returned to a normal level and access to raw materials stabilized. Production went up and by the summer the factory was producing 1,000 barrels of paraffin a week.23

FIGURE 6.1 Illustration in the journal Engineering showing the pipelines from the oil fields to Nobel’s wharf in the Black City.

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This initial setback, though, was only a little dip in the graph that Ludvig drew up in his ‘programme’, which he called it. In the first place, the programme had been formulated before the crisis occurred, in the second place Ludvig was thinking long-term and was well aware that the price of oil was subject to constant fluctuations. Therefore, he was not worried and the pipes for the oil pipeline were ordered immediately, despite the poor state of the economy. The order went to the Clyde Tube Works in Glasgow, which manufactured pipelines for the oil fields in Pennsylvania. The pipes were delivered as early as the spring of 1877, but laying them took time. Robert and Ludvig tried initially to interest other Baku producers in the idea, for reasons of cost but also to put pressure on the local authorities who were doubtful about the project as they feared that the new technique would lead to mass unemployment among the local population. Their rivals however were not interested, out of fear of giving up their independence or because of conservatism or both. Ludvig and Robert had therefore to take the project forward by themselves. Large parts of the land between Balakhani and the Black City were desert which was owned by the state and the local authorities refused initially to give permission for the pipeline, but after Robert turned to Grand Duke Mikhail and Ludvig paid court to high-ranking officials in St Petersburg they were forced to give way.24 However, the work was hindered by carters as well as coopers, who saw their future threatened. Eight watchtowers were therefore set up along the pipeline and armed Cossacks were stationed there to patrol the area.25 The contract was handed to the engineering firm Bari, Sytenko & Co. under the technical leadership of the young, and, in the future, very successful engineer Vladimir Zhukov. Alexander Bari (1847–1913) was a thirty-year-old engineer with an interesting background. When he was fifteen years old his family had been forced to leave Russia because of his father’s contacts with Karl Marx. They lived first in Zürich and then in Philadelphia, the capital of Pennsylvania. Abroad, they wrote their name as Bary, as it was spelt in France, the country from which the family had once emigrated. Alexander studied to become an engineer and made a name for himself by designing a number of pavilions at the World Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, for which he was rewarded with a gold medal. Subsequently he returned with his wife and daughter to St Petersburg.26 There he came into contact with Ludvig for whom he was like a godsend: a Russian engineer who had worked at the very centre of the American oil boom. Ludvig immediately took him on and sent him to Glasgow to order the pipes. Afterwards, Bari travelled to Baku, where he spent several months. ‘Thank you for taking on Bari!’ Robert exclaimed: ‘I have now spent enough time with him to be able to give an opinion about the man and although he is without any knowledge of chemistry I regard him as fully competent to carry out his task. He has a good understanding, is modest but knowledgeable and knows how to make himself liked by one and all.’27

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In December 1877, on behalf of the Nobel brothers, Bari travelled to the oil fields of Pennsylvania to study the latest findings in the field of pipe-laying and drilling techniques and to invite American drill masters to Baku. When the building of the pipeline was completed in the summer of 1878 he was back in Baku with four drill masters, who however found it difficult to adjust both themselves and their methods to local conditions, and accordingly returned home after less than a year.28 ‘It is high time to get rid of these expensive folk whose only talent was for how to drill in America but who were unable to adapt to our conditions,’ Robert complained when the last Americans left Baku in April 1879.29 The pipeline had not been cheap but the transport costs from Balakhani to the Black City were five times cheaper and the saving of time was enormous. ‘The pipeline, the tanks etc. etc. are awakening anxiety and envy in our rivals,’ Robert was already writing to Ludvig when only a fifth of the pipes had been laid, ‘they are now beginning to understand where the business is heading but as at the same time they feel themselves incapable of emulating us they are having recourse instead to those weapons that are called intrigues.’30 In the first month 841,000 pud of oil was sent through the pipelines, a decade later, over five and a half million pud per month. Within a year the investment had been paid back. It was not long before their rivals swallowed their vexation and paid 5 kopeks per pud for permission to use the pipelines. Then they were quick to follow this example. Already in 1879 around 150 kilometres of pipeline were laid out (one of which was built by Bari’s firm), but by then the Nobel brothers had won a head start that they would never lose. If in 1876 they dispatched fully 6,000 pud of paraffin from the harbour in Baku, production three years later was 551,000 pud as well as 466,000 pud of mazut oil. When the pipeline from the oilfield to the Black City was finished it was extended from the paraffin factory down to Baku harbour, a significantly shorter stretch. Then it was time for the second point in Ludvig’s and Robert’s programme: the transport out to the markets, which would be performed by tankers. The brothers tried first to interest Caucasus & Mercury, who however saw the enterprise as too risky. Moreover, on the Caspian Sea there was no shipyard that could build such a boat. As foreign vessels could be imported into Russia free of duty the order was given in November to the Motala Workshop in Sweden, for delivery eight months later. The vessel was called after the prophet Zoroaster. Ludvig drew up the rough sketch for the tanker, which was developed in close collaboration with Motala Verkstad’s technical director, Sven Almqvist; the detailed drawings were made by the engineer Olof Bengtsson. Zoroaster was the world’s first oil tanker. The vessel’s size was determined by the dimensions of the canal system that linked the Neva and the Volga, i.e. the Baltic to the Caspian Sea. Zoroaster shipped around 240 tons in eight tanks furnished with double walls with an intervening space filled with water to minimize the risk of fire. On 9 June 1878, the vessel was delivered to St Petersburg, from where the journey continued

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FIGURE 6.2 Branobel’s first oil tanker Zoroaster.

FIGURE 6.3 Engineer Olof Bengtsson’s drawing of Zoroaster.

through the canal system. Where the channels were too shallow the tanks were lifted out and loaded onto barges until the depth of the water allowed them to be replaced. ‘The steamboat Zoroaster is already now on the Volga – it has succeeded excellently,’ Ludvig reported to Alfred on 23 June.31 The person who steered the vessel from St Petersburg to Baku was Ludvig’s eldest son, Hjalmar Crusell, who at the age of twenty-two made his first known contribution to the family business.

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After the vessel had been delivered, he stayed on for a while with Robert at the paraffin factory. As early as September of the same year a further two tankers were ordered, Buddha and Nordenskiöld, which were delivered in the summer of 1879. They were of a different construction; the oil was transported in bulk direct into the holds and they were so big that they were built in three detachable parts to be able to pass through the locks in the canal system. Great importance was attached to safety. A series of precautions were taken to forestall the risk of leakage and to ensure the boats’ stability. ‘The construction and building of the vessels was a technical achievement on a grand scale,’ according to one expert.32 During the coming years, the Nobel oil-tanker fleet would be increased with a number of vessels, with names that reflect an exceptional geographical, cultural and religious multiplicity: Moses, Mohammed, Tatarin, Brahma, Spinoza, Sokrates, Darwin, Koran, Talmud and Kalmuck. Moreover, a large number of smaller boats, among other things flatbottomed tank-barges and roadstead vessels, were ordered.

The Nobel brothers’ Naphtha Production Company The paraffin factory was Robert’s, but the project could not have been realized without financial support from Ludvig, who regularly transferred money to his brother. By 31 December 1875, the brothers’ joint contributions amounted to 185,000 roubles (around 1,600,000 today), of which Ludvig had contributed 150,000 and Robert the remainder.33 Henceforth, the collaboration between the brothers was formalized and Robert drew up budgets for the years 1876to 1878. However, the good prospects for the future soon made it clear that the project could no longer be run on a family basis but that a company with several owners must be set up. ‘The capital is becoming too large for you alone to be the sleeping partner,’ Robert wrote to Ludvig in January 1876: ‘In this business large profits can only come with large amounts of capital.’34 As we mentioned previously, Robert worried about his brother’s permanently poor health, which threatened to put obstacles in the way of growing the business. Hitherto, he had requested money as and when needed, but during discussions in St Petersburg in the autumn of 1875 they seem to have agreed on regular transfers, something that Robert reminded Ludvig of in a letter written on the same day as that quoted above. ‘With age comes the realization that one’s lifetime is constantly growing shorter, and this makes us far-sighted and careful. I must therefore remind you to make arrangements lest, in the event you should fall ill or, even worse, die, I am not detained by the office, through failure to send the funds required for the continuation of the business. A capital sum of about 10,000 ought to be available here for any such unforeseen circumstance.’35 Robert was forty-six years old,

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Ludvig forty-four, but death was at this time an ever-present reality. Ludvig’s reaction is unknown. Further capital was contributed, as we mentioned, by Carl August Standertskjöld, who thereby became the firm’s third, if not official, partner.36 In the spring of 1877, a fourth partner joined the business, Pyotr Bilderling, with whom Ludvig had established a deep and trusting relationship while collaborating on their weapon production in Izhevsk, which had made both of them very rich. Another important reason for Bilderling becoming a partner was that only Russian subjects had the right to operate shipping lines in Russia. On 10 May 1878, one month before Zoroaster left the stocks in the shipyard in Sweden, a ‘special agreement’ was drawn up between Ludvig and Bilderling, in whose name the boat was registered. Bilderling went into the business with 100,000 roubles and undertook to inject a further 200,000. The agreement was based on the plans for improved means of transport and storage facilities sketched out in Ludvig’s brochure ‘Prospectus . . .’.37 ‘Bilderling’s involvement would be very useful, as he is a Russian subject, and things can be put in his name that foreigners have no entitlement to,’ Ludvig explained to Alfred.38 These injections of capital were the first steps on the way to a transformation of the Baku firm, which hitherto had been operated in Robert’s name, into a limited company. The investments that Ludvig foresaw in his ‘programme’ were only for the expansion of the paraffin factory to the tune of 2 million roubles – the building of tankers and storage depots would require even larger capital investments. In the spring of 1878, Robert was able to report a profit of 40,000 roubles in fourteen months, but this did not impress Ludvig. ‘It was the first year he was in production and you can imagine how much this will please him and lift his mood,’ Ludvig wrote to Alfred. ‘It pleases me greatly too but mostly for his sake, for nowadays I myself am so blasé about money that 40,000 more or less has no effect on my mood.’39 Robert’s figures were in truth not much to be proud of compared with those that Ludvig could show. The machine factory in St Petersburg and the arms factory in Izhevsk had a turnover of 25,000 roubles a day and in 1877 the machine factory had yielded a profit of 180,000 roubles, of which 64,000 was shared out in bonuses to the employees.40 In May 1878, after Bilderling joined the business, Ludvig asked Alfred for the first time if he truly wanted to be part of the planned limited company. Although everything was going according to plan, Ludvig thought it was time to involve other people. ‘If you now wish to join in the Baku business I must ask you to state how big a share you intend to take and at what due dates in the next two years you would like to pay your instalments.’ It would be desirable for Alfred to contribute ‘a substantial sum’ so that Ludvig could ‘continue with the development of the firm so that it is already fully mature before I need to rely on other and greater capital sums’.41 Alfred joined in as a founder of the oil company, but not with any ‘substantial sum’. Nor was he present at the first board meeting in St Petersburg at the beginning

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of September 1878, although according to Ludvig it would ‘be useful to our business in many respects as your experience in company affairs would be of great service to us’.42 Instead all the necessary papers were sent to Alfred in Paris for his signature. Robert, by contrast, came up from Baku in August. His presence, on the other hand, was more important than Alfred’s. Now that the company was to pass from being in his name to a limited company under the name of Nobel Brothers there were many things that had to be resolved, most importantly the questions of compensation. ‘Robert is here,’ Ludvig reported to Alfred, ‘his health is not bad but he is not in a good mood, he is irritable and tired and I have to tread very carefully in order to manage him without unpleasantness.’43 The most important question concerned how Robert should be compensated for the work he had put in over the years in Baku. His own preference had been to be compensated with shares, but according to Ludvig this type of compensation was forbidden in law. When Robert turned down Ludvig’s offer to compensate him out of his own pocket, Ludvig suggested that the question should be dealt with by the constituent assembly and there ‘settled once and for all . . . so that no reproaches for arbitrariness or selfinterest can be made’.44 Just as Immanuel had founded the firm in the 1840s with Colonel Ogaryov, Ludvig chose to go into partnership with a Russian to found his company. Apart from the above-mentioned practical advantages it was tactically smart to involve a respected Russian subject in the formation of such a wide-ranging enterprise. The natural choice was Pyotr Bilderling, with whom, after all, Ludvig had already made a separate agreement. When the application to be allowed to set up ‘a limited company under the aegis of Nobel Brothers & Co.’ was submitted to the minister of finance on 31 August 1878 it was thus made by ‘Ludvig Immanuelovich Nobel, merchant of the first guild and manufacturer, and Guards Colonel Pyotr Alexandrovich Bilderling’.45 The application was a variant of Ludvig’s ‘programme’ and explained in patriotic terms why the limited company had to be set up: One of the most important reasons for the slow development of the Russian oil deposits in the Baku area, with its infinite natural wealth of raw materials, is the absence of practical means for the delivery of crude oil from the wells to the refineries and of the refined products to the Russian market. Well aware of the fact that it was only the creation of cheap and fast means of transport that made it possible for the American paraffin to assume the dominant position on the world market that it has at present, we were forced, in our desire to make our Baku refinery more profitable and modern, to give particular weight to the creation of rational methods for freight transport that requires complicated technical equipment. To this end we have, along with the improvements that were introduced to our refinery, laid out a pipeline with

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pumps for the delivery of crude oil from the wells to the refinery and of distillate from the refinery to the seashore, special ships with tanks for transporting the oil and oil products in bulk have been built and special oil reservoirs of iron have been erected on the banks of the Volga for storage and safe-keeping of paraffin. We have already spent almost a million roubles for all this equipment. In order for these different items of equipment to form a mutually functioning organic whole, which makes it possible to deliver our own paraffin to the Russian market in successful competition with the Americans, injections of capital are needed that are twice as large as what has been invested to date. For the avoidance of speculation, a high price was set on the shares – 5,000 roubles, fully 9,000 Swedish kronor in 1879, over £40,000 today. The shares were not to be sold to outsiders before they had first been offered to the other shareholders.46 Along with the application a power of attorney was attached giving the technical engineer Mikhail Beliamin, who was managing director of the machine factory, the right to represent the firm in dealings with the authorities.47 This authorization was necessary as Ludvig and Robert, after handing in the application, had travelled to Stockholm to celebrate their mother’s seventy-fifth birthday on 30 September. Alfred also came up there from Hamburg, like ‘a shipload of relatives’.48 Now there was really something to celebrate, not just the birthday but also the successes in Baku and the founding of the new company! Pauline and Edla were also there, as were five of their children. There were so many family members that they could not all be put up by Andriette but had to stay in the Grand Hotel, where, in Alfred’s words, ‘the furniture is gilded but the food is rotten’.49 After the celebration, all three brothers went on to Paris and Ludvig then carried on to St Petersburg, but at Christmas Ludvig and family returned to Stockholm where they stayed for almost a year. Stockholm offered ‘pleasant diversions’ and he was not seriously ill once. Had he not had so many obligations back in Russia, ‘in particular the Baku affair, which is still being organized’, he would gladly have moved back from Russia and settled in Sweden, he confided to Alfred about the beginning of spring, adding: ‘But it will take several years before I can put everything in order so as to be able to step back myself.’50 Robert returned to Baku in December 1878. For the company to commence operations, the articles of association had to be confirmed by the Emperor, and that took time. For the time being, therefore, the business was run in Robert’s name, which made him feel ill at ease.51 One reason was the major works which got under way and which in February 1879, after five years’ drilling, led to them finding their own oil.52 Another reason was his state of health. At the beginning of March 1879, he was afflicted with a severe bout of typhoid fever which confined him to bed for a whole month and came close to costing him his life. His doctor explained that he would probably not survive such an ordeal again, but this did not worry

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Robert. The only thing that was meaningful for him was ‘that the business truly comes alive and is allowed to live on’: ‘For my own part, during the most difficult days of my illness I was quite indifferent and rather longed to die than to wish for recovery.’53 He therefore reminded Ludvig about a question he had asked Robert when they signed the company papers in St Petersburg: ‘ “Is everything now in such good order that in the event of my decease the business may not be affected by any inconvenience?” Your answer was – yes!’54 The fact that the Emperor’s gracious permission was delayed was not because the authorities had any objections to the founding of the company; on the contrary, they gave it their support. However, the ministries involved had their own views on certain aspects of the wording in the suggested regulation. Moreover, the ministry of finance asked for the opinion of the Governor of the Caucasus, Grand Duke Mikhail, which – as expected – supported the project whole-heartedly: ‘. . . I see it as my duty to state that two of the founders of the projected Limited Company, the brothers Ludvig and Robert Nobel, owners of an oil refinery in Baku, with their intelligent way of operating the business and their constant improvements in production technology, have significantly contributed to the development of the oil industry, wherefore an expansion of their activity in the aforementioned area would seem to be particularly desirable.’55 The law relating to the setting up of a limited company demanded that each formation of a company had to be approved and signed off by the Emperor.56 This royal permission arrived on 18 May 1879. ‘A telegram from St Petersburg informs us that His Majesty on 19 [sic] May old style approved the company regulations of our Baku enterprise in the name of the Nobel Brothers’ firm with a founding capital of 3 million roubles,’ a jubilant Ludvig informed Alfred in a letter from the summer retreat that the family rented outside Stockholm.57 Henceforth, the company went under the name of Branobel, an abbreviation of Bratya Nobel (Nobel Brothers), which was their telegraphic address. The application had been made by Ludvig and Bilderling, but in the company regulations there were two further founders: Robert and Alfred. The basic capital – 3 million consisting of 600 shares at 5,000 roubles – was shared between these four as well as another six shareholders as follows: Ludvig Nobel (1,610,000), Pyotr Bilderling (930,000), Ivan Zabelsky (135,000), Alfred Nobel (115,000), Robert Nobel (100,000), Alexander Bilderling (50,000), Fritz Blomberg (25,000), Mikhail Beliamin (25,000), Albert Sundgren (5,000) and Bruno Wunderlich (5,000). The board was made up of individuals who in different ways were close to the Nobel brothers. Apart from Mikhail Beliamin it consisted of Ivan Zabelsky, a St Petersburg merchant of the first guild who among other things was involved in the Baku project’s transport questions, Alexander Bilderling, younger brother of Pyotr and like him a colonel, Fritz Blomberg, the machine factory’s trusted chief accountant, Albert Sundgren, a Finnish businessman and Robert’s partner in the lighting oil business in the 1860s who also at this time was employed at the

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weapons factory in Izhevsk, and Bruno Wunderlich, a German businessman who had an import firm in Moscow. At the first shareholders’ meeting a board of management was appointed consisting of Ludvig, Robert and Bilderling, with Ludvig as managing director. The Nobel brothers together owned the majority of shares. Even if the deputy members were Russians – Zabelsky and Beliamin – the company thus had a strong family character, something that in the first instance can be explained by a desire for financial and organizational stability in a country with such an undeveloped company culture and poor access to capital as Russia. The fact that the shares were expensive – 5,000 roubles – was as we mentioned due to a desire to avoid speculation. If the business made a profit the owners would receive eight percent of the capital they had invested while the rest of the profit would be shared between them (60 per cent) and the employees (40 per cent), i.e. the same proportion as in the machine factory.

The men around Robert The letter in which Ludvig informed Robert of the Emperor’s gracious confirmation of the articles of association continued as follows: The plan is to have the whole line between Baku and St Petersburg ready by next summer. We now have 3 steamboats on the Caspian Sea, Zoroaster, Buddha and Nordenskiöld, which are capable of transporting 4 million pud of oil to Astrakhan. There are also already steamboats and barges ready to transport this oil to Tsaritsyn & in Tsaritsyn large tanks are being built which hold 800,000 pud but these should be further enlarged. We are now working on setting up the railway line to which end around two hundred railway waggons with tanks are under construction and we should now also begin to erect tanks in Moscow and St Petersburg. All the above-mentioned concerns only the means of transport and storage. But irrespective of these our actual Baku enterprise continues to expand. The distillation process is now working at full power and this year we hope to deliver 600,000 pud to the market. Ambitious plans indeed! Plans that had not only necessitated the founding of a limited company and a significant increase of capital but that also demanded a strengthening of professional competence. Robert, despite his proficiency in manufacturing paraffin, had as we saw long been in search of a competent chemist. In the spring of 1878, Erland Théel, a young acquaintance of Andriette’s, enquired about the possibility of a job in Baku. Since Robert, via Carl Öberg at the Nitroglycerine Company, had ordered a thorough vetting, Théel was employed in the autumn of the same year. Théel had been born in 1850 and had qualified as a

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chemist in 1876, so this was possibly his first job. It turned out to be a stroke of luck: before long Théel became manager of the paraffin factory and remained with Nobel right up to 1888 when he started his own factory for the manufacture of sesame oil.58 Another young man who would prove to be indispensable to Branobel was Alfred Törnqvist, born in 1854 and already a qualified civil engineer at the Technological Institute in Stockholm as a twenty-year-old.59 After some time in the USA, where from 1876 to 1878 he worked in a mechanical workshop and in a reaping machine factory as well as at the Swedish pavilion at the World Exhibition in Philadelphia, he returned to Europe in the late summer of 1878. In Paris he made contact with Alfred who in turn introduced him to Robert, who had travelled there to meet his brother and to see the World Exhibition. Robert invited the multi-talented Törnqvist, who showed an interest in industrial chemistry, to work for Branobel. In Alfred’s laboratory, so Robert reported to Ludvig, the young man had ‘immersed himself in the matter so speedily and with such judgement that I do not doubt that with Bari’s help he will take stock of everything that is needed and that in him we are getting both a skilled and a reliable worker. He is not unversed in chemistry and in general his knowledge is thorough; he is very interested in his task, which is why I dare to express the opinion that our choice was a good one and that the major question will soon be solved both thoroughly and cheaply.’60 The thinking was that Törnqvist should acquire knowledge of the latest discoveries in the field of paraffin distillation at the refinery in Marseilles. However, it turned out that there was not much to find out there. Robert therefore sent him to the oil fields in Pennsylvania, just as he had done the year before with Bari. ‘Törnqvist feels he will more easily gain access to the American factories as there, unlike in Europe, they are not suspicious of foreigners, as he speaks their language fluently and as the Americans prefer to employ a foreigner for the heaviest and most arduous tasks, whereby he can easily prepare himself for a position there,’ Robert wrote to Ludvig, continuing: ‘His decision to take any position that is offered will crown his enterprise with success and I now place his ability to master whatever he sees beyond all doubt.’61 What it involved was, in other words, a sort of industrial espionage, though not unlawful. Alfred covered the costs. Törnqvist crossed the Atlantic in December 1878. In Pennsylvania, thought Robert, it would be good if he could ‘without mentioning our names, find out the most exact details regarding prices of drilling tools, all kinds of pipes, steamboilers as well as necessary machines at the biggest & best manufacturing firms’.62 On Alfred’s advice Törnqvist also had with him samples of Baku oil which he had analysed in the USA. It turned out to possess quite different properties from the Pennsylvania oil, something that was important for the distillation process. Before Törnqvist left the USA in the summer of 1879, he spent a month visiting the American patent office and at the Library of Congress, where he ploughed

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through everything that had been written on the subject of petroleum. Törnqvist proved to be not only a technical genius but also someone equipped with significant moral qualities, which was impressive: ‘He goes about things in a sensible way, that man, and the expenses for his travels are so slight that one cannot help being amazed,’ Robert noted.63 Törnqvist also learned Russian in record time. Törnqvist’s first stop in Europe was, as before, Paris, where for about a week he was Alfred’s guest in his home on the Rue Malakoff. He had with him a couple of memorandums with detailed answers to the questions that the Nobel brothers had posed him during his stay in America. Alarik Liedbeck, who at this point was also working in Paris, also took part in the discussions, which among other things touched on the question of ‘continuous distillation’. This is a method that does not require the process to be halted for the addition of new raw material. The distillation apparatus is instead constantly fed with oil which in turn requires that the ready ‘fraction’, in this case paraffin, is constantly drawn off. The opposite process is called ‘batch distillation’ – a time-consuming process in which, after the desired product has been collected, the vessel has to be cleaned and the process started again from scratch. Alfred, Liedbeck and Törnqvist seem to have reached a fundamental solution to the problem during their discussions. When in September 1879 Törnqvist came to St Petersburg he was sent by Ludvig almost immediately to Baku in order to make an experimental model for continuous distillation in the firm’s mechanical workshop. After an initial test showed that the method worked the expansion of the factory was set in motion. Robert was so impressed by Törnqvist’s ability that he recommended Emanuel to make his acquaintance: ‘The young man (though now twenty-five years old) is by nature so richly equipped in all respects that he ought to become a veritable pillar on which a great weight of responsibility in this and your business can be placed. Should I die before he manages to assume his place, keep my words in mind, as a friendly piece of advice to you.’64 Work-related stress and the climate, however, took their toll, Törnqvist developed problems with his lungs and was forced to leave Baku. This meant a severe loss to the firm and Ludvig showered him with letters containing advice about doctors and health resorts. Törnqvist recovered after some time, however, and supervised and directed the work by correspondence from his convalescence on the French Riviera. ‘The idea of the continuous motion has turned out to be excellent,’ Ludvig wrote to Alfred in November 1881: ‘The oil flows out of one boiler into the other, no pumping, cooling or interruption occurs.’65 The method, which initially met with opposition on Robert’s part, began to get into trim in the spring of 1882 and resulted in a major increase in the rate of production. In December 1882, Ludvig took out a patent on it, which was an unusual decision on his part. In contrast to his brother Alfred, for example, he maintained the fundamental belief that inventions ought not to be patented but should belong to all.

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During 1883, the new plant produced 106 tons of paraffin, which was more than the other Baku factories put together. The new method meant that Branobel obtained a significant lead over their rivals; in Baku it would take fifteen years before continuous distillation began to be put into practice, in the USA, twentyfive. After Törnqvist had recovered he went back to work for the Nobels, not in Baku but in St Petersburg, where among other things he devoted himself to organizing the export of lighting oil to Germany by trains and tanker boats. However, after a disagreement with the then local manager in Baku, the Finn Gustaf Törnudd, he left the firm in 1885 and moved to California, where the following year he died in a diving accident, only thirty-two years old. ‘Very damaging for the Br. Nobel company, for we have never had such an intelligent, gifted and hard-working engineer in the company,’ was the comment on Törnqvist’s departure by Karl Wilhelm Hagelin, the company’s most important collaborator by a long way.66 Hagelin had been born in 1860 in St Petersburg, where his father Wilhelm was employed from 1859 to 1861 in Immanuel Nobel & Sons’ mechanical workshop. The family lived in a little house built for the factory’s workers which was situated so close to the workshop that ‘the house shook when the steam hammer was operating’.67 When the workshop went into liquidation the father obtained employment as a machine operator in a British steamship company which plied on the Volga, and it was on boats and in towns along the river that Karl Wilhelm (known as Wilhelm) grew up. He learned Swedish from his mother, who could read but not write, and Russian in school. At the age of fifteen he started as an apprentice in a mechanical workshop and came to work for, among others, Caucasus & Mercury. In February 1879 he came to Baku, where he was immediately taken on at Gustaf Bengtsson’s mechanical workshop. There were already four Swedes working in the workshop – a smith, a turner, a filer and a lead solderer and coppersmith – whom Bengtsson had recently recruited from Eriksberg’s mechanical workshop in Gothenburg. Hagelin only managed a few months’ work there, however, before he got a job as a filer with Robert, who because of his sternness, according to Hagelin, was known as ‘Our Lord’. The change of employer meant not only a higher wage but also became of decisive importance. ‘On the fourth day of Easter 4/16 April in the year of Grace 1879 there began my lengthy service in the Nobel petroleum company,’ Hagelin declared solemnly in his memoirs.68 Hagelin’s service with Nobel would be not only lengthy but exceptionally successful; we will return to him several times in the coming chapters. At Nobel’s, Hagelin was able to share living quarters with Carl Qvarnström, a Swede who was born in 1856 and who moved down to Baku from Gothenburg along with the other Swedes at Bengtsson’s mechanical workshop. While the others had three-year-contracts with Bengtsson, Qvarnström, who paid the expenses of the trip himself, was free to leave the workshop when he wanted to. When Hagelin

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FIGURE 6.4 Karl Wilhelm Hagelin, a key figure in Branobel.

made his acquaintance, Qvarnström had already gone to work for Robert and had become manager of the mechanical workshop where Hagelin found work as a filer. During the eleven years that Qvarnström worked for Nobel Brothers – in 1890 he started up his own lubricating-oil factory, ‘Bakunit’, together with Martin Westvall – he would contribute to a series of important operational improvements.

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When he and Hagelin were taken on, however, Branobel had not yet been founded – that would take several months more. ‘The “Nobel Brothers’ Naphtha Production Company” was founded the same year, but when I came to the factory Robert Nobel was in charge of the whole thing, and also for some time after,’ Hagelin recalled, describing conditions there as follows: The workplace was a little shed, where the ‘instrument workshop’ and two stirrup-pumps were housed. There were three of us workers there: a Russian, Vesnenko, who was the actual ‘toolmaker’, a Swedish former machinist and colleague of my father’s, Haglund, who with a little treadle lathe turned oil level gauges and myself, whose job was give them the finishing touch in a vice. The actual workshop was in another part of the factory, but they did more rough work there, which was closer to ‘plumbing’. For at that time a refinery consisted mostly of walled-in boilers, bigger or smaller cisterns and a mass of piping.69

Robert’s last days in Baku Robert was someone for whom hypochondria had over the years become part of his identity. At the same time, he did have genuine health problems. There is not a letter in which he does not comment on his health and for the most part complain about how unwell he feels. He suffers from headaches, he has trouble with his spleen, his bowels, his liver – and with what he calls his ‘morbid mood’ and ‘morbid irritability’. The typhoid fever he had suffered from in the spring of 1879 and that had so nearly finished him off made him think about leaving Baku, particularly as the new company had got off the ground. For the company to be put ‘on a clear, lawful and official footing’, however, it had to be formally constituted. The constituent assembly took place on 28 July 1879, after which Ludvig told Alfred that ‘our company is now officially organized and fully set up’.70 The agreement between Ludvig and Robert was also ready, even if it had been reached at the cost of trouble and dissension. It was ‘hard to be eternally pretending to be magnanimous and indulgent and to put up with everything, just because you keep telling yourself that the other person is unwell and that he should therefore be excused’, Ludvig complained to Alfred.71 The depth of the antagonism is borne out by Robert’s definition of the settlement as ‘the great battle of the brothers’. The terms of the agreement were that Robert would, partly, receive a share in the company corresponding to twenty shares worth 100,000 roubles, and partly be compensated with 8,000 roubles annually for the work he had put in in Baku from 1873 up to 1 April 1881.72 This was money that Robert had Ludvig himself entirely to thank for. ‘I have every reason to hope that he will now be satisfied and feel happy, since he has been made secure and can see the work he has done bear fruit and give him self-esteem’, Ludvig wrote to

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Alfred, at the same time praising Robert for his contributions: ‘for I must say that the oil he produced is a real triumph for us and is gaining us a good reputation.’73 Robert spent the summer and autumn of 1879 in St Petersburg and returned to Baku in November, although he actually should to have travelled to Europe for the sake of his health. The pipeline had meant that the pace of production in the paraffin factory had increased, and moreover, the demand from the market was growing the whole time. The factory therefore had to be expanded with several distillation boilers. It was to fulfil this task that Alfred Törnqvist was sent to Baku and it was to see the expanded factory completed that Robert stayed on in the city. However, it was not only practical concerns that made it hard for Robert to leave his post. He had built up the business and become accustomed to running the whole show himself and he was jealously suspicious of all attempted changes. After Robert’s serious illness, Ludvig was keen to find a successor for him so that he could leave Baku to ‘take care of and spare himself and get his strength back’. As Robert, according to Ludvig, had always surrounded himself with ‘lesser talents’, however, there were no successors in Baku from which to choose.74 The external candidates who Ludvig suggested were rejected by Robert. When in May–June 1880 Ludvig made a tour of inspection to Tsaritsyn and Baku the question of a successor became topical again, but Robert ‘is resisting . . . and trying to frustrate all my efforts to find him a suitable adjoint (assistant)’.75 It was not for nothing that Robert had the nickname ‘Our Lord’; Alfred even talked about his ‘self-deification’.76 Robert, as we saw earlier, was conscious that he was difficult to deal with. ‘Are you ones very annoyed with me?’ he asked his nephew Emanuel rhetorically. ‘Perhaps I make too much fuss, but . . . for 7 years now I have been wrapped up in this business to the exclusion of all else, so that I reckon I have grown together with it and every setback it encounters hurts me so deeply that it provokes a bitterness that, to my own dismay, is sometimes aired on paper.’77 The words were repeated in a letter to Alfred that finished with: ‘I have therefore often wished for death – but it will not yet, it seems, rob me of the joy (?) of living.’78 Robert was in agony. The business in Baku was his, in the same way that the machine factory was Ludvig’s and the dynamite empire Alfred’s. At long last, by his own efforts, he had reached a position comparable to theirs. No wonder that he was suffering from a sense of loss that put his ‘morbid mood’ severely to the test. The capital that was injected with the founding of the new company was necessary to realize the planned programme; Robert would never have been able to further develop his operation with his own resources alone. At the same time, it must have hurt him that the company’s successes were largely seen as the result of Ludvig’s initiative and organizational ability. In fact, Robert played a significantly bigger role in the industrial innovations that are associated with Branobel than is usually ascribed to him. His contributions in the chemical field are acknowledged: had it not been for the successful work of

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extracting a purer paraffin the product would never have been competitive. Several of the innovations that tend to be credited to Ludvig, moreover, had Robert as their originator. Ludvig’s document ‘Prospectus . . .’ and the essay in the Technological Society’s series of journals drew on the book Petrolia which he got from Alfred as well as on his experiences from his visits to Baku in 1876. But the same suggestions about building cisterns, pipelines and transport ships that are presented there had already been put forward by Robert after his first visit to Baku 1873, long before Ludvig had started to take an interest in the question or even visited the city. The correspondence with the engineer Svenson shows that ‘ships for transports of paraffin without barrels’, i.e. tankers, seem to have originally been Robert’s idea.79 The fact that Robert had been allotted a minor role in the setting up of Branobel can be explained. In the first place, the story was told after Robert’s death by relatives of Ludvig’s, partly in the form of two magnificent volumes published in connection with the Naphtha Company’s twenty-fifth and thirtieth anniversaries respectively (in 1904 and 1909), partly by Ludvig’s daughter Marta NobelOleinikoff in the book Ludvig Nobel and his Work (1952). All later historians in principle rely on these sources. Even if in neither of these cases is there any question of a conscious belittling of Robert’s contributions, there is no denying a certain element of bias. The other factor that played a part in the verdict on Robert’s contributions is undoubtedly his temperament. The concept of a cantankerous troublemaker formed early as an overlay on the image of Robert and it has influenced posterity’s view of him. ‘Already during his stay in St Petersburg we knew for certain that if he had praised someone in the morning then he would dispatch him in flames to hell before sunset,’ Alfred explained to his nephew Emanuel – ‘It went like clockwork and never failed.’80 However, his brothers knew how to distinguish his ungovernable moods from his obvious talent and his major role in connection with the establishment the Naphtha Company. The passage where Alfred talks about Robert’s ‘self-deification’ ends with two rhetorical questions: ‘But is this not also something positive? Are fixed stars not nobler bodies than dull planets without any ability to shine by themselves?’81

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7 THE NOBEL BROTHERS

Robert left Baku at the end of the summer of 1880. Before leaving he appointed Alfred Törnqvist as technical director and the person responsible for the finances of the factory’s technical workshop. Before his departure, a leaving party was arranged in the office garden at Balakhani. A dance floor was built, the food was good, speeches were made and Erland Théel demonstrated his chemical abilities by manufacturing fireworks. ‘The night was warm and still, the mood was excellent, although not many were present for “Our Lord’s” departure,’ recalled Wilhelm Hagelin.1 Robert’s first stop was St Petersburg, where he again met up with Ludvig who ‘had a severe dust-up with him and took him down a peg’ and was glad when he went away again. ‘His temper latterly was absolutely impossible – he plagued himself and others with the most unworthy suspicions and was insufferable on account of his deliberate insults,’ Ludvig reported to Alfred.2 Instead of continuing to Stockholm, to where Pauline and the children had moved from Helsinki, Robert, according to Ludvig, ‘took the road south to unknown climes and left no address so as to be left entirely in peace’.3 He was to dwell in these unknown climes for just over a year. Marta Nobel-Oleinikoff states in her book about the family that ‘there were great difficulties involved in gathering information concerning Robert Nobel after he left Baku in 1880’.4 This is true, information is meagre. With the help of his letter-books, however, it is possible to sketch the contours of his life during the first years outside Russia. These were spent on travels around Europe. The costs of this roving life in expensive hotels and health resorts were covered by funds which he had deposited in the office of the machine factory in St Petersburg and which he drew on at irregular intervals. From St Petersburg, Robert continued to Vienna. Here he was gripped by a sense of shame. All his life he had struggled to become financially independent with the aim of securing the family’s future. In Baku that same spring he had written his will, which he told Alfred. ‘As you are and have been my most dear brother, I have, in the will I have just drawn up, taken the liberty of naming you,

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along with [Carl] Öberg & [their cousin Adolf] Ahlsell as my children’s guardians in order to look after and manage their little fortune.’5 His family, whom he had hardly seen for ten years, now consisted, besides his wife, of four children: Hjalmar (b. 1863), Ingeborg (b. 1865), Ludvig (b. 1868) and Thyra (b. 1873). When Alfred on one occasion expressed his regret that Robert lived ‘a lonely and sad life’, Ludvig replied that in that case it was ‘high time that he remembered his family’.6 Even if Robert was not a family man in the conventional sense he was obsessed by the thought of his wife’s and children’s financial security. Conscious of his fragile state of health he therefore wrote a letter to Pauline from Vienna in which he explained that it was ‘incompatible with prudence and good order that I should drag along with me on such long trips in foreign lands important documents the loss of which, in the event of my death, might prejudice the interests of my family’.7 He therefore enclosed details about money, debts and bonds that were kept in Baku and St Petersburg along with a receipt from Branobel’s Baku office acknowledging receipt of his will. He also urged Pauline to draw the money she needed from the office in St Petersburg without needing to go via him.8 After Vienna Robert continued to Nice, where he stayed during the winter and spring. His health was poor again, he had a fresh bout of ‘Caucasian fever’ that had to be cured with arsenic, together with ‘congestions’ – blood clotting – in his brain.9 What was really illness and what was hypochondria is unclear; when Alfred visited Robert he noticed that things weren’t so bad with him.10 Robert remained in Nice at least until the middle of May 1881 and from the beginning of August he stayed in the Bohemian spa of Carlsbad, which he had visited several times before. In September 1881, Robert was back in Vienna, where he spent the autumn. ‘They are advising me to spend the winter on the Riviera or in Egypt and that coincides with my own feelings,’ Robert wrote to Ludvig, ‘for my long stay in Baku has unfitted me for the northern winters, but irrespective of that I want to pay a visit beforehand to Stockholm, which I owe my wife & children, even if it is more injurious to my health’.11 When Robert left Vienna and came home to his family is unclear, but presumably it was by Christmas 1881. After the move from Helsinki, Pauline rented an apartment in the centre of Stockholm. Also in the household, apart from two maids, in the capacity of ‘visitors’ were the faithful old servant Selma Scharlin and Ludvig’s son Carl, who was studying at the Royal Institute of Technology (as the Technological Institute had been called since 1877). In the census Robert was entered as domiciled in Baku, Russia.12 Once home, Robert continued to worry about his health. The caviar that Ludvig had sent was greatly appreciated by his friends and acquaintances, but he couldn’t touch it himself because of his diseased spleen. Neither could he eat meat and fish but lived ‘exclusively on vegetables, which in a cold climate are an all too meagre diet’.13 In the event of his death, therefore, he decided to try to purchase a property

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the income from which the family could live on. As his disposable capital in Stockholm was insufficient he asked Ludvig to help him sell ten shares in the Naphtha Company. ‘On the one hand it hurts me greatly to have to dispose of these extremely valuable shares, but on the other hand my sickly disposition requires a degree of calm, which is hard to achieve in any other way.’14 The shares were to be taken from the stock he had been allotted after a new share issue in the autumn of 1880. Ludvig was unwilling to see them end up in the hands of strangers and declared that he was willing to buy them, but as Alfred was keen to increase his holdings Ludvig stood aside for him.15 The price was £5,000 sterling (a good £480,000 today).16 In this way the shares remained in the family. When the business was settled, in June 1882, Robert travelled to Carlsbad for a cold-water cure.17 After a short break in September to celebrate his mother’s seventy-ninth birthday he continued his travels and ended up in Merano in South Tyrol, where he spent the period up to Christmas.18 His restlessness was incurable, like his hypochondria. ‘I can understand the hermit’s life too,’ Alfred commented, ‘but with books, ink and activity, otherwise it is death in life, but even worse than the fuss and bustle of business . . . is the burdensome trouble our brother Robert has all year round trying unceasingly to cure away his ailments.’19 The following summer Robert was in Marienbad taking the waters.20 Selling the ten shares was the first step in Robert’s effort to move capital and assets to Sweden. In the winter of 1883–4, he ordered from the office in St Petersburg ‘with regard to my age and poor state of health’, and with the intention of providing for his descendants, a large number of shares and coupons in the Naphtha Company as well as cash deposited there.21 At the same time he asked the office in Baku to send the will deposited there to Stockholm.22 There was no purchase of a property in Stockholm. In February 1884, Robert instead responded to a newspaper advertisement for ‘a large estate beautifully situated . . . close to railway- and steamboat-stations’. The property comprised 2,000 acres of arable land, wheatfields, meadows, woods and enclosed pasture and had its own flour mill and sawmill. There was also livestock: 140 cows, fifty oxen, ten horses and sixty sheep. The asking price with animals, machinery, sawmill and movables was 350,000 kronor (around £1,600,000 million today), including a mortgage loan of 150,000.23 The property was called Getå and lay on the shore of Bråviken, not far from the city of Norrköping. To be able to buy the estate Robert sent for a further 25,000 roubles (around £200,000 in today’s values) from his funds deposited in the St Petersburg office.24 Only a month after his acquisition, on Whit Sunday 1884, he was able to receive his first guests in his new role as estate owner: his brother Ludvig ‘with his womenfolk’ – apart from his wife Edla presumably one or more of his daughters Anna (b. 1866), Mina (b. 1873), Ingrid (b. 1879) and Marta (b. 1881). ‘That day was so pleasant that for everyone it will certainly occupy a little corner in their memory,’ Robert wrote to Alfred Törnqvist.25 ‘But what contributed to this most of all was

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the natural beauty of the spot and the fact that we were lucky with the weather, which made everyone’s mood serene and happy.’ From 1884 onwards, Robert and his family stayed at Getå during the summer and in 1889 they settled there for good. At Getå Robert mainly devoted himself to improving the estate; he expanded it and erected a number of greenhouses. The drawings for the buildings and furnaces he did himself. Russia now belonged to the past and Robert only went back there once, in the summer of 1888, when he visited St Petersburg and Baku; more of this in a later chapter. As two-thirds of his assets consisted of shares in Branobel, however, he followed closely the development of the company.

‘Our works are large and magnificent’ ‘I still think back with horror to that time he was in Baku, to his violence and technical incompetence,’ Ludvig wrote to Alfred several years after Robert had left Baku, continuing: ‘He liked to surround himself with people who, although morally upright, had characteristics similar to those of a sheep. Independent natures did not thrive in his vicinity – the staff was chosen accordingly.’26 With Robert gone, Ludvig was able to people the Baku office with competent staff and to realize several of the ambitious ideas he presented in the abovementioned letter to Alfred (page 157). He was, as one researcher summed it up, ‘manager, chief engineer, head of sales, his own research and development department, chairman of the board and market analyst’ in one and the same person: ‘On an international scale only de Lesseps, who built the Suez Canal, could be compared to him.’27 Nothing could stop Ludvig. When his rivals proved uninterested in sharing the costs of building a pipeline with him, as we saw he laid one of his own. In the same way he designed and built his own tanker waggons after the railway company turned down his request for collaboration. He found his model in America, where such means of transport had already been employed for a decade. As early as 1881, Ludvig was able to transport paraffin to central Russia and Warsaw in the company’s first 100 tanker waggons. Two years later the number was up to 1,500, driven by dozens of locomotives, all collected in a company of his own that Ludvig had been forced to found because of the railway companies’ lack of interest. Land transport was more expensive than by sea but had the advantage that it could continue throughout the year and not only when the rivers were ice-free. The paraffin was loaded onto tanker waggons from depots. The first depot which was constructed ready in 1880 in Tsaritsyn, consisted of eleven tanks which together contained 263,000 pud or fourteen tons. Tsaritsyn was an ideal storage site, not only geographically but also because the Volga here is one-and-a-half

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kilometres wide, with plenty of room for docking manoeuvres. During the following years, depots were made ready all over the Russian empire – including in Moscow, St Petersburg and Riga. In 1882, the company bought a property in Domnino outside the city of Oriol, 210 miles south of Moscow, where an enormous storage site and a large mechanical workshop were set up. The speedy expansion demanded, as we saw, a major increase in the workforce, from labourers to factory bosses, engineers, foremen, chemists and others. As there was a shortage of qualified local workers most of them were brought in as before from Sweden and Finland, and some from Germany. In the winter of 1882, the post of local manager in Baku was filled by an old friend of Ludvig, the abovementioned Gustaf Törnudd. He was brought in from Wiborg’s mechanical workshop where he was technical director and stayed on with Branobel till 1888, when he returned to Finland. ‘Since your departure there have been many changes here,’ Wilhelm Hagelin wrote to Alfred Törnqvist in February 1882. ‘The workforce has significantly increased. Rydén is the factory’s engineer and управляющий (foreman), Roman is the chemist, Lambert and Alfthan are the distillers of the lubricating oil, Björkegren manager of the drawing-office, Hellerström and Svensson draughtsmen. All of these arrived around the month of September [1881].’28 In the winter of 1882, the business already had a hundred office workers and almost 2,000 labourers, most of whom were Persians. The same profit-sharing system that Ludvig had introduced in the factories in St Petersburg and Izhevsk was also put into practice in Branobel, with the difference that the business was a limited company. The dividend for 1881 was 25 per cent and the profit after repayments was 164,000 roubles. The directors, the founders and the office workers shared 506,000 roubles,‘which is indeed a fair sum’, as Ludvig proudly commented.29 Just as in Ludvig’s other workplaces technical schools were set up, both in the Black City and in Balakhani, and out in the drilling-fields houses were built for the labourers. At the end of April 1882, Ludvig travelled down to Baku. ‘What I see here fills my soul with joy and wonder at the great improvements the business has made,’ he wrote to Alfred Törnqvist on the same day that he arrived.30 ‘Our works are large and magnificent and are working splendidly,’ he told Alfred at the same time, continuing: ‘An excellent spirit prevails among our employees.’31 And two days later he put together the following enthusiastic report from Tsaritsyn: Seldom in my life has anything afforded me such great joy as the sight of our now fully completed works here and the many happy faces that met me here. Everything here bears the stamp of order, system and appropriateness which markedly differs from all that one is accustomed to see in these parts. Our roads are paved, our bridges in good condition, the buildings spacious and comfortable,

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they are neat and tidy, and the technical installations create an overwhelming impression which leaves the visitor bewildered. . . . This year already we have received from Baku 600,000 pud and our new products had already reached Warsaw and St Petersburg the year before and at that time the waterways were not yet open and even today there is ice further up the Volga. As you can see, everything is commencing in favourable conditions. We are in a desert here and by the shore of the great river one sees not a single tree, everything is waste, despite the fruitful soil, because of lack of water. The city of Tsaritsyn has no water-pipe, no park. The railway is the only thing that has a water-pipe and gardens. We have a magnificent water-pipe, large park arounds the houses and reservoirs. Everything grows splendidly here under the hot sun and it is a joy to see how happy all our employees are and to hear with what pride they speak of our grounds in comparison to the untidiness and listlessness of the city.32

Villa Petrolea To tempt a qualified workforce to far-off, primitive Baku it was not enough to offer good wages. Good social provision also had to be guaranteed, especially if families were also to come. During 1881, therefore, a project got under way to build a large housing and recreation complex on a small hill above the factory precincts in the Black City, with a view over the harbour. It was christened Villa Petrolea. The area was rented by a village community and the lease ran for forty-nine years. The contract was signed by Gustaf Törnudd on 18 February, five days after he arrived in Baku. Old man Nobell and Krusell are here now, the old man had a little reception in Balakhani on Sunday for the office workers, the day was spent outside in the fresh air and was particularly pleasant, the Old Man made a speech to everyone and was very happy and contented, yesterday the 6th [of May] he held a big party for the city’s top officials and notables, only a few of our people were invited and a pavilion was erected for the above-named party on the place where the new housing was to be built, the place was dedicated with ceremony and christened Villa Petrolea. Now work is proceeding apace on the foundations for 3 houses, two two-storeyed houses for unmarried men and one for the manager (Törnudd).33 The quotation is taken from a letter sent by head of production August Awelin to Alfred Törnqvist, the man who got the project to build Villa Petrolea under way before he was forced to leave Baku for health reasons. The work proceeded at a

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FIGURE 7.1 The managing director’s house at the Villa Petrolea.

furious pace. The foundation stone was laid on 19 May 1882 in Ludvig’s presence, and as early as August Törnudd was able to report to his niece in Finland: Here we own around 10 acres of land and are in the process of erecting our residential area intended as homes for the company’s office workers. The houses all lie on a hillside, so that the sea can be seen from all the windows . . . All the buildings are being built in white, finely-hewn sandstone in Byzantine style . . .

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and the whole thing will be surrounded . . . by a magnificent park and garden. Each house is surrounded to the east and south by broad and decorative verandas both in the upper and lower stories. . . . fresh water is fetched daily by our steamers from the Volga. . . . On the land down here there will be further building of an orangery, stables, coach-sheds, hen-houses, duck-ponds, cowbyres, a pig-sty, etc. . . . We are going to pipe gas from the factory to the villa to heat our rooms and cook our food. The lighting is already partly electric . . . We already have telephone cables, but these are to be further extended, so that from my study in the villa I can talk to every department, including the office in Balakhani and the city. ‘What do you think, doesn’t the whole thing sound like a story from The Thousand and One Nights?’ Törnudd asked his niece rhetorically, answering himself: ‘None the less it is true, and shows that Ludvig Nobel has not shrunk from either trouble or expense in order to make Baku as pleasant a place as possible to stay in for us northerners.’34 According to the Naphtha Company’s own information the cost of building the Villa Petrolea amounted to 250,000 roubles, or £2,400,000 today.35 For gardens and plantings, they turned to Wiborg’s seed business. This was the hardest part as it was difficult to find plants that suited the barren soil, and moreover there was a shortage of water. However, by and large everything was completed according to plan during the next few years. As well as homes for the staff, estate offices and more besides, a villa was built for the managing director

FIGURE 7.2 This photo shows that the Villa Petrolea was built in a completely desert landscape.

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which Törnudd was the first to live in, and a grand clubhouse with restaurant, music room and ballroom, billiard room, library and reading room. When Ludvig came on a visit in the autumn of 1884 everything was more or less finished. He stayed with his sons Carl and Hjalmar Crusell in the managing director’s house, together with Törnudd. Ludvig and Hjalmar remained in Baku for two months, with detours to Tbilisi (Tiflis) and the port of Batum on the Black Sea (of which more later), while Carl, who had just graduated from the Technical University in Stockholm, remained behind until the following summer to acquaint himself with the business. On 21 October, in a letter to his eighteen-year-old daughter Anna in St Petersburg, Ludvig summed up his impressions of the Villa Petrolea: In one of the big houses is the club, where the whole colony gather almost to a man, on Wednesday and Saturday evenings, to make music, dance and play billiards. They have had the happy idea of forming a band, a veritable orchestra, which has already reached a quite remarkable standard of virtuosity. The orchestra consists of 15 persons who are wind players. The conductor and teacher is an excellent musician, who for many years was head of the naval band here. In the space of a year our dilettantes have made such strides that they have given concerts, to great applause, to the benefit of good causes. The newspapers that mentioned them call them the Nobel orchestra. I was of course invited to attend a concert in the club. The whole atmosphere was festive, to honour me. They played the Björneborg March, sat me on a chair and carried me high in the air around the great hall all the while the march was playing. Then my health was drunk out of a large bowl and speeches were made, in which they thanked me for what I had thought of to ensure a comfortable life for the employees. All of this caused me particularly great joy, for I had had considerable difficulty before I succeeded in getting everything done and now that I see that everything has gone well and that things are nice and healthy for the employees and that they acknowledge that I did this out of goodwill, then I feel a great satisfaction in my heart and think that I have ample compensation for my trouble and my pains. . . . I had laid out the residential area in hopes of having greenery all around us, but unfortunately this has not succeeded as there is a lack of water. All we are able to achieve are flower-beds and a bit of kitchen-garden. . . . I hope that next year we will be better able to provide ourselves with water and then, with God’s help, my dream of a green Villa Petrolea, a little paradise in Baku, will become reality.36 During the following decades, Ludvig’s Baku paradise became a gathering-point for Swedish Baku and when in 1909 the Naphtha Company celebrated its thirtieth anniversary there were eleven houses in the area for employees and engineers and their families. In the coming years a large number of houses were also built for the oil company’s other staff, labourers as well as office workers, of which more in Chapter 11.

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FIGURE 7.3 In the middle and on the right dwelling houses for the staff, managing director’s villa on the left.

The pessimist and the optimist ‘By the way, my future prospects in connection with Ludvig Nobel are so pleasing and promising that I need never regret the day when I left Wiborg’s workshop,’ wrote Gustaf Törnudd after his first nine months in the Caucasus. It would, he added, be difficult for him to leave Baku during the coming months on account of all ‘the enormous number of new buildings’ that were to be put up. He was ‘quite amazed at the colossal sums’ that passed through his hands daily. ‘If we are talking about money, it’s millions, if we are talking about products, it’s millions! The productive capacity of the existing factories will be doubled and new factories built for new, not yet manufactured products!’37 Törnudd hit the nail on the head. Since the Naphtha Company had been set up in the summer of 1879 the pace of expansion had almost defied belief as much on land as on sea. Refineries, workshops, houses, pipelines, oil depots, tanker ships, barges and tank waggons were ordered and constructed, no end of new office workers and labourers were taken on. The company’s original capitalization of 3 million had increased by a million roubles in 1880, 2 million in 1881 and 4 million in 1882. The accounts for 1881 showed, as we saw, a brilliant result. This despite major setbacks – the tanker Nordenskiöld exploded and was completely destroyed, Buddha was severely damaged in a storm in the Caspian Sea and there was a fire in the machine factory’s model workshop in St Petersburg. Moreover, the water level in the Volga was so low that the ships on order could not be delivered and the oil transport northwards were held up. The losses were covered by the large profits, but the problems were highlighted in the press and gave the business bad publicity. In addition, the price of oil fell to a level that threatened continued profits and made access to credit more difficult, and working capital was something that Branobel was in constant need of. The company’s income was unevenly distributed and concentrated in the winter, when they had a market for their goods. The

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FIGURE 7.4 Branobel’s works in the Black City in 1881.

enormous investments that Ludvig initiated, however, also required access to capital during the summer half of the year, when they only had outgoings. ‘I then have the colossal freight charges to pay to the railways and our own fleet and sales and income will not begin until September,’ Ludvig explained to Alfred, ‘but then things go so quickly that before the end of January we have recovered what we laid out during the year, plus the profit.’38 The problems were thus structural. Alfred, the experienced financier, became uneasy and came to the conclusion that ‘Ludvig Nobel, who otherwise is caution itself, has been more or less dragged by his magnificent creation to go forward more quickly therewith than the circumstances allow’.39 At the beginning of 1882, Ludvig obtained a loan of 1 million roubles from Horatius Günzburg, Russia’s leading private banker, at an interest rate of 2 per cent over the bank rate. Naphtha shares of the same amount were deposited as security. If the loan was not repaid by 1 April 1883, Günzburg was entitled to cash in the shares, something that Ludvig wanted to avoid as he was unwilling to allow in foreign shareholders. The greatest help came from Alfred, who already in 1881 had advanced the Motala Workshop fully half a million kronor (£2,500,000 in today’s values) to build a new tanker ship and who in the summer of 1882 remitted further funds via Banque de France and Crédit Lyonnais. Nonetheless, the scarcity developed thereafter, as Alfred put it, to a ‘crescendo’, which led as early as January 1883 to the business lapsing into financial ‘embarrassment’ – despite the fact that ‘November & December are the months when the Company reaps both sowing and profit’.40 Although the financial market in France was wretched, at the beginning of 1883 Alfred loaned the Naphtha Company a further million roubles; this, despite the fact that he regarded the company’s situation as ‘quite serious’: ‘Perhaps I am painting things too black; but if you are now to some extent embarrassed, so shortly after the working capital was injected, what is to be expected during the course of the year when there are only outgoings and no income?’41 Alfred’s anxiety was so great that, at the beginning of February, he took himself off to St Petersburg to discuss the future of the business on the spot with Ludvig. It was his first visit to the Russian capital for twelve years.

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The visit was characterized by difficult discussions between two brothers who represented two different business philosophies. Alfred was a modern entrepreneur, a capitalist, he was used to running a large and expanding business, while Ludvig was a foundry owner, who most of all wished to keep the business in the family and thought that speculating on the stock-exchange ought to be left ‘to those who are no good for anything really useful’.42 They also had different natures: Alfred was the born pessimist, who liked to ‘paint everything black’, while Ludvig mostly saw opportunities and was stimulated by misfortunes that befell him. ‘I found the financial situation in St Petersburg somewhat complicated and almost threatening, despite Ludvig’s considerable resources,’ Alfred reported to Robert. ‘They have clearly built too hastily and not taken sufficiently into consideration the necessity of an enormous working capital for a business that during the first 7 months of the year only consumes and brings in nothing.’43 During the discussions in St Petersburg, accordingly, Alfred forced Ludvig to delete projects from the budget for the year 1883 that could be postponed (school, club, dwelling houses, park precinct, piped fresh water, roads, etc.). The postponement was, according to him, necessary to consolidate the company’s position.44 ‘I gave all of them a healthy fright over their budgets, which were deeply in deficit,’ Alfred told Robert, ‘and Ludvig has now cancelled a whole range of new-builds which were already begun but which can very well be delayed even for another year.’45 Alfred’s criticism of the management of the business was hard but at the same time he could ‘despite small and large clouds, which indeed must soon disappear, only wonder at the colossal work’ that their brother had achieved in so short a time. ‘A veritable giant’s work, 99% of the burden of which has been borne by yourself, and which was carried out according to a thoroughly splendid plan without any sort of fumbling.’46 His objections were thus directed not against the direction of the company or the technical know-how but against the deficient financial competence. What divided the brothers, Alfred wrote to Ludvig, was that ‘you build first and procure money afterwards, while I suggest that in future it is best to find the money first and then to enlarge’.47 Limited companies in general found it hard to get credit in Russia and not least something new-fangled like an oil company. After Ludvig had agreed to the budget cuts, Alfred decided to rescue the company through a reverse loan of 4 million francs until the end of the year, over and above the million he had already agreed to. This, despite his own credit being strained because of the situation in the French financial market. The sum corresponds to around 200 million Swedish kronor (£1,600,000) today. The interest that Alfred took from Branobel was the same as he had had to pay in Paris, where he had borrowed with his dynamite papers as security. ‘Your offer of so much Credit I now accept not only as proof of your great friendship and goodwill towards me but also as proof that you have attained a clearer and more correct understanding of the position,’ Ludvig replied: ‘I cannot express what great joy this affords me.’48

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The Russian National Bank also came to his aid, by lending money in April on the strength of the Naphtha Company’s shares and bonds as security and later by agreeing to other loans, among others a ‘special current account’ of 2 million roubles for Ludvig in person. For Ludvig, this meant that the cloud that had been darkening the sky had blown away and in May he told Alfred that the company was continuing to work as planned. Only a few new construction works had had to be postponed and money had not been lacking for a single day. ‘When I now see how over a thousand wagons roll daily on all Russia’s rails, how our tanks are beginning to fill up, how the new steamships are arriving and wandering the canals and rivers down to their destinations – then I see that day approaching when our products will go out over Russia’s borders in great quantities and secure a world market for us. Then, but only then, will the victory be complete.’49 Alfred’s view of the matter was the diametrical opposite. The bad times on the Paris stock market exposed him to colossal financial strains and his mood was at rock bottom. His ‘compliance’, he explained to Ludvig, did not at all depend on any confidence in the company’s affairs, on the contrary: the more he had seen of its financing the more worried he had become. Even before Ludvig had recovered from his direst straits, he was thinking of creating new difficulties! As Alfred’s Paris credits were bound up in the oil company, he regarded caution as a matter of honour. ‘I hope that you will emerge unscathed from your dreadful money problems but it is beginning to look to me as if nothing could be more urgent for you than to prepare for something of the kind every year.’ The letter ended with a quote from Alphonse Daudet’s novel Fromont jeune et Risler aîné (1874), in which Risler says: ‘J’ai pus confiance’ – I have lost confidence.50 The letter is preserved in Alfred’s archive, which shows that it was never sent and Ludvig thus never got to read it. Instead, Alfred was elected to the board of the Naphtha Company in June as one of its directors. Meanwhile, efforts continued to raise money. Ludvig was so absorbed by his attempts to save the company that he did not even have the time to travel to Stockholm for his mother’s eightieth birthday, which was celebrated in presence of Alfred, Robert, Ludvig’s children Emanuel and Anna and other relatives and friends.51 Andriette got first-hand information from them about what she called ‘the troublesome Baku affairs’, which worried her greatly.52 Ludvig and Alfred converged instead in London in November 1883. Alfred was convinced that the best thing would be to involve a renowned British trading house in the affairs of the Naphtha Company. However, no agreement came about – according to Alfred, the British businesses had enough to do with investment projects on the home front. Instead, the meeting led to the conflict between the brothers becoming more intense. ‘In London recently relations between myself and Ludvig became quite strained, our exchange of letters having been the prime cause,’ Alfred reported to Robert after returning to Paris.53

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The brothers’ points of view were in fact so different ‘in so many respects that we actually ought never to work together in the same business’, Alfred confided to his young female acquaintance Sofie Hess.54 In future, he informed Ludvig, he would in general have ‘no kind of business relationship with relatives’, continuing: Pure objectivity is my goal from here on and I suggest treating dealings between us in such a way, as if we were complete strangers to each other. In this way we can avoid all kinds of strained and unpleasant relationships. Otherwise both you and I will think that we are right. The simplest thing would be if I were to assign the whole of my claim to my Banker and let the whole transaction move from the domain of emotions to that of business. Your Company wishes me to prolong the loan they have from me. My answer is quite simple: with watertight security yes, without security no.55 Ludvig agreed with ‘laying aside all personal disagreement between us and not letting business differences cast a shadow over kinship and friendship’, which pleased Alfred.56 Robert was also keen for the brothers to lay down their weapons. ‘Let mercy go before justice and do not be too sorry for Ludvig, his health is poor

FIGURE 7.5 The route of naphtha from Baku beyond into the world. The map is preserved in Alfred Nobel’s archive.

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and needs to be attended to, if he can retain some calm it will be for the best of all,’ he wrote to Alfred, adding: ‘I have good reason to be sorry for him and in a case like this I neither wish to nor can take his part, but unity makes for strength and in the meantime that is the only support in the main business.’57 The weapons were laid down, but the conflict had wounded both of them deeply. Alfred admitted later that he ‘had never before or since . . . been treated with such lack of consideration’58 and Ludvig thought that Alfred quite simply did not understand that business that he himself saw as his baby. He too wrote in anger a letter that he never sent, he revealed. But the following came to Alfred’s eyes: If you knew how infinitely much hurt these unnecessary remarks have caused me you would feel sympathy for me and leave me in peace. You in turn have forgotten a couple of trifles: that I knew the business better than you, that I myself have and have always had absolute belief in the firm, that I have always taken the whole responsibility for it and would never have allowed others to suffer any loss thereby, and that my own means would be sufficient to fully guarantee it. Nor have I told anyone back home about your anxiety and nor could anyone have been able to regard your participation in the firm as other than that of one of the Nobel brothers. They have always been used to seeing me manage the company’s interests with more care than my own, and it is not to be wondered at if they regarded you as an outsider. Take this to heart, if you should be inclined again to reflect on the past; start from the premise that before the businessman and the book-keeper stands the human being with a heart and a sense of honour and a settled intention to do his duty.59

The Transcaucasian Railway and the house of Rothschild Alfred and Ludvig were diligent correspondents. The number of letters and telegrams that were exchanged between them in the crisis year of 1883 alone is enormous, around 500. Sometimes they wrote several letters a day to each other and to the office in St Petersburg. A detailed account of the discussions about credit, share- and bond-issues, state guarantees, interest rates etc. is not feasible in this context. To sum up, we can say that the company, towards the summer of 1884, got back on its feet again, if shakily. This happened partly through a large issue of naphtha shares. Ludvig had wanted to raise the price of the shares to 6,000 roubles but went along with Alfred’s suggestion to instead offer shares at a price of 250 roubles. In this way, the company’s share capital was raised from 10 to 15 million roubles: 10 million in big shares of 5,000 roubles and 5 million in shares of 250. It was a necessary step for the company to gain the confidence of smaller shareholders abroad and in Russia, where Branobel were being criticized in the

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press as foreigners bent on exploiting the country’s natural resources; such discourse was common in the 1880s when the country was being ruled by the Nationalist Tsar Alexander III. In May 1884, the Disconto-Gesellschaft in Berlin took over the Naphtha Company’s bond loan with the Russian National Bank for 5 million roubles with ten years left to run and moreover agreed to credit of 2 million with oil as the pledge. Ludvig’s assistant in his negotiations with the German bank was his financial adviser and intimate friend, Ivar Lagerwall, doctor of philosophy with a thesis on Sweden’s trade during the second half of the seventeenth century.60 Three years later he would be voted on to the board of Branobel. The credit with the Berlin bank was a result of Chancellor Bismarck’s ambition to improve relations with Russia. On the German side the negotiations were led by Ludvig’s good friend, Louis Berger, a member of the German Reichstag and someone with good knowledge of conditions in Russia.61 In the summer of 1886, Berger succeeded Alfred in Branobel’s administrative council. The demand for bonds was so great that the issue was immediately oversubscribed. This meant that among other things the banker Günzburg could be bought off. Alfred’s anxiety evaporated. ‘I find the arrangement with the Disconto Bank in Berlin to a great degree advantageous and comforting and I must congratulate you on it,’ he wrote to Ludvig, ‘for to be sure you deserve a little peace, which hitherto you have not been granted.’62 At the same time Alfred felt that his contributions had not met with sufficient appreciation: ‘Although all this was taken care of by me I have not heard a word of acknowledgement,’ was his commentary on the arrangement with a typically sarcastic choice of words. ‘It actually surprises me that they don’t say I did damage to the affair.’63 After a year of financial problems and quarrels between the brothers, the acute differences had thus been overcome. However, the company had hardly had time to consolidate before a rival appeared – and a formidable one: the banking house of Rothschild in Paris. The background was as follows. May 1883 saw the opening of the long-awaited Transcaucasian Railway between Baku and Tiflis and from there to the harbour in Batum on the Black Sea coast, situated only fifteen kilometres from the Turkish border. Batum was a sleepy little malaria-ridden Turkish village which had fallen to Russia through a treaty with the Ottoman state in 1878, but its situation was perfect. In Roman times, Batum had been an important naval base and thanks to the railway connection with Baku it now came to play a key role in the export of oil to Western Europe. ‘Moreover when the railway from Baku to Poti is ready the world’s markets will be open to us,’ Robert had prophesied, as we saw, in 1875.64 Robert was essentially right, but of course could not foresee that Batum would fall into Russian hands and the more northerly situated Poti would therefore be rejected as a port for exports. By connecting Batum with Baku the oil company came to play an important role in the integration of this newly-annexed area into the Russian empire.

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FIGURE 7.6 The harbour in Batum.

The idea of uniting the Caspian and Black Seas – a stretch of 800 kilometres – with a railway had been aired as early as 1861 by the governor of the Caucasus, Prince Baryatinsky. It had then been pursued by his successor Grand Duke Mikhail, who, as we saw, realized from an early date the importance of the oil industry for Russia and who was particularly well-disposed towards the Nobel family. When Batum became Russian the entrepreneurs Sergei Palashkovsky and Andrei Bunge obtained a concession for the laying of the railway line. Both had previous experience of building railways and Bunge moreover was the nephew of the deputy finance minister, which may have contributed to their winning the concession. However, the work went slowly, and the costs exceeded the company’s resources. None of the oil producers in Baku was willing to come up with the money, including Branobel. Over-production of crude oil had caused a major fall in prices with a consequent lack of keenness to invest. Palashkovsky then contacted the banker Alphonse de Rothschild, who together with his brother Edmond headed the family’s Paris branch. It was a sensible and logical step. The Rothschild family had great experience of railway construction. Back in 1837, they had financed one of Europe’s first steam-driven railway lines, between Vienna and Kraków, and after that the routes Paris-Saint-Germain and Paris-Versailles as well as several other railway lines on the continent. Moreover, the banking house was involved in the fast-growing paraffin industry and owned a refinery in Fiume on the Adriatic. For them, the rail connection between Baku and Batum had the obvious advantage that it provided access to Russian oil and removed dependence on the USA and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.

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FIGURE 7.7 The railway line between Baku and Batum.

Considering the tempting prospects for profit it was not difficult for the Rothschild brothers to accept the suggestion to invest money to save the railway construction. The railway line, which was opened in May 1883, was an immediate success. After only a year 45 per cent of all Russian-produced oil was carried on the railway between Baku and Batum and soon the balance between American and Russian oil on the world market would change. In 1884, the USA represented 67.5 per cent of oil production, Russia, 32.5 per cent – in 1893 the figures were 52.6 per cent and 47.4 per cent respectively. That Rothschild did not invest money in the railway project with the sole intention of carrying oil bought by other producers was self-evident. The aim was to obtain access to their own oil, and therefore December 1883 saw the founding of La Société Commerciale et Industrielle de Naphte Caspienne et de la Mer Noire (Kaspisko-chernomorskoye neftepromyshlennoye i torgovoye obshchestvo; the Caspian and Black Sea Oil Industry and Trading Company).65 The company was owned by Alphonse de Rothschild and the board included among others his sonin-law Maurice Ephrussi (from a well-known banking family in Odessa active in Vienna and Paris). The enterprise was led by Ephrussi together with the technical head and oil expert Jules Aron. Alphonse de Rothschild himself was a banker and financier and not interested in managing businesses. According to Alfred he was ‘afraid of nothing so much as having to involve himself in the management of a business’, which made him easy to have dealings with.66 That the company could be founded was not a matter of course, as Jews, after the murder of Alexander II in March 1881 (according to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the result of a Jewish plot) were forbidden to own or lease Russian natural resources. Yet the Rothschild family occupied a special position. In 1862, the Russian state had borrowed large sums from Alphonse de Rothschild in Paris and Nathan Meyer Rothschild in London. Lionel Rothschild’s bank in London had financed Britain’s involvement in the Crimean War but despite that they were entrusted with the trading with Russian state bonds in Europe. Relations between Russia and the Rothschild family were thus tried and tested. To turn down a banking firm that was prepared to invest in Russian oil production on the grounds of race or religion was unthinkable and the company and the articles of association were therefore sanctioned by the Emperor. The problem for the new company was the same one that Robert had been confronted with in 1873: they had started too late to find their own oil wells. Just as Robert had bought de Boer’s paraffin factory and oil parcels, Rothschild got in touch with Ludvig in an attempt to take over his business. Rothschild was willing to buy Branobel for 15 million roubles (which was what the oil company had been valued at) plus 30 per cent in premium. ‘The question seems this time to have a more serious and credible character, but for myself I see no reason to offer our business for sale,’ Ludvig wrote to Alfred – ‘least of all on such conditions as are now being suggested, namely that Rothschild’s should have

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at least 80% of the business.’ He would on the other hand have nothing against negotiating to let Rothschild’s contribute with ‘as large sums as possible for plants that are needed for exports abroad’.67 Ludvig asked Alfred to handle contacts with Rothschild, but Alfred declined, saying he lacked detailed knowledge of the business and in addition was not sure what Ludvig’s aim was.68 Instead, at Alfred’s suggestion it was Mikhail Beliamin who was appointed to negotiate. At his side he had Ivar Lagerwall. On Rothschild’s side the negotiations were conducted by Jules Aron. Ludvig was conflicted about collaborating with Rothschild’s. On the one hand he feared being reduced to playing second fiddle, but on the other hand he needed capital to be able to expand his activities in Batum and from there via the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to export his paraffin to the countries of Western Europe. According to Alfred, this was an argument in favour of an agreement, like the fact that it would be good to avoid having Rothschild as a rival.69 Rothschild’s investments in Batum had brought about the same rapid change as those of Ludvig in Baku. The little town was transformed in a short space of time into a boomtown and after a few years it was one of the world’s most important oil ports. That the interests of Branobel and Rothschild would come to collide one day was obvious and it was this insight that brought the parties to the negotiating table.70 During the first formal negotiations in Paris in the spring of 1884 Aron explained the motives behind Rothschild’s interest in Russian oil and the banking house’s already large investments in refineries in Austria (Fiume), France (Marseilles) and Spain (for example, in Santander). He gave assurances that Rothschild’s would never enter the market on their own or in collaboration with Nobel’s rivals. Ludvig’s answer, after the working capital had been raised to 20 million, was to offer Rothschild 25 per cent of the shares. Until the planned works was in production the newly issued shares would be paid at a 6 per cent rate of interest in place of dividends; this, to protect the interests of the original shareholders. The suggestion was turned down by Rothschild’s with the argument that one should never enter into a business where one did not have a controlling share. They also hinted that the banking house was too powerful to have as a rival. To this Beliamin answered that Branobel were not frightened of competition but that it should occur on the international market, not inside Russia. During a follow-up meeting, in Paris in September, the tone was different, and Ludvig and the board were convinced that Rothschild’s would accept the offer to acquire 20 or 25 per cent of the shares. After three weeks, however, the negotiations collapsed. In March 1885, after several further contacts and rounds of talks, Ludvig informed Alfred that ‘the negotiation with Rothschild’s is definitely broken off ’.71 Nor did the discussions about a possible alliance with Standard Oil, which were being held simultaneously, lead to any results. The breakdown of the negotiations had negative consequences for Branobel. That same year, Rothschild’s instead bought Batum’s Oil Industry- and Trading-

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Company (abbreviated to BNITO after the Russian name Batumskoye neftepromyshlennoye i torgovoye obshchestvo), founded in 1883 by Palashkovsky and Bunge together with a syndicate of investors. BNITO had made the classic mistake of not ensuring a working capital big enough to cover unexpected outgoings and setbacks. In this they resembled Ludvig with his grandiose but undercapitalized plans. They were therefore forced to sell. Ludvig had also been interested in taking over BNITO, but Rothschild’s drew the longest straw, something that Alfred had warned about in a letter to his brother.72 Along with the packet of shares they obtained through their acquisition access to a paraffin factory in the Black City and twenty hectares of oil land in Balakhani, Sabunchi and Romani. By pumping money into BNITO and other insolvent oil companies in Baku these were enabled to compete with Branobel. The conversations with Rothschild’s and Standard Oil demonstrated to Ludvig the need for a restructuring of the company if it was to survive on the world market. He appointed new people to the board and negotiated new contracts with his agents in Russia and Western Europe. He also had the tanker Petrolea built at Motala shipyard for traffic on the Baltic and the Svet built for the Black Sea. During 1885, large amounts of paraffin and crude oil were sold to Western Europe and the Scandinavian countries and they were looking to export even more in 1886. These plans were thwarted by Standard Oil, however, which controlled 90 per cent of the American market and was the biggest actor on the international oil market alongside Branobel. When the threat from Ludvig became too great the American company went on the counterattack by forcing down the price of oil. Moreover, in certain cases they resorted to slander and industrial sabotage. It was not only Standard Oil’s waging war that depressed the price, however. Another and more important reason was over-production in combination with the fact that the means of transport were still underdeveloped. During the years 1883 to 1885, the production of oil almost doubled, not least because of the many boreholes that were gushing. Robert had discovered his own oil for the first time in 1879 and two years later the company got its first fountain when Borehole 25 sent up a jet sixty metres into the air. Borehole 9 then, from a depth of 193 metres, sent up a gush that spread oil mixed with sand over a radius of sixty metres. During the first month alone it yielded 121,000 tons. An even bigger gush – which did not belong to Branobel – emitted 6,500 tons of oil a day in six weeks before it was sealed again by Branobel’s engineers. All this oil was produced in an area of only thirty square kilometres. Although Branobel had the biggest refinery in Baku they found it difficult to keep pace with such huge quantities. Nor was the Transcaucasian Railway, which after its completion had been taken over by the state, equipped for it. However, there was no chance of any state investment in new tanker waggons, so both Ludvig and Rothschild ordered and added their own. In addition, there was an obstacle on the line, at the Surami Pass in Georgia. The incline was so

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FIGURE 7.8 Branobel’s Borehole 25 which in twenty-four hours sprayed out 150,000 pud (2,400 tons) of oil. The photo bears the date 1883, when the borehole was opened so that the photo could be taken. The spontaneous gush occurred two years earlier.

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steep – 900 metres – that it required two locomotives to pull eight tanker waggons. Ludvig therefore founded a syndicate with five oil producers in Baku which laid a sixty-five-kilometre long pipeline through the pass, but it was not ready until 1889.

The year 1886 This turned out to be the second big crisis year for Branobel, as well as for relations between Alfred and Ludvig. The over-production of oil and the low prices proved to be long-term, at the same time as the business continued to invest and expand. The company’s dividend for 1885 was only 2 per cent. Once again, the rumour went round that Branobel was on the brink of ruin, credit was refused and agreements cancelled, nor was it any longer possible to borrow money on the machine factory’s bills of exchange. According to Ludvig, the problems were mainly a result of malicious slander: ‘Naturally Nobel is to blame for everything. In the good old days when everything was carried in barrels oil fetched 3 to 4 roubles,’ he wrote ironically in a letter to Alfred: ‘Now the foreigner has come with his capital and his confounded new ideas. The complaints are repeated in the newspapers and take on the character of hate-filled persecution.’73 It was true, the company was in fact subjected to rumourmongering as well as attacks in the press, but that was not the whole explanation. As Ludvig’s daughter Marta pointed out, her father refused to realize that ‘it was fundamentally the firm’s own unconsolidated commercial status, more than the envy of rivals, that undermined the company’s financial reputation and credit’.74 Alfred was kept informed of the state of affairs, in particular by Ivar Lagerwall, who had a good insight into the Naphtha Company’s finances. The financial problems led to the disagreement between Alfred and Ludvig resurfacing. According to Alfred, the Naphtha Company had not learned from the previous crisis but had continued to build first and look for money later, which made him draw the conclusion that the company’s ruin was only a matter of time. Alfred’s negativity was, as on the previous occasion, coloured by his own financial situation. Ever since dynamite had been released to the market in 1867, he had built up a veritable empire for manufacture and distribution. In the mid-1880s his dynamite companies in different were under attack from other manufacturers and, moreover, they were competing among themselves. The solution was a fusion between the dynamite companies and for that financial resources were needed – resources that to a large extent were bound up in Branobel. The money he lent in 1883 should have been paid back the same year, which did not happen. ‘I now have on the contrary over 3 million Roubles absolutely locked up in St Petersburg,’ he complained to Ludvig, ‘and as almost all of my remaining fortune resides in Dynamite shares which are inscribed in my name and as a result

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absolutely unsellable . . . you will easily understand how I, having such wideranging business interests and having a hatred of borrowing, can be in dire straits.’75 To help his brother out of his dilemma, Ludvig went so far as to offer as security for Alfred’s claims a mortgage loan on his properties in St Petersburg. (During the previous crisis the possibility of selling these had even been raised.) It was a suggestion that Alfred willingly accepted but which fortunately did not have to be put into effect. Through amalgamation of the main company, DynamitAktiengesellschaft, and Nobel’s Explosives Company in Great Britain, together with three other German dynamite companies, in the autumn of 1886 the NobelDynamite Trust Company was set up and matters arranged themselves. One thing that upset Ludvig was that Alfred and Robert were said to have spoken ill of the business and thereby endangered its creditworthiness. ‘[Robert’s] comments to outsiders and bankers abroad have done me an immense amount of damage and . . . comments made by yourself, that are then spread by ill-will, undermine trust in our business,’ Ludvig wrote to Alfred.76 It was an accusation that Alfred dismissed. ‘Ludvig’s assertion that we damaged the Company’s credit through careless comments does not stand up to the most cursory examination,’ he wrote to Robert. ‘What has damaged the Company’s credit and finally undermined Ludvig’s too is that he built without knowing how he was going to pay for it, a system that might be suitable for children but not for full-grown people.’77 Another reason for Ludvig’s disappointment was that, in this difficult position, his brothers were demanding money from the company – not only Alfred but also Robert. In the summer of 1886, when the company’s revenues were at their lowest, Robert indicated that he wanted a payment of monies due to him amounting to £6,000, corresponding to about £700,000 today. Ludvig replied with a letter that sums up his state of mind and gives a good picture of the feelings between the brothers at this time. The ‘very inappropriate time for this demand’ that Robert had chosen, he wrote, made it look ‘as if you and Alfred had agreed to abandon us just when the dividend has gone down’. This was something that favoured Branobel’s domestic and foreign rivals, who were trying to blacken the company with a skilfulness that ‘is only paralleled by the skilfulness with which the radical press tries to undermine everything that goes by the name of ownership and capital’. Ludvig continued: That both of you now, without discussion, go on our enemies’ errands, is for me a sorry affair, for it in no way makes easier the difficult battle with rivals which I have had to endure for years. . . . In the competition that is now under way it is not a question of earning but of making oneself independent for the future, and independent precisely in a financial sense. As everyone is trying to undermine our credit I must by not paying dividends build up my own resources for our turnover. Technically nothing remains to be improved, the last word has been said. In the administration cutbacks have recently been made and yet more will

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be made. This naturally brings down new enemies on my head and will give further occasion for slander and persecution. You can see from the tone of my letter that I am not in a jolly mood. For years I have been so mocked and slandered by Jews, Armenians, Russian patriots and the newspaper rabble, and, however repugnant it has been, I have never defended myself against all those defamatory newspaper articles, well aware that this baying pack cannot be shouted down; but I am now tired of being alone in wishing others well.78 As soon as Alfred had put his affairs in order he calmed down and the tone of his letters became more conciliatory. In October, Ludvig travelled to Paris to negotiate with Standard Oil, which had plans to buy its way into Branobel. The move did not come off, but his stay in Paris gave Ludvig and Alfred an opportunity to meet, for the first time in three years, and to thrash things out. Their differences of opinion regarding the management of the company probably remained, but the personal contact applied balm on the wound. ‘It did my old heart good to see the former brotherly trust fully restored,’ Ludvig wrote from Vienna, to where he had travelled from Paris: ‘Letters are cold things, a face-to-face conversation on the other hand inevitably brings out what lies buried deep and that this is warm and good we both know.’ Alfred agreed: ‘The last thing I want is to fight with you and if a shadow has lain between us, it has long since yielded to the heart’s “let there be light”.’79 The year 1886 was lacking in positive developments. For the first time since 1879–80 the Naphtha Company paid out no dividend at all. Despite the tight financial situation, Ludvig was still the boundless optimist and he fought for his business tooth and nail. During the crisis year he travelled with Ivar Lagerwall to Baku, where he stayed for several months. Despite all setbacks he maintained a striking, almost incomprehensible presence of mind, deriving from a solid belief in the ‘system’ he had created and in the company’s future. A seven-page-long letter to Alfred was summed-up in these lines: Shall I too now follow the general confusion, shall I too also put a blindfold on my eyes, just because all the others persist in being short-sighted and easily scared of? The business requires that we should seek out an increased market: that required the construction of several new depots in Russia, a plant in Batum and a boat for export on the Baltic. All this has now been done, stands ready and has commenced operations. And now I stand there with this truly splendid creation finished, complete in all its parts, without other debts worthy of the name apart from your debt and mine, in sum 2,500,000 roubles. If the public now – thoughtless and easily scared as they always are – deny me credit, then I shall reply: I will get by all the same although with less profit, but I will get by!80

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The credit arrived in the end, this time too thanks to Alfred. The success of his newly founded dynamite trust worked according to Ludvig ‘like an electric shock’ on the finance market in St Petersburg, and Branobel found its feet again, if as shakily as in 1883.81 The company could now raise money on its paraffin stocks, both from St Petersburg’s Private Bank and from the Russian National Bank. It was the first time in Russia that paraffin had been accepted as security. Ludvig also still had personal credit with the National Bank of two million roubles. And as on so many earlier occasions the family Standertskjöld stretched out a helping hand – this time it belonged to Hugo, who had become rich as head of the arms factory in Izhevsk and who loaned the oil company 200,000 roubles.82 The following year is poorly documented, but there seem to have been no major developments in the company, and the negotiations with Rothschild’s and Standard Oil were at a standstill. That the company’s finances had been consolidated emerges from the fact that the dividend for 1887 had gone up to 6 per cent, and Ludvig believed as firmly as before in his ‘splendid creation’. From Bad Ems, where he was taking the cure that year, he wrote a letter to Robert on 1 June in which he declared himself ‘satisfied with the way things have gone’ and continued: These are difficult times for everybody and for every line of business; one must content oneself with less than before and be satisfied as long as no revolution sweeps away all wealth and all private ownership in one go. I therefore tend to say to my children that work and knowledge, I do not mean book-learning, but rather the ability to create something, are our only surety for the future. Our business is fully built, it is complete in every way, not dependent on the whims of others; technically it is so perfect that surely nothing can surpass it. Our rivals cannot create anything better. It needs only hard work, care, goodwill and sound common-sense to prosper; it is for the younger generation to complete this programme. I hope that they will do that and I therefore look with composure to the future.83 It is a prophetic letter. The younger generation of Nobels completed Ludvig’s programme with credit and the business grew over the years to an oil empire. Unfortunately, his anxiety about a revolution that ‘sweeps away all wealth and all private ownership’ would also come to be realized.

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8 THE END OF AN EPOCH

Ludvig’s technical and organizational talent was exceptional, like his capacity for work. During the complicated initial phase of the oil industry in the 1870s he ran the machine factory in St Petersburg and the arms factory in Izhevsk at the same time. When in 1862 he leased Isherwood’s mechanical workshop the site occupied an area of 3,500 square metres and the building took up 9,700 cubic metres. Ten years later the respective figures were 13,000 and 18,200. The Nobel site, which included factory premises as well as dwelling houses, was 285 metres in extent and ran between the Great Nevka Quay (from 1887 the Samson Quay) and Samson Prospekt.1 Expansion was possible thanks to Carl August Standertskjöld, who always came up with the goods when required. Ludvig was allowed to use his bonds as security for bank loans at interest rate of 5 per cent. On Standertskjöld’s cash loan the interest rate was 6 per cent, which was cheap in a country where access to investment capital was meagre. Ludvig was therefore keen to pay back loans and interest punctually to ‘uncle Standertskjöld’, his ‘best, oldest and most loyal friend’.2 The 1870s were a particularly fruitful decade for Ludvig Nobel not only professionally and financially but also in the private sphere. He had three children alive from his first marriage – Emanuel, Carl and Anna. More or less of an age with this bunch of siblings was his son Hjalmar Crusell whom he had had by Anna Lindal. His second wife, Edla, bore Ludvig no fewer than twelve children, of whom seven survived infancy: the first five were Mina (b. 1873), Ludvig (‘Lullu’; b.1874), Ingrid (b. 1879), Marta (b. 1881) and Rolf (b. 1882). When Emil was born in 1885 Ludvig joked that besides his Christian name, he would like to call the boy ‘Full Stop’.3 However, Emil only became a comma; the full stop was Gösta, who was born exactly one year later. Since the end of the 1860s, the family had been living in a two-storey house in the factory precincts (see the Figure 8.1 and 8.2), but after Edla gave birth to her first child it became too cramped. Ludvig therefore decided to erect a new and larger dwelling house. The commission for its design went to an architect with an interesting life story. Carl Frederic Andersson was born in Stockholm in 1826, the

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FIGURE 8.1 ‘The house on the quay.’

FIGURE 8.2 The interior of the new house.

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illegitimate child of a servant who three years later married a slaughterman called Sven Andersson. He seems to have soon tired of the boy, who in the spring of 1831 was sent to St Petersburg, where he grew up with his maternal uncle, a master bronze-smith from Borgå (now Porvoo) in Finland. At the age of sixteen, Carl Fredric, who in Russia went under the name of Karl Karlovich, began attending the architecture school of the Academy of Art, where he studied until 1846. In the 1850s, he designed a couple of dwelling houses which earned him a certain cachet and in 1859 he was awarded the title of ‘academician’. From 1864 to 1874 he worked as an architect for the Administrative Committee for the Supervision of Public Buildings. Karl Andersson was thus a ‘St Petersburg Swede’, like the Nobel brothers, and belonged to the same generation. Ludvig had known him for many years and between 1862 and 1865 they had collaborated on the planning of the Swedish St Katarina church, where Andersson was the architect and Ludvig the chairman of the buildings committee. The collaboration had not been frictionless, as it emerged that Andersson was demanding a 10 per cent ‘commission’ from the building entrepreneurs. His corruptibility deeply upset Ludvig and Andersson came close losing the commission. After a good deal of fuss the whole business ended in a compromise and the work could be completed.4 The fact that the commission to design the new Nobel dwelling house still went to Andersson shows that Ludvig valued the latter’s professional expertise. Apart from the dwelling house, in the 1870s and 1880s he designed a number of buildings in the factory precincts, among them a gasworks together with warehouses and large production plants. Andersson’s work also included an apartment block at 32 Shpalernaya Street in central St Petersburg, which was built in 1875 and several years later acquired by Ludvig. All in all, Karl Andersson designed around twenty houses in St Petersburg. He did not belong to the very top stratum but he is regarded by specialists as a significant architect.5 The new big house, which was built in Florentine Renaissance style in the years 1873–5, was situated on Great Nevka Quay. This was an epoch of the eclectic, and Andersson was given to eclecticism. Style-wise he may have been inspired by some houses that had been built in the city in the previous few years, for example Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich’s palace on Palace Quay with its Florentine façade, but in its composition the architectonic solution was original. The different levels, like the asymmetrically placed entrance point to a design which is at the same time imaginative and rational. The glazed-in winter garden also contributed to the asymmetrical appearance of the façade. In 1885, the house was extended in towards the factory area according to Andersson’s drawings. The living space was then 875 square metres. The building was not only a dwelling house but also had room for the offices of the machine factory and the oil company. Karl Andersson was the architect, but the purchaser and building contractor was Ludvig, who had inherited his father’s interest and talent for architecture. It

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was therefore inevitable that he would set his mark on the house, especially on the interior. It is said that, with a stroke of the pen, Ludvig removed three interior walls on Andersson’s drawing to create a salon of 129 square metres with room for twenty-eight guests. ‘Whether it was because of that period’s inescapable demand for modernization and expansion, or whether to a large extent it was a consequence of Ludvig’s . . . mania for building, is difficult to decide, but the fact is that the Nobels’ houses were continually being altered and enlarged in tandem with the growth in business and in the numbers and pretensions of family members,’ commented his daughter Marta.6

The Swedish parish and societies Karl Andersson was one of the approximately 700 individuals born in Sweden or of Swedish background who at this time were resident in St Petersburg. Most were enrolled in the Swedish congregation of St Katarina, which in the 1870s numbered almost 7,000 members. Apart from the roughly 6,000 Finns there were about 300 Danes and a number of Norwegian and German members of the congregation. St Katarina’s congregation was one of the capital’s oldest non-Orthodox communities and had its roots in Nyen, the Swedish town that lay in the Neva delta before the area was taken over in 1703 by Tsar Peter and St Petersburg was founded. After the Peace of Nystad in 1721, which deprived Sweden of everything the country had won at the Peace of Stolbova in 1617, relations between Sweden and Russia were normalized. St Petersburg quickly developed into a Baltic metropolis that to an increasing degree attracted foreign workers and craftsmen, among them Finns and Swedes. The Russian tsars’ conscious policy of enticing foreigners to the country with advantageous terms contributed to this dynamic. During the first decades, the Lutheran Scandinavians lacked a church of their own, but in 1733 they were granted permission to build one. It was given the name St Anna’s after the Russian Empress of the period. About ten years later the congregation split because of conflicts between Swedish- and Finnish-speaking members and in 1769 the Swedish-speaking congregation built a church of their own, St Katarina’s. This was replaced in its turn by Karl Andersson’s church building which still stands on Little Stableyard Street. Almost all parish priests were drawn from Swedish-speaking Finland. From 1835 to 1881 the congregation was led by the Rev. Gustaf Fredrik Zandt, an ‘educated, urbane gentleman with . . . a liking for social life and with personal charm, which made him very popular’.7 It was Zandt who took the initiative regarding the building of a new church. He was succeeded by a possibly even more charming and popular pastor, Herman Kajanus from Helsinki, who apart from anything else was an excellent speaker and singer (his brother was the well-known composer and conductor Robert Kajanus, who led the City of Helsinki Orchestra

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FIGURE 8.3 St Katarina church, erected in 1865 from drawings by Karl Andersson.

for fifty years). It was with Kajanus that the Nobel family had the closest contact as he christened and married Ludvig’s children and grandchildren. An annual treat was the Christmas morning service in the church. It was described as follows by Ludvig’s daughter Marta: There was already a Christmas morning atmosphere at home, but it grew even stronger as we approached Rev. Kajanus’s house with the candles lit two and two in every window one floor up alongside the church itself. Nowhere in the city was there anything like this, not even in other Swedish homes. One saw in the darkness the occasional person hurrying to the nearby Finnish St Maria’s church and to St Katarina’s Swedish church, where the door was opened by churchwarden Malmberg; he wore red, bushy whiskers, a black frock-coat with gold cross on the lapel and a jovial Christmas morning mien. . . . The church was only sparsely occupied, but in the galleries could be seen the poor old grannies of the congregation with black cloths on their heads, huddled in their droopy, threadbare coats. They stood up, bowed at the name of Christ, sobbed and wept, coughed and prayed, giving the church its own, very sad décor. In front of the altar rose a tall Christmas tree with green-painted wooden candlesticks and coarse wax candles. The Rev. Kajanus himself or his curate

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Karvanen officiated, dressed in modest, black, ankle-length cassocks on the German Evangelical Lutheran model. Priestly vestments and other gorgeous church textiles were on the other hand nowhere to be seen.8 The congregation was for a long time the main meeting-place for the Swedes and the Swedish-speaking Finns in the Russian capital. However, with the increasing immigration during the second half of the century there was a growing need for social intercourse outside the setting of the church. In 1877, the Scandinavian Association was founded in St Petersburg. The board included members of the top layer of the city’s Scandinavian – mainly Swedish – society. The choice of chairman fell – not surprisingly – on Ludvig. Among other members of the board were the noted ballet master at the Mariinsky Theatre, Pehr Christian Johansson, Sweden-Norway’s vice-consul Gustaf Mikael Damberg, professor and ‘senior astronomer’ at the Pulkovo observatory Magnus Nyrén, Ludvig’s son Emanuel, master tailor Nicolai Nordenström and the FinlandSwedish jeweller Alexander Tillander. To begin with, the Association had almost exclusively sociable aims, but after only a year the name was changed to the Scandinavian Charitable Association in St Petersburg: according to its statutes the Association was to ‘as far as its assets will allow, give support to needy Scandinavians dwelling in St Petersburg and its environs’. After a few years Ludvig handed over the chairmanship to Magnus Nyrén, but both he and other family members would in future years contribute financially not only to the Scandinavian Charitable Association but also to other social organizations within the Scandinavian colony.9

Social life The Nobels were knit together by a common fate which was anything but ordinary: their father’s flight from Sweden, his successes in St Petersburg, the decline and fall of the machine factory, Ludvig’s battle against his creditors and his successful building-up of a new workshop business, the discovery of oil in Baku and the development of one of the world’s biggest oil companies. They were family people. The letters bear witness to a strong fellowship and highly developed sense of solidarity, within and between generations, and they seem to have been happiest in their own circle. Who did they socialize with? In the correspondence that has been preserved there are remarkably few details about the family’s friends and acquaintances, who for obvious reasons belonged mainly to the Swedish-speaking circles in St Petersburg. (Russians are named in the correspondence only in work-related contexts.) Some have appeared in these pages, including the Standertskjöld family, but they were not permanently resident in St Petersburg. Immanuel reveals in his

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autobiographical notes that Gösta von Kothen and his wife were his and Andriette’s closest friends during their years in Russia, but that is about all. Who else was part of their circle of friends? Among the top layer of the city’s Scandinavian society, alongside the clergymen, were of course the diplomats in the Swedish-Norwegian legation. In the business world there were two professional categories which were particularly well represented among the Swedes and Finns: the jewellers and tailors. Two of the city’s biggest jewellery firms had a strong Swedish connection. Bolin had become the court jeweller as early as 1839 and Fabergé took over in 1885. (Carl Fabergé was not Swedish but he was married to a Finland-Swede and was a member of the St Katarina’s congregation.) Several decades later the Nobels would become one of Fabergé’s biggest customers, if not the biggest. The tailoring trade was well represented among the Scandinavians. Nordenström was a military tailor and Lidvall a civil one, and both were suppliers to the court. One may assume that the men in the Nobel family ordered their suits from Lidvall, who made the Emperor’s clothes and whose tailoring business around the turn of the century was Europe’s largest, with 210 employees.10 All these people belonged to Ludvig’s and Edla’s close acquaintances, but we do not know if they were part of their intimate circle. The same holds true for ballet master Johansson, who was a prominent figure in the cultural life of the city, but interest in culture was not a conspicuous feature of the Nobel family. Only Alfred seems to have had a genuine interest in literature; although the Nobels’ time in Russia coincided with the high point of the Russian novel there is a total lack of literary references in the comprehensive family correspondence. Of course, they went to concerts and the theatre, but more from convention than from genuine interest in culture. Alfred and Ludvig were moreover deeply unmusical and when they escorted ladies to the opera, they went by turns out to the stage box, where there was a sofa, ‘to take a nap or “slumberaria”, while the other one dutifully stayed in his seat’.11 ‘No so-called “higher aims” of either an artistic or a literary nature were pursued . . . in social life in “the home on the quay”,’ Marta Nobel-Oleinikoff recalled. Not only Alfred and Ludvig but the family in general were unmusical and ‘also not to any noticeable degree did they enjoy dance, and the entertainment after dinner therefore mostly consisted simply of conversation and sometimes . . . of card-playing by the older family members’.12 No personalities from the world of culture visited their home, ‘because for this, the most important prerequisites were missing: a certain talent, a deeper knowledge of languages, esprit, education in the wider sense and . . . charm’.13 Education in the Nobel family meant – apart from in Alfred’s case – something other than humanistic learning. What was celebrated was practical knowledge, like science. To this latter category belonged the astronomers Oscar Backlund and Magnus Nyrén, who for decades led the operations at the Pulkovo observatory, the former as director, the latter as his deputy director.

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Nordenskiöld One person whom Ludvig enjoyed having as his guest was the explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, who in 1879–80 led the Vega expedition – the first expedition to sail through the whole of the Northeast Passage, the formerly unexplored sea route between Europe and Asia through the Arctic Ocean. The project was supported financially by the Russian Polar explorer and patron Alexander Sibiryakov, the Swedish King Oscar II and the businessman Oscar Dickson, each contributing a third of the cost. The Vega voyage was one of that period’s most renowned exploits. Nordenskiöld, who was a Finnish nobleman, was promoted by Oscar II to the rank of baron and Vega’s captain Louis Palander was ennobled with the name Palander af Vega. Nordenskiöld had been born in Helsinki but was exiled to Sweden at the age of twenty-six – he wanted to see a free Finland and had expressed his displeasure that Sweden had not freed the land while Russia was preoccupied with the Crimean War. Nordenskiöld’s mother was the daughter of Immanuel’s old patron Lars Gabriel von Haartman. Ludvig had kept in contact with Nordenskiöld since long before the Vega expedition. When, in 1875, after ‘horrors and hardships’, the expedition reached the mouth of the Yenisei safe and sound, ‘a number of Finns and Swedes’ drank the health of professor Nordenskiöld’s wife in Ludvig’s house on Samson Quay, an event that she was informed of by telegram.14 In 1879, as we saw, Ludvig named one of his first tankers Nordenskiöld. At the end of December (Russian calendar) 1880 Nordenskiöld travelled to St Petersburg for celebrations on account of the Vega expedition and, together with Russian colleagues, to plan future expeditions. The visit was so important for Ludvig that he postponed a trip abroad to be able to host his famous fellow countryman. During the week-long visit, Nordenskiöld was received by the Emperor, honoured with a celebratory dinner by the city’s Finns, dined with ambassador Due of Sweden-Norway and gave speeches at the Imperial Geographical Society and the Technological Society. On 28 December (9 January 1881 in the Swedish calendar) Ludvig gave ‘a splendid breakfast’ for around 100 people.15 As a memento of the visit the guests received a special Vega plate, which Ludvig ordered from the Rörstrand porcelain factory in Stockholm. It was a variant of an existing commemorative plate which portrayed Nordenskiöld, Palander and Dickson. On the Nobel plate, the picture of the ship had been replaced by a fourth portrait, Sibiryakov’s, and it bore the text ‘En souvenir de la visite de A.E. Nordenskiöld à St. Petersbourg le XXVIII décembre MDCCCLXXX’. Sibiryakov’s name had also been enlarged and had changed places with Palander’s, which had been reduced in size. When the order was dispatched in August 1881, Ludvig sent the first plate to Nordenskiöld ‘as a memento of the great joy you gave me and the

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FIGURE 8.4 The last known photo of Ludvig, taken in Bad Ems in 1884.

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honour you showed me by being a guest in my home during your all too short stay in St Petersburg’.16 Nordenskiöld also received some more substantial gifts from Ludvig, including minerals and Russian technical journals. When the explorer ordered Russian sauerkraut for his great Polar expedition in 1882, Ludvig saw to it that the order for 160 pots was delivered to Stockholm.17

Summer retreats Ludvig’s health obliged him, as we havementioned, to spend long periods abroad. The main destinations were Bad Ems, Weissenberg and Bad Soden in southern Germany as well as health resorts in Italy and on the French Riviera. He sometimes travelled alone, but often with a company consisting of large and small family members. That Ludvig could be absent for such long periods from the factory in St Petersburg was because the work was in good hands during his absence. The director of the machine factory from 1872 to 1888 was Harald Berg, born in Lojo in Finland. In common with his successor Herman Kauffmann, also a Finn, Berg combined engineering knowledge with good leadership qualities. The profitsharing system that Ludvig had introduced guaranteed their interest in the fortunes of the business. The recreational trips were not only to southern Europe’s health resorts but also to Scandinavia. Nearly every summer Ludvig and his family visited Stockholm, where they stayed in hotels or rented villas and even thought about acquiring a property. However, the plans for this fell through, because the site on offer had not yet been built on and the construction work would demand ‘an investment of time and thought’, something that Ludvig said that he lacked.18 Sweden, moreover, was a sea distant from St Petersburg, which was inconvenient. The summer of 1881 was, therefore, the last time that the family holidayed in Sweden. Southern Finland was a more convenient alternative. When the Saima canal, which joined the Bay of Finland to the Saima lake system, was completed in 1856, and especially after the railway from St Petersburg to Viborg was opened in 1870, St Petersburg families were tempted to spend their holidays in Finland. In the summer of 1882, the Nobel family were living at Karlberg near Tavastehus, a property belonging to Eberhard Galindo, who was a general in the Russian army and with whom Ludvig was acquainted through his arms business. It was a small world. The following year Karlberg was bought by the director of the Izhevsk factory, Hugo Standertskjöld, who developed the property into an English landscaped park with artificial lakes, summer houses and castle ruins.19 The summers that followed were spent at Lauritsala manor by the first lock on the Saima canal. No one in the Nobel family spoke Finnish, but that was not a problem, Marta Nobel-Oleinikoff remembered: ‘Nowhere did the Nobel family

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come into close contact with the local people, apart from with the shoemaker and shop. . . . But in their capacity as short-term summer visitors or dachniki neither did they exert themselves to mutilate the Finnish language, as the locals in any case tried to guess what the posh people from the capital wanted.’20

An epoch is buried Ludvig and family spent the winter of 1887–8, as so often, in southern climes. In autumn 1887 Ludvig, Edla and their daughter Mina stayed briefly in Baden-Baden and Venice, after which they continued to Meran in South Tyrol, where they stayed for two months. From Meran they travelled via Milan and Genoa (where they celebrated Christmas), San Remo and Menton to Cannes, where they arrived at the end of January. Shortly afterwards they were joined by Emanuel, Hjalmar Crusell and the younger children Lullu, Ingrid and Marta while the youngest remained behind in St Petersburg with their older sister Anna. Emanuel returned home after a few weeks, while Carl joined them on 10 March. After having felt unusually well right up until the end of February, Ludvig suddenly fell ill with a high fever which refused to abate. He believed that he had been struck down with malaria or typhus, but according to the doctor the cause was his incurable heart complaint exacerbated by a cold. His heart sometimes beat extra fast, and he could lie for fourteen hours ‘sweating profusely’, Edla told their daughter Anna. ‘I am very worried and unsure how this illness will end,’ she added; ‘Papa’s age, his worn-out nervous system, his sick heart all give cause for concern.’21 The doctors maintained that there was no looming danger on the horizon, however, and in the coming weeks his condition improved. When Robert called on Ludvig in mid-March, however, Ludvig’s strength was so diminished that ‘the tears came into his eyes’ and his state of health soon deteriorated again.22 On 27 March, Robert wrote to Alfred: I have now taken my leave of Ludvig, which was not easy, and I am travelling to Florence tomorrow, but now that I am leaving our brother so exhausted I think I am doing the right thing by urging you to visit him soon and to show him all the cordiality and friendship that your good heart dictates and that you so well understand. It is impossible to foresee what outcome his illness may yet have – the fever does not abate and he says himself that he cannot stand it any longer – but what is certain is that your visit would have a life-giving and salutary effect. Therefore make short work of it and come.23 Alfred obeyed the summons and about a week later he was in Cannes. His first telegram built up Robert’s hopes that Ludvig would rally while later reports were ‘very depressing’. On 11 April, Alfred sent a telegram which Robert interpreted as

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a death announcement. ‘It is remarkable,’ he replied to Alfred the following day, ‘that every success is followed by hard blows; now, when his business affairs are affording him contentment, there comes a severe illness and perhaps death to rob him of the fruits of his labours.’ He was halfway through writing the letter when a telegram arrived from Carl: ‘All hopeless has not many hours left.’24 Neither Robert nor Alfred, who had also just left Cannes, managed to make it to their brother’s sickbed. Ludvig died at 2 p.m. the same day, 12 April 1888, surrounded by Edla and six of their children including Hjalmar Crusell. It was Carl who closed his father’s eyes. When Edla became a widow, she had just turned forty. ‘At difficult moments of my life he has always been my strength, no wonder then that I feel myself weak when he is gone,’ she wrote to Alfred: ‘Nor do the black-clad crowd that surround me contribute to making life easier but duty and love for them, I hope, will help me to endure and be of use to my many children as long as they need me.’25 The death attracted the attention of both the Russian and Swedish press. ‘Nobel was attached to his native land by many ties,’ according to a long and detailed obituary in a Stockholm daily. ‘His aged mother still lives in the Swedish capital, his sons received their engineer’s training at the technical university here and it was from here that he took his spouse.’26 In the French press (e.g. Le Figaro) the deceased was mistaken for Alfred, the best-known of the brothers in Europe, who had the doubtful pleasure of reading that he was an inventor of murderous tools of war, ‘a merchant of death’ who ‘only with difficulty can be seen as a benefactor of mankind’.27 Ludvig’s remains were taken to St Petersburg, where he was buried on 28 April (16 April in the Russian calendar). Robert was too ill to go and Alfred did not get there in time. Two days before the funeral he sent a guilt-filled letter to Emanuel, in which he explained that it was because Carl had originally given him a different date for the interment. When the telegram with the correct date reached Paris, he had already travelled to Germany, and when he finally received it, it was too late for him to get to St Petersburg in time. ‘If the interment on the other hand had been on the 30, in line with Carl’s first intimation, there would have been quite sufficient time,’ Alfred wrote. As if this excuse was not enough, he added that ‘it has perhaps turned out for the best’ as he would not have managed ‘the long journey to St Petersburg without a stop’. Indeed, he concluded, it would not be long before he himself drowned ‘in the river of Lethe’.28 Alfred’s explanations are reasonable but a little too long-winded to be really convincing. Did he really do all he could to get to the interment? His general aversion to St Petersburg and the quarrel with Ludvig two years earlier probably caused him to be torn between conflicting emotions. That the wounds from the conflict had still not healed emerges from a letter from Edla written a week after her husband’s death. In it she thanked Alfred for having granted Ludvig’s wish to meet and talk with him and continued: ‘I do not know the nature of your

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conversation, but I know that the disagreement that had crept in between you weighed on his pure mind and that it was a relief for him to see you and perhaps to resolve what had been unresolved.’29 The reservation ‘perhaps’ hints that what had been unresolved was not quite resolved. That the conflict still persisted, gnawing away, emerges from a remarkable letter from Alfred to Ivar Lagerwall: My acquaintance with my deceased brother was rather superficial. I must confess, perhaps to my shame, that he was more unfamiliar to me than most of the individuals I have been intimately associated with. You may conclude from this confession that it was really only generosity on my part that led me to make tremendous sacrifices and land myself in dire straits in order to rescue his, and his company’s, more than threatening situation. . . . Had I only been met with ingratitude I would have regarded that as quite natural and even have rejoiced at the stability of the Natural law; but what I experienced was far worse than ingratitude and moreover infringements of my rights were made that one may scarcely name from fear of being disbelieved. All this is forgiven and forgotten for as long as it can be forgotten, because for the memory there is no sponge as there is for slates. But the impression remains and encourages one to reduce to a minimum all kinds of business dealings between relatives.30 ‘For the memory there is no sponge as there is for slates.’ So, the barb was still there. Alfred had ‘forgiven and forgotten for as long as it can be forgotten’, but not everything; what was unresolved had not been resolved. Yet we must ask ourselves how Alfred could maintain that his acquaintance with Ludvig was ‘rather superficial’ and that his brother was to him ‘more unfamiliar that most of the individuals’ he ‘had been intimately associated with’? He had after all lived the first thirty years of his life with Ludvig and after leaving Russia had met him countless times in Stockholm or Paris and in other places in Europe – not to mention their copious correspondence. Was Alfred in one of those periods when he ‘painted everything black’?

‘A shining example’ The coffin with Ludvig’s remains arrived on the evening of 15th/27th April at Warsaw railway station, from where it was taken on a catafalque to the Swedish church. The funeral took place the following day. Tickets were required to view the ceremony in the packed church and a thousand or so people accompanied the funeral procession. The funeral was described as follows by the correspondent of the daily Stockholms Dagblad:

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The funeral of the well-known and universally respected ‘naphtha king’ Nobel took place today with an extraordinary degree of participation on the part of the local community. The stately Swedish church on Little Stableyard Street was attractively decorated with mourning draperies and a great quantity of tropical plants, which later surrounded the catafalque with the costly palm-tree coffin which enclosed the remains of the prematurely deceased. The coffin was almost covered with magnificent wreaths of fresh and artificial flowers, of laurel and palm leaves and, if my counting was not amiss, no fewer than ten large wreaths of silver. A large and splendid wreath with blue and yellow ribbons was, I was told, from the Swedish colony here, other wreaths were from the company’s employees, workers in the mechanical workshop, etc., also from the Technical Society in Paris, from family and friends in Berlin; altogether there were more than 100 wreaths. By 2 o’clock the church was filled to capacity; among those present could be seen the Swedish-Norwegian minister, His Excellency Due, the military attache Captain Brändström, Consul Sterky, many high-ranking Russian figures and deputations from a multiplicity of technical and philanthropic societies. Pastor Kajanus made the first speech (in Swedish) after which Pastor Masing [of St Maria’s German church] spoke (in Russian), primarily addressing himself to the many Russian workers present, for whom he held up the deceased as a shining example. By a quarter past three the sorrowful ceremony in the church was at an end, and the coffin was now carried by relatives and friends to the hearse, harnessed to 6 horses. The whole street was filled with people, many of whom had stood and waited on the spot continuously from 12 o’clock. The procession, which walked over the Nevsky Prospekt, the Nikolai Bridge and all the way to the Smolensky churchyard, was headed by mounted gendarmes followed by 12 lamp-bearers, as is the custom here; then came the hearse followed by close to 20 carriages with wreaths and 80 other horse-drawn carriages . . . . At the graveside the deceased’s friend and family doctor, Professor Landzert, said some words of farewell, in which he recalled that every time he, in his capacity of doctor, urged the dear departed to be sparing with his exertions, he always answered: ‘I cannot and will not rest before I have succeeded in materially safeguarding the future of all my dependents.’31 The interment took place in the family grave, which had been designed by Ludvig and where his first wife Mina and his late children rested. His daughter Marta recalled: ‘The horribly tasteless metal wreaths in large oval or round metal boxes with glass lids’ that were placed by the tomb.32 Many official speeches were made in Ludvig’s memory, both during and after the funeral, all of them effusively positive. His son Emanuel was responsible for the

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finest words of farewell. ‘I miss in him not only a loveable and tender father, but I lose in him a loyal and wise and thoughtful friend, from whom I have had no secrets,’ he wrote to Alfred two days after Ludvig’s death: ‘It is not often that parents know how to create friendship and an easy relationship between themselves and their children: but my father, with his youthful disposition, knew how to extend this to all of us older siblings.’33

The first Nobel prize Among the notabilities of the town who accompanied Ludvig to his final rest were several members of the Technological Society, which Ludvig had helped to set up. On the first anniversary of Ludvig’s death, 31 March (Russian calendar) 1889, the Society held a commemorative meeting in his memory with lectures on Ludvig’s contributions to various areas of activity: the Technological Society, the armamentsand machine-construction industries, the Izhevsk factory and the Russian oil industry. The lectures were collected the same year in a book with the title In Memory of Ludvig Immanuilovich Nobel. It was also announced at the gathering that the Nobel Brothers’ Oil Company had decided to donate money for a prize and a medal in memory of Ludvig Nobel to be awarded by the Technological Society. The value was 6,000 roubles (around £56,000 today) and was to be awarded for ‘the best work or research-study in metallurgy or the naphtha industry (in general, or any part thereof) or for outstanding discoveries or technical improvements in these areas of activity, taking account of their practical implications for the development of the industry in Russia.’ The first competition was advertised in 1893 and the first prize was awarded two years later to the twenty-eight-year-old chemist, Alexei Stepanov, for his treatise ‘The foundations of lamp theory’. This became the world’s first Nobel prize, awarded six years before the prize that Ludvig’s brother Alfred founded. The lectures at the meeting took the form of a unanimous tribute to Ludvig Nobel not only as an engineer, inventor, business leader and social reformer but also as a person. ‘If in a biography of Ludvig Nobel all the words of praise should be repeated that were used of him in speech and writing, the author would surely be censured for hagiography, particularly given the close degree of kinship to the one who is the object of the eulogy,’ Marta wrote in her biography of her father.34 ‘Censure for hagiography’ is something that in actual fact anyone risks who tries to paint a comprehensive picture of Ludvig Nobel. He appears to have been an unusually agreeable and harmonious person, equally afflicted by illnesses and strokes of fate as his brothers but blessed with a more sober temperament, good-humoured, and refreshingly free from self-importance. No one seems to have had anything negative to say about him – except, sometimes, his brothers, who envied him his success and wealth (Robert) or criticized his financial irresponsibility (Alfred).

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FIGURE 8.5 The Russian Technological Society’s Nobel medal.

Ludvig is everywhere depicted in overwhelmingly positive terms both as a craftsman and as a private individual and paterfamilias. According to Pyotr Bilderling, who knew him well, his straightforwardness in work-related questions in combination with a certain brusqueness meant that in daily life he could be seen as unreasonable and harsh. Under the surface was hidden ‘a warm soul’, however, although he was ‘utilitarian and altruistic he loved to give an appearance of harshness and to air aphorisms that he himself was not guided by’. His favourite saying was ‘No good deed goes unpunished’, which he used to quote with conviction, ‘which in no way hindered him from doing good and devoting himself to wideranging good works’.35 Ludvig’s close adviser and confidant, the wise and discerning Ivar Lagerwall, summed up his personality in the following way: In the midst of his wide-ranging activities and his prominent position as head of Russia’s largest industrial enterprise Ludvig Nobel was modest and unpretentious like few others, although he must have been conscious of his own worth. In the promised land of titles he went all his life without a title. His personal lovableness was such that he was equally highly regarded by high and by low, and his friends showed him a degree of affection that far exceeded the usual measure. But the most noteworthy facet of his character was his great personal courage. He feared no danger, and he had the courage of his convictions. Timidity or shyness were equally foreign to him in the presence of the formidable Emperor Nicholas I as in the face of the devastating cholera outbreak in the 1850s, when he went about taking care of his sick workers.36

The inheritance When Ludvig’s estate was divided up, with the help of Nachmann the lawyer from the German embassy, the real estate was distributed as follows: his widow Edla inherited a dwelling house that took up a whole block between 29 Great Stableyard

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Street and 42 Moyka Canal. It had been erected in the years 1868–9 after drawings by David Grimm, an architect colleague of Karl Andersson, and bought by Ludvig in 1871 for 850,000 roubles.37 Another property, the above-mentioned apartment block at 32 Shpalernaya Street, designed by Karl Andersson, went to their daughter Anna. The large dwelling house at Samson Quay fell to Emanuel’s share, while the plot of land behind, between Samson Prospekt and Nystad Street (called ‘the second yard’), was the joint inheritance of the siblings.38 Emanuel and Carl were appointed tutors to the under-age siblings together with Edla’s brother-in-law, Alfred Nyberg. According to what he had stated, Alfred had no knowledge of the contents of the will and neither did he receive anything.39 In view of the Oil Company’s shaky finances he had offered to extend the period of his loan, but the debt tormented Ludvig. On his sickbed, therefore, he instructed Emanuel to transfer a number of his shares to Alfred as security for his claim. This was done: as soon as possible after returning from St Petersburg, Emanuel saw to it that shares to the value of 850,000 roubles were put in Alfred’s name.40 Alfred could have cashed in the shares but decided, because of the poor share price, to keep them and let them be used as security for loans from the State bank.41 At his death Ludvig was a rich man – Lagerwall estimates his fortune at ten million roubles, which corresponds to £80 million today.42 That estimate may well be correct, as Ludvig’s nominal assets in the Oil Company alone on 1 January 1888 amounted to 6,220,750 roubles, consisting of 755 shares at 5,000 roubles and 9,783 shares at 250. The market value was of course significantly higher. The rest of the family’s nominal assets in the company were divided up as follows: Alfred 2,495,500 roubles, Robert 350,000, Emanuel 117,000, Carl 110,000, Edla and Anna 100,000 each, Hjalmar Crusell 50,250, Alfred Nyberg 50,000. Ivar Lagerwall himself had shares to a value of 25,000 roubles.43 Most of Ludvig’s shares went to the under-age children.44 Whether any liquid assets changed owners after Ludvig’s death is unknown, but against the background of his general philosophy of life there is reason to assume that there were no large sums involved. Money was to be earned through work. ‘Capital in pure money left as an inheritance to children is pure moral corruption,’ he explained to Alfred two years before he died: ‘Capital in industrial form is a good weapon in the struggle for existence, but anyone who believes that this capital can yield interest without active work will soon fail.’45 In accordance with this principle the responsibility for both the family’s businesses was laid on the eldest sons: Emanuel was to take care Branobel while Carl’s share was the machine factory, which was converted to a trading house (a limited partnership company) with himself and Emanuel as joint owners.46 Emanuel also took over responsibility for the import and sale of Alfred’s dynamite to Russia, an important line of business which had formerly been run by Ludvig. As we saw, Alfred had never succeeded in setting up a dynamite factory in Russia.

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As emerges from a letter quoted previously, Ludvig hoped that the younger generation, through ‘hard work, care, goodwill and sound common-sense’, would complete the ‘programme’ that he himself had begun, and he therefore looked ‘with composure to the future.’47 The future would fulfil his hopes in full measure.

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PART THREE

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9 THE THIRD GENERATION

Emanuel was twenty-nine and Carl twenty-six when they inherited the family businesses, but they were no little innocents, having been involved in the company’s activities from an early age. Yet their formal schooling had been both short and deficient, just like that of their father and their uncles. They were taught first at home and then in Annenschule, St Anna’s School, one of the city’s most renowned institutions of learning. It had been founded in 1736, was under the aegis of the German-Lutheran parish of St Anna’s, and had a tradition of tolerance and modern pedagogy. As early as the 1700s girls had been educated in the school and in Emanuel’s time almost 40 per cent of the pupils were girls. At the end of the 1860s the number of pupils had grown to over 800 and a new school building was erected. It was in this new school building that Emanuel began his education. He started school in 1869, at the age of ten, at the same time as Carl, who was three years younger. One reason for Emanuel’s lateness in starting school may have been his father’s general scepticism about schools, but there may also have been a practical explanation. It was a long way from their home on the Viborg side to the school, which was situated in the city centre, and it was practical for the boys to go together. In the Annenschule the classes were counted backwards. One began in class VII and finished in class I. Three languages were studied right from first year – German, Russian, French – and from class IV English was also taught. On several occasions Emanuel was punished by being made to repeat a year. His absences amounted to about sixty hours, something that should probably be put down to illness. Moreover, it was sometimes difficult to get to school, especially when it was icy and the floating bridge between the Viborg side and the city centre was lifted so as not to be crushed under the weight of ice. (A fixed connection, the Liteynyi Bridge, was not built until 1879.) Emanuel did not graduate from the Annenschule but finished school in 1874, after class III. During his five school years he mostly received good marks and what was to be his final report contained only two 2s, in Russian and arithmetic. In

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FIGURE 9.1 and 9.2 The brothers Emanuel (twelve) and Carl (nine) photographed in 1871.

the other subjects he had 3+ and above, with a 5 in nature study. His best language was French, in which he got a 4.1 The reason why Emanuel was taken out of school was that Ludvig, as we saw, prioritized practical knowledge and technical know-how over ‘book-learning’. His son was therefore sent to the Technical Secondary School in Barmen (now a part of Wuppertal city). However, he studied there for less than a year before his father required his services. Despite his short stay there Emanuel had good memories of Barmen, where one of his classmates was the future aeronautical engineer, Hugo Junkers. In the spring of 1876, Emanuel accompanied his father on his first trip to Baku. He was then seventeen years old. With this, his schooldays were definitely over and the work for his father and the factory began. That Ludvig had high expectations of his son is shown by the fact that right from the start he set him important tasks. In May 1877, the Russo-Turkish war broke out and that same autumn Emanuel was sent to Plevna in northern Bulgaria to deliver armour plating that the machine factory had made for the Russian army. The Russian troops were led by engineergeneral Eduard Totleben, one of Russia’s foremost experts in fortifications, holder of top posts in the engineering sector and old acquaintance of Immanuel

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as well as of Ludvig. For this contribution Emanuel was rewarded with a medal commemorating the Battle of Plevna, which after several assaults was finally captured by Russian forces in December 1877.2 ‘Emanuel seems now to be taking a very active part in business and gives an account of the situation once a week by letter with great clarity and in well-chosen word,’ Ludvig declared with satisfaction in a letter to Alfred the following spring, when he happened to be in Geneva and Emanuel, in his absence, was overseeing work in the machine factory. ‘I hardly need to tell you that this makes me very happy, for it allows me to hope that he will turn out to be a serious man and what I started will not then need to go to rack and ruin.’3 Emanuel was not yet nineteen at this time. It is no wonder that Ludvig had high hopes of his son. Gustaf Törnudd, who met Emanuel during his and Ludvig’s visit to Baku in the autumn of 1882, came up with a possibly more objective judgement. Emanuel, Törnudd wrote, was a ‘thoroughly good, honourable and lovable young man’ but not as gifted as his father: ‘As regards brains he has not been so richly endowed by Our Lord as his father, but he possesses his father’s energy and tenacity to a high degree.’4 If by ‘brains’ Törnudd was referring to engineering or inventive genius he was correct – Emanuel lacked those qualities. However, he had other talents that would prove to be at least as indispensable for the future success of the Nobel business. Just like his father, then, Emanuel was intimately involved in the family enterprise from a very young age. The working routines were well established both in St Petersburg and Baku and during his father’s frequent and lengthy sojourns abroad Emanuel also took his place on the board of the Naphtha Company. He was charged early on with taking care of financial questions and soon learned how to deal with businessmen as well as bankers and ministers. During the crisis of 1885– 6 it was he who negotiated the loan from St Petersburg Private Bank, the first in Russia with paraffin as security.5 His social skills and acknowledged pleasant personality served both himself and the company well. The Naphtha Company’s head office was divided into sections, the most important of which were the technical (drawing office and laboratory) and foreign sections as well as the trade section. There was also a secretariat here and departments for bookkeeping, comptrolling and accounts, cash office and finance, personnel, railways, haulage and a post room. Each department had its head. The directors on the board also had different areas of responsibility in their turn. The first meeting of the board after Ludvig’s death was held in the summer of 1888. Emanuel was elected to the board and was given the responsibility for the company’s finances and relations with the government, the stock exchange and the civil service.6 Although the family had a majority of the shares, sensibly enough he did not demand to succeed his father as chairman of the board – for that, he was too young and inexperienced. That function devolved instead on Mikhail Beliamin, who had been on the board since the company was founded in 1879, first as a deputy member and since 1881 as a permanent member.

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The board included Hjalmar Crusell, Pyotr Bilderling, the Danish national Charles Nellis (who had been a member since 1885 and was mainly responsible for personnel and auditing issues) and Ivar Lagerwall, Ludvig’s adviser and confidant. Lagerwall had been elected to the board the year before and was now head of the trade department. The real head, however, was Beliamin while Lagerwall had to be content with the post of inspector-general of the company’s foreign markets. When Lagerwall protested against an ordinance which meant that one director was subordinated to another, and wanted to leave the board, Emanuel persuaded him to remain, which he did out of respect for Ludvig. ‘The memory of Mr Ludvig Nobel . . . and my personal connections with his family forbid me to break with our company in a conspicuous manner,’ Lagerwall wrote to Alfred in a seventeen-page report on the situation in Branobel after Ludvig’s death.7 Robert also came from Stockholm for this first board meeting without Ludvig. As far as we know it was his first visit to Russia since leaving Baku in 1880. Before the board meeting he travelled to Baku, where his son Hjalmar – of whom more later in this chapter – was employed in the office. For Robert, there was a lot was at stake – the whole of his life, in fact. The greater part of his wealth was invested in the Naphtha Company and in contrast to Alfred he was not making any new money. He only had expenses. The financial position of Robert and his family was wholly dependent on the company’s successes.

The Emperor’s visit Emanuel’s time as head of the family and of the most profitable part of the family’s business interests began well, at least on the social level. For many years Ludvig had looked forward to a visit by the Emperor to Baku, but that honour now devolved on his son. In October 1888, Alexander III and his Danish-born spouse, the Empress Maria Fyodorovna, came to Baku. It was the first and last visit by a Russian monarch to the Azeri capital. The city had been cleaned up, streets laid with asphalt and triumphal arches erected at the railway station and the entrance to the Black City. Deputations arrived from Dagestan and other mountainous tracts with representatives of the oldest Caucasian princely families ‘in their gaudy costumes and weighed down with gold- and silver-wrought weapons’. Most spectacular were the guests from Turkmenistan, Khiva, Bukhara and Turkestan who took over the Grand Hotel and re-furnished it as a veritable caravanserai.8 The police were at full stretch and a number of security precautions were taken. Two British newspaper correspondents were arrested by mistake, the latter because his surname resembled the name of a nihilist who had arrived in Tiflis ‘equipped with dynamite and bombs to carry out an assassination attempt on the Tsar’. They were freed, with apologies from the police, but only after the imperial couple had left Baku.9 Another security measure

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was that train traffic between Baku and Batum was cut off for several weeks, which led to losses of millions of roubles for the oil companies.10 The primary goal of the imperial couple’s visit was the Black City and the Nobel brothers’ works.11 At the entrance to the paraffin factory they were met by Emanuel’s sister Anna, who handed the Empress a bouquet of flowers in a gilded and enamelled, diamond-studded container. In the Russian manner, the Emperor was offered bread and salt, served on a silver dish fashioned by the court jeweller Ovchinnikov. The paraffin factory was pictured on the bottom of the dish, on the edging were the imperial coat of arms and monogram and in between them six medallions representing among other things gushing boreholes, tanker waggons and tanker ships, part of a refinery and a sulphuric acid factory. The salt cellar was shaped like a paraffin depot. Inside the factory the imperial couple were greeted by Emanuel and the board members Bilderling and Nellis. Also among those present was Hjalmar Sjögren, employed as a geologist by Branobel. In a letter to the Stockholm daily Nya Dagligt Allehanda he reported as follows: It had for a long time caused bad blood among other factory-owners that the Emperor, out of all the 200 factories, was only going to visit one, and moreover a foreign one, and there had been many attacks in the newspapers as a result of this. This was countered however by pointing out the fact that our firm is as Russian as any of the others and that it would have been strange if the Emperor should visit a factory of the second rank, given that within his bounds he has the largest paraffin factory in the whole world.12 Emanuel had invested heavily in advance of the visit. Not only did the Empress received a present. Grand Duke Georgi, the imperial couple’s seventeen-year-old son, received a silver model of a paraffin depot and the heir to the throne Nicholas (the future Emperor Nicholas II) was given a case containing twenty-four bottles with samples of the Naphtha Company’s products. After inspecting the different sections of the works the retinue continued to the loading dock, where they were shown 100 tons of paraffin an hour being pumped through a pipeline. They also boarded the tanker ship Darwin, which was moored at the dock. Tables showing the production and exports of the Naphtha Company had been set out in a speciallybuilt pavilion. The Emperor received an album bound in silver with photographs showing the company’s works in Russia and abroad, he drank a toast in champagne to Russian industry and thanked Emanuel for his generosity. After visiting the Black City, the imperial couple continued with their retinue to the oilfield in Balakhani, where the derricks and oil reservoirs of Branobel and other producers were inspected and a gusher was set off artificially for the distinguished guests. ‘I scarcely believe that the Royals received an unfavourable impression from their reception in Baku, rather the opposite, and all who were present when they

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FIGURE 9.3 and 9.4 The imperial family arrive at Branobel’s works in the Black City. There they visited the wharf, among other things, and saw the oil being pumped from the pipeline direct into the tanker.

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FIGURE 9.5 Anna Nobel.

visited the factory say that both the Emperor and the Empress were quite delighted and several times expressed their thanks for the friendly reception and for all the interesting things they saw,’ Carl (who got his information from Anna) reported to Alfred. The court jeweller Ovchinnikov, according to Carl, had received orders for no fewer than twenty silver dishes on the eve of the imperial couple’s tour. ‘Don’t forget, uncle, that there is a drop of the Orient left in the Russian Imperial blood and they have a weakness for showy ornaments,’ he commented.13 The total cost to the Naphtha Company of the imperial visitation, according to newspaper accounts, amounted to several hundred thousand pounds in today’s values.14 The investment was thus a large one – but it paid for itself: Emanuel was honoured with the Order of St Stanislas 3rd class, a mark of favour that his father had been treated to seventeen years earlier. ‘It would have been much better for him if he had managed to avoid this favour,’ thought Carl, who had inherited his uncle Alfred’s talent for sarcasm.15 A more important expression of the Emperor’s favour was his hope that Emanuel would become a Russian subject. It was a combined mark of favour and an exhortation that it was impossible to reject, and Emanuel accepted.16 Unlike his grandfather Immanuel, who forty-five years earlier had declined this mark of honour, he had been born and raised in Russia and was in charge of a business which in respect of its size and almost monopolistic position was of national concern.

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The success in Baku was a source of enormous joy to grandmother Andriette in Stockholm, who on receiving a report by letter from Anna (unfortunately not preserved) replied that she was ‘delighted that my Grandchildren have had the pleasure of the Emperor showing his satisfaction with what your father strove for both with his genius and his great store of capital, which we hope will ensure good rates of interest in the near future’.17

Leadership problems Emanuel returned to St Petersburg in January 1889, after spending more than three months in Baku. The Emperor’s visit had been a success and everything was apparently going well. Andriette’s hopes for ‘good rates of interest in the near future’ were however not so easy to realize. In 1886, the government had reintroduced excise duty, which had been abolished nine years earlier with the intention of boosting the oil industry. The duty amounted to forty kopecks per pud and had to be paid before shipment. This meant an additional expense of 500,000 roubles during the winter half of the year and during the transportation season 24,000 roubles a day. The company bought government bonds which were deposited as security but that covered only a quarter of the excise duty, so that money had to be sought elsewhere. It was natural to turn to Alfred, but when Emanuel asked for a loan till the late autumn of 1888 Alfred answered that he had already invested half of his fortune in the Naphtha Company and ‘on no account in my transactions with the Company will I return to the type of business governed by sentimentality, which up until now has brought me so much trouble, annoyance and losses’.18 For him, the Baku business was ‘a lottery, with the difference that there is no question of profit but only of bigger or smaller losses’.19 In the end, though, Alfred chose to help out, exactly as before, but on condition that other shareholders also joined in. After Bilderling, Beliamin and Nellis put in money Alfred agreed to lend a million francs until the turn of the year.20 Despite the problems with excise duty, the Naphtha Company did well. The drilling had been successful, and production increased from 10 to 14 million tons of paraffin. The dividend for 1888 was once again 6 per cent, which corresponded to a third of the annual profit. In the next two years the company also managed to show a good profit and the dividend was set at all of 8 per cent. During the years 1891–5 the dividend varied between 5 per cent and 10 per cent, with the exception of 1893, when no dividend at all was paid. The balance of accounts for 1895 was the business’s best to date, partly because of a borehole that gushed and produced 20 million pud of oil. That same year they were granted permission by the government to increase the share capital to 20 million roubles. A major reason for Alfred’s scepticism was his dissatisfaction with the board of the Naphtha Company, which he thought lacked a leader with ‘sufficient energy

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to check mischief and counterbalance despotism’. Just like before, he blamed the company’s problems on Ludvig, whose incautious investments would have ‘killed off any business in normal competition’ and whose ‘partiality for goodfor-nothings and the consequences thereof are now making themselves more and more palpable’.21 What was needed was a strong chairman and according to Alfred they did not have far to look for a person with ‘excellent leadership qualities’, namely Robert. There was however one caveat: his vehement temper, which meant that he sometimes acted without thinking. ‘Otherwise he would be the right man – the right man in the right place [in English in the original]’.22 The criticism was mainly directed at Mikhail Beliamin, who according to Alfred had assumed too much power on the board after Ludvig’s death. Among other things he controlled Branobel’s foreign agents, who were said to be feathering their nests at the company’s expense. Robert was of the same opinion as Alfred. He said he had already warned Ludvig about Beliamin at the time the company was founded and at the board meeting in 1888 he tried ‘to organize some mild opposition to his style of expansion but my efforts only demonstrated his strength’.23 What Robert calls ‘mild opposition’ was described by Emanuel as ‘a rather impetuous performance’, which implies that the differences were significant.24 Bilderling was also apprehensive about Beliamin’s naked ambition, which he thought threatened the stability of the board.25 Alfred followed developments carefully from his Parisian vantage point. He had major financial interests in the company and received quarterly reports about its position from Emanuel. On one occasion he suggested a new board member to Emanuel, but this suggestion was not taken up, according to his nephew, because the person in question was a Jew. In his reply to Alfred, he explains that one of the company’s foreign agents of Jewish descent was threatened with expulsion each time he visited St Petersburg although he had a diplomatic passport, and that it needed extraordinary measures to have the decision rescinded. ‘I believe nevertheless that there ought to be and that there are ways to keep even an Israelite secure in Russia and I shall seek to obtain clarity on the issue.’26 The Nobels’ own attitude to Jews was not uncomplicated. In the correspondence between Alfred and Ludvig anti-Semitic turns of phrase occur, but they were not ethnically or religiously motivated. The Nobels were industrialists and were not fond of financiers and bankers – at this time, increasingly important professions, with a large proportion of Jews – as they were dependent on them. At the same time, in his letters Alfred expressed great respect for the financial competence of the Jews. He therefore had no problem suggesting that a Jew should replace another Jew – Beliamin – on the board of the Naphtha Company, on whose council he had himself been replaced by the Jew Louis Berger. Moreover, Sofie Hess, the young woman whom Alfred had been courting for many years, was Jewish. So, in his case we can hardly talk of any racial anti-Semitism.

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The same holds true for Emanuel, who was not averse to anti-Semitic clichés but whose negative view of Jews had mainly to do with their role as bankers. ‘It is not given to the Jews to work in the industrial sphere,’ as he expressed the difference between the Nobel industrialists and the Rothschild bankers.27 At the same time he was critical of Russia’s ‘medieval perception’ of Jews as ‘vermin’.28

Ivar Lagerwall The person who provided Alfred and Robert with information about the work of the board was Ivar Lagerwall, someone with a bright intellect and, in Alfred’s words, ‘the only one in the Company from whose side I have been met with discretion’.29 Beliamin was an outstanding engineer, everyone was agreed about that, but sales questions were not his thing. When Lagerwall suggested that sales and distribution in England ought to be reorganized he got a chilly reception from the board. Beliamin was also alleged to have been responsible for the company losing 200,000 roubles because of unsuccessful currency speculations. According to Lagerwall, Beliamin impressed Emanuel, like most other people, by ‘his wealth of facts and by his use of algebraic formulae for simple business calculations’ – something that he thought Emanuel was impressed by because of his lack of experience. When Emanuel refused to support him, Lagerwall criticized him for his ‘pathological fear of change’.30 However, Lagerwall’s views must be taken with a pinch of salt. He had been closely associated with Ludvig and could not accept that the chairman’s gavel had been taken over by someone for whom he had little respect. Emanuel had another view of the matter. According to him, Beliamin was a ‘clever and wise’ person and everyone on the board had ‘done their best for the good of the firm’ – with the exception of Lagerwall himself, who ‘just crossed his arms’ after Ludvig’s death: ‘This is all the more sad for me as it was from him that I expected the most and that I received the least support.’31 Emanuel was particularly upset by the fact that Lagerwall did not discuss the problems directly with him but wrote long letters not just to Alfred but also to Edla, which made her anxious and unhappy. ‘I believe I am receptive to sensible advice and will always be glad to listen to it, but I must declare that I am thoroughly tired of only having to listen to complaints and no criticism and independent thinking about any potential change,’ he complained to Alfred.32 Lagerwall left St Petersburg and gave up active involvement in the board in November 1888 and the following year he resigned from the board, tired of ‘saying yes and amen to Mr. Beliamin’s arrangements, the wisdom of which escaped me’. Emanuel asked Lagerwall to remain in the service of the family, but he declined. He would be given an income but neither influence nor anything to do and that did not interest him. But they parted as good friends and ‘not without sincere regret on my part’, as Lagerwall told Alfred.33

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FIGURE 9.6 ‘A world-renowned Swedish family of inventors.’ The first page of the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet, 1894. Before Alfred’s death and his founding of the Nobel Prize the whole Nobel family were seen as equally remarkable.

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‘Since your retirement there is no one left who dares to utter an idea of his own,’ Robert wrote to Lagerwall. ‘On the Board Beliamin is the only one who works, and thereby he dominates everything and wishes on no account to let in any rival who might contend with him for power.’34 ‘Indecisive’ is an epithet that often crops up in descriptions of Emanuel’s character. ‘On the board of the Company Emanuel stands out simply and solely through his indecisiveness,’ Robert complained to Alfred. ‘He is good at the financial policy, but everything else paralyses him and the name of Nobel has ceased to assert itself other than in the name of the firm.’35 According to Ivar Lagerwall, Emanuel’s ‘indecisiveness . . . is so well-known in St Petersburg that people just do not bother to suggest anything to him.’36 Robert’s and Alfred’s criticism of Beliamin and his dictatorial attitude was based to a large extent on reports from Lagerwall and were probably justified. But the criticism of Emanuel? In a letter to Alfred Lagerwall drew the following pen portrait of their nephew: Emanuel’s character is rather complicated. But the key to that resides in the circumstance that, like every heir to a large fortune, he first and foremost is and must be conservative. He is conservative to the extent that every step forwards or backwards frightens him – he would like to forge ‘status quo’ in bronze and halt the movement of time’s clock. Time and again he has explained to me how, rather than implement a change, he holds on to individuals whose incompetence and harmfulness he is aware of: ‘I know their faults,’ he says, ‘I know that they are not up to it – of a new person, I know nothing.’ . . . I do not need to point out to you the charming foundation that lies behind these traits of character. Emanuel, left to himself, would be the most inestimable, reliable friend. His benevolent nature and good intentions, his serious efforts to be fair and make himself useful would make him a respected and valued employer. Unfortunately, because of his inability to act, he becomes a plaything for those who are sufficiently reckless to act in his place and at his expense. . . . That makes me sorry for Emanuel. If he is not steadied by a strong and well-intentioned hand he will be underrated and will be deeply unhappy as a result.37 To understand Emanuel’s position, we must bear in mind that Beliamin was the same age as Ludvig and thus twice as old as Emanuel. Presumably it was sensible of Emanuel, as a new and young member of the board, to act with caution and not get rid of someone who had been involved in founding the Naphtha Company and who over the years had indisputably done it great service. Moreover, the law required a there to be a Russian representative on company boards and competent Russian candidates were few and far between. ‘As regards the composition of our board of directors, it no doubt has its drawbacks, but the last board meeting was

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not the right moment to begin the break-up,’ admitted Emanuel, whose lack of decisiveness was counterbalanced by his capacity for work and his wide-ranging network of contacts within the government, bank and industrial sectors.38 Nor did it take long before Lagerwall admitted that he had been correct in his criticism of Beliamin but wrong as regards Emanuel, whom he thought could no longer be treated as a quantité négligeable. In a letter to Alfred, he declared that it had been unjust of him to ‘overlook the fact that this financial work was constituted an enormous task for a young man and that he had acted sensibly in letting other matters rest in the meantime’. During a visit to St Petersburg he had ‘found, to my pleasure and surprise, that Emanuel had formed not only a clear-headed judgement about a number of the unsatisfactory circumstances afflicting us, but had also developed a degree of decisiveness and determination that have earned him respect’.39 Despite his dissatisfaction with the work of the board Alfred had always had a more conciliatory attitude than Robert and Lagerwall towards Emanuel, for whom he entertained warm feelings. His objections were directed towards Beliamin and the lack of competence of the company’s board of directors, not towards his nephew. Also, Emanuel was Alfred’s advocate in his attempts to interest the Russian government in the smoke-free gunpowder he had developed, and which went under the name of ‘ballistite’ and was commonly known as ‘Nobel gunpowder’.40 One expression of Alfred’s confidence in his nephew’s manner of doing business was that in the spring of 1890 he decided to let his old loan continue as security for the company, and not only that – he bought another 247 shares (‘so that the number will go up to exactly 3,000’), which the company could also use as securities. ‘I am not fond of paying compliments,’ he assured Emanuel, ‘but must declare that I am surprised how well you handle the extremely important affairs that you have in train. Молодецъ племянникъ [Bravo, nephew]!!!’41 There were good reasons for Alfred to revise his view of the company. Business was going well and the dividend for the years 1889–90 was, as we have seen, high, the State bank demonstrated its confidence in Emanuel by buying Branobel’a foreign drafts (bills of exchange that had not yet been accepted), and the company’s shares were traded for the first time on the German market. In December 1890, Emanuel organized a party to celebrate the fact that during the year the company had produced its hundred millionth pud of paraffin. ‘The figure is magnificent,’ he told Alfred proudly, ‘most especially if you remember at the same time that in addition we extracted 275 million pud of crude oil, out of which and from our own wells we took out over 200,000,000 pud of our own naphtha, which was first transported through our pipelines and then in the form of petroleum or mazut traversed Russia in the Company’s waggons and ships.’42 Despite these successes, however, the problems for the company were not over and a few years later a new crisis of confidence would crop up. More of that later.

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Carl Nobel and the machine factory We know significantly less about Carl Nobel than about his elder brother and his paternal uncles. The letters of Emanuel, Ludvig and Alfred can be numbered in the thousands, while only a couple of dozen letters from Carl’s hand are preserved, most of them to Alfred.43 His schooling, however, was significantly more fragmented than his brother’s. He repeated all his classes except for one and finished Annenschule already after the autumn term in class III. His marks were decent but a little less good than Emanuel’s, and he had more absences and more time detentions.44 Just like Emanuel, Carl was fifteen when he finished school. He was then sent by his father to Sweden, where he served as an apprentice first in Motala workshop and then in a well-known mechanical workshop in Stockholm, where the future Polar explorer S.A. Andrée had been employed the year before as a draughtsman. Presumably against his father’s will, Carl decided to break off his apprenticeship and get himself a formal education. In the autumn of 1880, after additional studies, he was admitted to the mechanical engineering course at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where, as we saw, he lodged with Robert’s family. ‘Your son Carl is a very unusual lad’ who has ‘to the highest degree understood how to earn himself the unqualified friendship and love of all,’ Robert assured his brother Ludvig.45 His studies would have finished in 1884 if his father, true to his principles, had not taken his son out of school and sent him to Baku. However, Carl was a determined young man and he returned to Stockholm, where in 1885 he graduated as a civil engineer at the Royal Institute of Technology. Having completed his education, like a number of other young St Petersburg Swedes he did his military service in Stockholm.46 After returning home to St Petersburg work began again in the machine factory, where Carl managed to work for a couple of years before Ludvig died. This meant that on his father’s death he was familiar not only with the work itself but also with the problems confronting the factory. The benefit of experience had convinced Ludvig that the key to success lay in specialization while diversification led to problems with profitability, and yet the irregular supply of large orders meant that production was split between several products. For Carl, it was important to identify which could generate a sure profit. Steam engines and steam pumps had been manufactured in the workshop ever since Immanuel’s day and Carl shared his interest in these products. They were needed not least for the works in Baku. Already in Ludvig’s time, accordingly, he had taken on a fellow student from the Royal Institute of Technology, Sixtus Petterson, who began his employment in the workshop in 1887.47 Petterson, who was to work for eight years in the business before moving to Baku as an engineer in the drilling fields, drew up plans for a so-called ‘triple-expansion engine’, a steam engine with a series of cylinders which step by step increased the volume of the

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FIGURE 9.7 Carl Nobel.

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cylinders. It was used in the workshop’s lighting plant and meant that the greater part of the factory area could be illuminated. Another special area was motors driven by paraffin, combustion motors. Just as with the steam engines and steam pumps, there was a direct link here to the operations in Baku. Such motors had begun to be manufactured abroad and Carl obtained the rights for their manufacture in Russia from one of these factories, the Schweizerische Lokomotivenfabrik in Winterthur. However, Nobel’s workshop made certain changes in the construction, which was mainly designed for waggons for the Russian army. At the World Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 the machine factory was awarded two gold medals, one for its carburettor, another for its paraffin motor, whose ‘design, construction and execution are excellent’.48 Another imported product that Carl introduced onto the Russian market was the separator, which could separate cream from milk and which he had become familiar with during his years of study in Stockholm. It had been invented by Gustaf de Laval in 1877 and in the 1880s began to conquer the world. As the product was subject to customs duty Carl came to an agreement with the company Separator in Stockholm, whereby the separators were imported in parts that were reassembled in St Petersburg. It was a business that to begin with was not particularly profitable but that in future would generate large profits. Carl, however, was not to experience that success. He suffered from diabetes and, like his father, spent long periods at European health resorts. On his way to Italy, where he and his family were going to spend the winter, he had a bout of pneumonia and died in a hotel in Zürich on 8 December 1893.49 He was then only thirty-one years old. Just like his father, Carl ended his days in a hotel overseas. He left three daughters from his marriage to Mary Landzert, whom he had married in 1889. His wife belonged to a family of Russified Germans who had lived in St Petersburg since the mid-1700s and she was the daughter of Professor Landzert, who made a speech by the graveside at Ludvig’s interment. After Carl’s death his half-share of the machine factory was inherited by his widow. In 1896, Mary married her second husband, the engineer Åke Sjögren, brother of Hjalmar Sjögren (see below), and moved to Stockholm. Emanuel disliked Mary’s new husband and before the wedding he forced him to sign an agreement in which he declared that he had ‘no claim to any right by marriage to a half-share in the factory in St Petersburg and that he was not to become involved in business matters’.50 Emanuel later became sole owner of the factory through buying out Mary and her children.51

Brother Hjalmar Emanuel and Carl, in their capacity as heirs to the Naphtha Company and the machine factory respectively, held the most prominent positions in the third

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generation of family members who were engaged in the family businesses, but they were not the only ones. Hjalmar Crusell, Ludvig’s eldest son (by Anna Lindal), played an important role in the Naphtha Company for four decades. Hjalmar was brought up in Ludvig’s home, but because of his illegitimacy little is known about his childhood and schooling.52 According to one source he is supposed to have studied at the Technical School in Barmen along with Emanuel. Afterwards he started work with the family business, mainly in the Naphtha Company. Like the other sons, Hjalmar Crusell was given responsible tasks at an early age. The first traces of his activities date, as we saw, from 1878, when he was twenty-two years old. Zoroaster, the Naphtha Company’s first tanker, had arrived at St Petersburg and Ludvig made Hjalmar responsible for its onward journey to Baku, via the canals, the Volga and the Caspian Sea. Crusell specialized in chemical issues and was supposedly the person who stood nearest to Ludvig in the factory laboratory in St Petersburg, where many experiments were carried out that later came to fruition in Baku, where Hjalmar worked under Robert’s aegis. ‘Crusell is a fast builder, it is a pleasure to see what he has contrived in Balakhani,’ Robert reported in 1879 to Ludvig in a letter that gives a rare glimpse of Hjalmar’s personality: His inclination definitely seems to lie in that direction, he has less interest in the wearying task of running a business. In any event he is becoming an exceptionally fine fellow, if only he is not spoilt. Because he was brought up by you, the other employees pay too much attention to him and it noticeable that he already needs that. I have warned Hjalmar about it. He will never be spoilt by me however much I value him and like him. There is no-one that I am so satisfied with as with him and with some experience behind him he will succeed in making himself even more useful.53 According to Robert, Hjalmar had ‘a tendency to be conceited and bullying’ and thereby had alienated several of the company’s employees. After being spoken to by Robert and others he had improved, but Robert still asked Ludvig to recall him to St Petersburg, which also seems to have happened.54 ‘Our Lord’ was a demanding employer, with a disposition that inclines one to be careful when judging his words, but it is not impossible that that need for selfassertion that can be characteristic of someone born out of wedlock can have enticed Hjalmar into the sins ascribed to him in the letter. Be that as it may, the important thing is that Robert held him in high regard as a professional. Hjalmar made thorough studies in the drilling fields and in the laboratories and when continuous distillation was introduced he seems to have played an important role. He also constructed a colossal oil distillation tank of 9,000 pud which was known as ‘Ivan the Terrible’. Crusell worked for several years in Balakhani and in 1890 he

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FIGURE 9.8 Hjalmar Crusell (in hat) at a beer-drinking session in Baku. The others are, from left, Carl Treumann (manager of the factory laboratories), Otto Tiedemann (head of the sulphuric acid factory), Mrs Tiedemann, Axel Lambert (head of the paraffin and lubricating oil distillery) and O. Treumann.

became the technical head of the company. Already in 1881, he had taken up his place as a deputy on the board of the Naphtha Company and for thirty-one years, from 1885 to 1916, he was a full member. Hjalmar Crusell was Ludvig’s son but was never officially acknowledged as such. Remarkably enough not even Edla seems to have realized the actual state of things. ‘This year I have Hjalmar Crusell as a neighbour, the most suitable and congenial colleague I have ever met, for he is anxious in the extreme not to disturb anyone,’ Emanuel wrote in a letter to Edla from the health resort of Yessentuki in the Caucasus.55 Hjalmar Crusell had grown up in Ludvig’s and Edla’s home, he had studied along with Emanuel and had sat on the board of the Naphtha Company – but the oddly formal description of him as ‘the most suitable and congenial colleague I have ever met’ makes it hard not to conclude that Edla was unaware that Hjalmar was Emanuel’s half-brother. The supposition that this was only known to a few people is strengthened by the fact that Hjalmar is not named anywhere in the comprehensive family correspondence as – nor is hinted to be – a relative but is always mentioned by both given name and surname. Another possible interpretation is that Emanuel also did not know that his ‘colleague’ was his brother. In that case the opposite must also be true: that Hjalmar too was unaware of the

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relationship. Perhaps it was only Ludvig, Mina and Hjalmar’s mother – as well as perhaps Immanuel and Andriette – who knew the truth. Although Hjalmar Crusell served the Naphtha Company for forty years he was, in other words, not a true ‘Nobel’. In one way, though, he came to be one: in 1884 he married Sigrid Mellgren, the niece of Edla Nobel. Hjalmar Crusell died in Helsinki in 1919.

Cousin Hjalmar The other Hjalmar in the family was Robert and Pauline’s son. He was born in 1863 and was thus a year younger than his cousin, Carl. Before Robert and family moved to Stockholm in 1880, Hjalmar, as we saw, lodged with the Adlersparre family. What education he received after school is unknown, but according to his father his bent was towards chemistry before, for health reasons, he was forced to break off his studies.56 In 1884, he visited St Petersburg for the first time. From where he was sent by Ludvig to Tsaritsyn. What he worked on there is unknown, but he seems to have found the Russian experience tempting. After spending some time in Sweden, he returned in October 1885 to Russia in order to discuss with Ludvig his ‘future occupation’.57 ‘My son Hjalmar is now ready to travel and will be leaving us this evening,’ Robert wrote to Ludvig from Getå. ‘I have not wished to oppose his decision, although it runs counter to all previous plans. . . . I have deliberately not allowed my children to study Russian in order to ensure that they stay in their own country and now it only needed a hint from you and Hjalmar is leaving Sweden. I wish with all my heart that he may be of use to you and to the company and that he himself does not need to regret his decision.’58 What the discussions with Ludvig led to is not known, but in January 1886 Hjalmar reported on the financial position of the Naphtha Company in a long letter to his father. As we have seen, it was a turbulent time for the company and Hjalmar tried – surely under Ludvig’s influence – to pacify Robert by claiming that it was a question of natural economic fluctuations. Ludvig was impressed by Hjalmar, who had a fine intellect and learned Russian quickly. ‘I let no opportunity pass to impress on him the idea that his own future and that of his siblings depend on the manner in which our great enterprise is managed,’ Ludvig wrote to Alfred. ‘That it is his as well as Emanuel’s and Carl’s duty to devote their time, their concern and their labours to this enterprise.’59 From St Petersburg, Hjalmar travelled via Tsaritsyn to Baku, where he worked in the laboratory. Ludvig, who visited Baku in the autumn of 1886, asked him to acquaint himself with all the departments of the factory, with a view to his education. Hjalmar himself hoped afterwards to be allowed to work in the

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FIGURE 9.9 Hjalmar Nobel in Caucasian costume.

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distillation department; his interest in chemistry was not to be denied. For a while he worked in the office in Balakhani dealing with bookkeeping and business correspondence. In the summer of 1888, Hjalmar was visited in Baku by his father, who was in Russia for a board meeting of the Naphtha Company, but otherwise his contacts with the family in Sweden were sporadic. ‘I take it that you are well, but how is my Hjalmar? It is a bit more than ½ a year since anyone in my family has had a line from him,’ Robert complained to Emanuel in the spring of 1890: ‘He does not ask me for money – has he then such a salary that he can look after himself without my help?’60 Robert was anxious about Hjalmar’s future and asked Carl whether ‘he can be of any substantial use in the service of the company, how Emanuel sees him, not as a cousin but as a useful individual, and if the company considers itself to be in need of him, and what terms can he expect in its service in the immediate future?’61 He had heard that Alfred had made Hjalmar an offer that would be difficult for him to turn down. Alfred had in fact done so: he had invited his nephew to come to Paris and work for him as a chemist. A position with Alfred is something that one imagines would have appealed to Robert, bearing in mind his fixation with financial security and Alfred’s financial muscle. But – Robert writes in an unexpected burst of nostalgia for Russia – ‘whoever has once acquired a taste for residing in Russia must find this country more splendid and pleasant to live in than those countries where everything is insnared in conventional lies to the extreme, as is the case in the major civilized countries in Europe’. If he had been young he would not be sitting at Getå ‘but would be undertaking something big in the way of building in Russi’.62 Robert explained to Emanuel that he would rather see Hjalmar ‘Russified than Frenchified’.63 There seem, however, to have been difficulties for Emanuel and Hjalmar working together that precluded the latter’s career in the Naphtha Company. Hjalmar, like Robert, was an independent soul who refused to ‘be in an oppressive and dependent position, constantly aware that I am dependent on somebody’s charity’, as he wrote to his father.64 ‘If [Emanuel] and Hjalmar have had their minor squabbles this has doubtless been the natural consequence of having a relative as one’s boss which is always a unpleasant imposition and hard to bear,’ Alfred commented, continuing: ‘Do not believe that Emanuel has anything to say about Hjalmar other than full acknowledgement of his merits.’65 Now, this was not entirely true – the ‘squabbles’ were not minor. Hjalmar left Russia for good in September 1892, after seven years in the country. Before his cousin travelled home to Sweden Emanuel complained that he was ‘idle’ and irresolute and ‘just as undecided about his future work as ever’. He also thought Hjalmar was extravagant. He had received 5,000 roubles from Alfred (£40,000 today) for his private use during his sojourn in Russia but did not know how to manage the money.66 Hjalmar’s inability to hold on to his wallet however was

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something that Alfred himself connived at; if Hjalmar was not sparing with his cash, it was, according to Alfred, because he had a ‘happy disposition’.67 Despite Robert’s wish that Hjalmar ought to become ‘Russified’ he never returned to Russia, at least not to work. Nor does he seem to have worked for Alfred as a chemist. On the contrary, on several occasions he asked his uncle for advice about what to do for a living, and, among other things, came up with the suggestion of starting up a cement factory; but Alfred seems not to have been convinced that Hjalmar was capable of leading a business. Moreover, he was in quite general terms unwilling to advise or help his nephew, as there was a great risk that he himself would get the blame if things ‘went haywire, which most things do’.68 Yet Alfred helped both Hjalmar and his siblings financially by making each of them a present of a promissory note for 20,000 kronor (£105,000 in today’s prices), the six per cent interest on which they were entitled to enjoy for as long as he lived.69 When in 1894 Alfred took over the Bofors foundry in Karlskoga he employed Hjalmar, who among other things was charged with taking care of the fitting-out of the manor house of Björkborn, where he also lived. Hjalmar did not marry until he was sixty years old. His wife was the thirty-two-years younger Anna Sofie Posse. The marriage was childless, but Hjalmar already had four children by his housekeeper whom he acknowledged as his before he died, and who were given his surname. With Carl’s death, Emanuel found himself solely responsible for the Nobel industrial empire. Of the other children from Ludvig’s and Mina’s marriage only Anna was left. As we saw, she had played a ceremonial role during the Emperor’s visit to Baku in 1888 but that a woman should follow a professional career at this time was pretty well out of the question. Moreover, a conservative view of women’s role in society prevailed in the Nobel family. In 1890, Anna married Hjalmar Sjögren, Branobel’s chief geologist, and moved to Uppsala, where the year before her husband had been appointed professor of geology and mineralogy. Sjögren, who in 1885 had been taken on by the Naphtha Company in Baku on a four year contract, published several reports about the geological conditions of the area, including ‘An account of the mud volcanoes in Baku’ (1886), ‘On the formation of the basin of the Caspian Sea’ (1888) and ‘The Caucasian naphtha fields’ (1892). Although he was based in Sweden he was called upon by the company in the coming years as well. Anna and Hjalmar Sjögren had no children of their own but adopted a girl, Märta, born in 1901.

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10 EMANUEL

Carl’s death reawakened the old nightmares about Emanuel’s competence, and in a letter to Alfred, written only a few days after his passing, Edla expressed her unease about the future of the factory and the Naphtha Company. She was afraid that her stepson did not possess ‘enough decisiveness or energy to fill all the gaps and spaces that the dear departed [Ludvig and Carl] have left behind them’. She therefore asked Alfred to impress upon Emanuel the importance of not wearing himself out but taking on new people in the business and went on: ‘Em’s ability does not keep step with his goodwill, the former falls short and therefore muddles arise which ought not to take place.’1 Alfred did as Edla asked and explained to Emanuel that ‘an energetic and decisive person with sound commonsense is all you need’. Over time, he added, ‘you will wear yourself out for nothing’.2 Emanuel replied: ‘All these administrative tasks have been occupying me for a long time past, perhaps much more than I have let on, and my brother’s death has scarcely made the need for competent help in the company any more tangible for me than I felt it to be earlier, or rather, than I foresaw that it would come to be.’3 The immediate cause of Edla’s unease was Emanuel’s lack of commitment to the business of the machine factory. During the first half of the 1890s it was the Naphtha Company that just about exclusively took up his time and attention. The machine factory interested him mainly insofar as it was important for developments in the oil industry, where the competition over markets was continuing with undiminished force. As an agreement with Rothschild and Standard Oil had not turned out to be possible his efforts were concentrated on trying to lessen the influence of these companies in Russia. To that end Emanuel tried to get up a syndicate giving Branobel the sole right of distribution and sales for a period of five years. The syndicate was to consist of Branobel along with six other leading Russian refineries. It was the company’s second attempt to set up such a syndicate. Ludvig had earlier realized the advantage in collaboration with other oil producers, but his

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efforts had been unsuccessful. Emanuel presented his thoughts about syndicates to the finance minister Ivan Vyshnegradsky, who before becoming a member of the government had been professor of engineering at the University of St Petersburg and a member of the Artillery Committee. The Nobel family’s industrial knowhow was thus well known to him, and he supported Emanuel’s initiative. Emanuel’s skill in financial questions was generally acknowledged and he soon won an equal degree of trust from the Russian government as his father had enjoyed. So, for example, he was appointed on the recommendation of the stock exchange to the bank rate committee of the State bank – an assignment that had to be authorized by the finance minister. When due to his workload Emanuel declined, Sergei Witte, who in the spring of 1892 had succeeded Vishnegradsky as finance minister, reacted as follows: ‘So, he doesn’t want to. Tell him that there are occasions when he needs me, now I need him and therefore he is confirmed [in the post].’4 On the other hand, there was offer that Emanuel accepted all the more readily: to become a member of the advisory board of the Volga-Kama bank. There were obvious advantages connected with that position. On the one hand, the bank was big, with branches in several towns along the Volga as well as a newly established office in Baku. On the other hand, he would thereby ‘get a better insight into the position of our rivals and their activities as exporters than we have of them at present’, as he explained to Alfred.5 The concept of a syndicate developed more slowly than planned because of turbulence on the Russian oil market. The unease was a consequence of a bad harvest that led to famine in the southern parts of Russia. Added to this was a cholera epidemic that mainly affected Baku, Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan. The cholera infection lodges in the intestine and is spread via drinking water, food and clothes that have been soiled by excrement. The course of the illness is speedy, consisting of violent fits of vomiting and diarrhoea that completely dehydrate the sufferer. Death often results after only a few hours. About fifty per cent of those who fall ill die. However, cholera is an undemocratic disease, it thrives best in unhealthy slums and undernourished stomachs – in more well-nourished individuals the infectious agent succumbs to the stomach acids. The orderliness and hygiene in the Nobel workplaces differed radically from conditions in the Russian towns, and accordingly cholera barely affected the Naphtha Company. Although tens of thousands of people fled Baku in panic, they succeeded in holding on to their staff both in the refinery and on the tanker ships.6 Emanuel also did what he could to ameliorate conditions on the site, sending doctors and disinfectants, and tasking his employees to help out according to their ability. ‘In the environs of the Nobel factory, where previously Swedish cleanliness was already the order of the day and therefore hardly requiring improvement in sanitary terms, they also do everything to protect the health of the workers,’ reported Torbern Fegræus, who in 1891 succeeded Hjalmar Sjögren as head geologist with Branobel, in a letter to his mother in Sweden: ‘In this respect I have

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FIGURE 10.1 Emanuel Nobel.

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been given the job of supervising the whole thing – have become, so to speak, appointed loo-disinfection-chief-counsellor – and to that end I have prepared a cholera dispensary, sickroom, etc., and set up a laboratory for privy chemistry.’7 Both Emanuel and Alfred also made financial contributions to cholera research at the Institute for Experimental Medicine in St Petersburg. The health catastrophes led to dramatic price falls for crude oil and paraffin, as well as for naphtha land, and several refineries were offered for sale. Branobel was invited to buy, but Emanuel held back, partly because of the company’s large investments in new oil depots.8 In addition, he was worried about the growing competition from Standard Oil, which had organized their bulk transports over the Atlantic and their distribution system in Europe. Rothschild was also on the offensive. The agreements about deliveries of paraffin from Baku that the firm had negotiated during the building of the railway from Baku to Batum were about to expire in 1892 and new suppliers had to be found. It was therefore Rothschild’s and not Branobel that bought up most of the refineries that were for sale. They also acquired a majority of the shares in Branobel’s main rival on the Russian market, the Mazut Company.

The Syndicate It was primarily the threat from Rothschild that made Branobel and the other manufacturers try to join together in a syndicate. In December 1892, a preliminary agreement was reached in the south Russian city of Rostov that would unite twothirds of the Russian oil industry and that concentrated all trade in Branobel’s hands. This in turn was seen as a threat by Rothschild’s, which were uneasy lest the syndicate became too dominant. It therefore offered to join it by founding a company outside Russia with a starting capital of 20 million francs. The company’s role would be to store and sell Russian oil which would be guaranteed 25 per cent of the world market by Standard Oil.9 It was an idea that worried finance minister Witte, who warned Emanuel against making common cause with the ‘hateful Jew’ Rothschild.10 In early 1893, Emanuel paid a short visit to Paris to have discussions with Alfred about the syndicate, which was set up a few months later but was soon dissolved. ‘Unfortunately I have had to convince myself that we from St Petersburg cannot hold together our Asiatic friends in Baku,’ Emanuel reported to his uncle: ‘Lawyers and other troublemakers have contributed to splitting up the syndicate we put together in Rostov and since the manufacturers in Baku had no intention of meeting their obligations, we realized we had no other choice but to refuse all further co-operation with them.’11 The failure gladdened not only the producers who were not included in the syndicate but also the government, which saw the attempt to bring order into the oil

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trade as a threat to the state’s wish to steer the economy. For Emanuel, however, it was obvious that collaboration between the oil producers was a prerequisite for the survival of the Russian oil industry:‘The position vis-à-vis the American competition is now becoming very difficult and I look with some anxiety towards the future,’ was how he summed up the collapse of the agreement. ‘But a syndicate will soon be formed anew, or else all Russian exports will cease within the course of a year.’12 The result was that in the following year Branobel formed a consortium, the Baku Paraffin Manufacturers’ Union (Soyuz bakinskich kerosinozavodchikov) along with Rothschild’s and Alexander Mantashev, the third largest oil producer in Russia. Sixty-two per cent of Baku’s oil producers joined the alliance, which with the permission of the government was constituted in February 1894. Nobel and Rothschild’s had 65 per cent of the exports and were sole agents for paraffin in Europe, while Mantashev, which had depots in Alexandria, handled the East – Egypt, Palestine, Syria and India. The oil producers in Baku could freely choose which of the three companies they wished to sell to. The Union worked better than the paraffin syndicate but was also not particularly long-lived. The exports were controlled by a committee in Baku and the mutual suspicion and mistrust between it and the agents in Batum led to the Union being wound up after only three years. In any case, the founding of the Paraffin Manufacturers’ Union was an important step in the right direction for an industry in which hard-nosed rivalry had hitherto placed obstacles in the way of co-operation. Rockefeller and Standard Oil carefully followed developments in Russia that threatened their position on the world market. In Ludvig’s time, Standard Oil had turned down the idea of an agreement with Branobel as the situation on the Russian oil market was chaotic and Ludvig could not carry other domestic producers with him towards an agreement. Now that it looked like succeeding the idea of co-operation was reawakened from the American side.

The Rothschild’s and Standard Oil Alfred, who had pursued long and costly lawsuits against aggressive rivals in the explosives industry, wanted to spare Branobel something similar and thought that ‘Russian and American interests are so intimately connected that the parties must be crazy if they do not join in a sensible union’.13 His suggestion therefore was that Standard Oil should be allowed to buy 49 per cent of Branobel’s ordinary shares or 15 million roubles of a new share issue. However, the idea was rejected by Emanuel, who sat on almost three-quarters of the company’s shares and thereby had strong set of cards in his hand. Standard Oil moreover was not as powerful as previously, as its monopoly position in the USA had been broken by other American oil companies. To some extent, the business was as exposed as Branobel at the time of

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the first negotiations, in Ludvig’s time. For Emanuel to be interested in a deal with Standard Oil the company first had to take steps to drive other American interests out of the European market. In February 1895, Emanuel travelled to Paris to negotiate an agreement with Jules Aron for Rothschild’s and Standard Oil’s chief negotiator William H. Libby. ‘For the time being I am alone here in the city and surrounded by Rothschild Jews and the cunning Libby, and to tell the truth, it is not much fun, in these circumstances, to work on a common errand of such a nature as our prospective syndicate with America and Russia,’ he wrote in one of his many reports by letter and telegram to Alfred, who was at his home in San Remo and who, before the negotiations, had given him the following exhortation: ‘Bleed the Jews as much as you can.’14 The agreement would, in Emanuel’s words, establish ‘the principles for a dividing-up of the world markets’, neither more nor less. Such an agreement was in fact worked out, but Rothschild’s began to ‘make difficulties’ and did not want to sign it.15 On 21 March a disappointed Emanuel declared that he was the only one who was willing to sign it and that he would therefore leave Paris the following day.16 He also informed Alfred that he believed he had acted in accord with Alfred’s urging to bleed the Jews and that he ‘ought almost to have been able to perform a Christian deed’.17 What the Christian deed consisted of is unclear. A preliminary agreement survives in the archives dated 14 March 1895, between, on the one hand, Emanuel Nobel and Jules Aron, ‘representing Russia’s oil industry’, on the other, William H. Libby, ‘representing the United States’ oil industry’.18 The agreement, which would be valid for ten years, covered crude oil and refined products and gave the Americans 75 per cent of the world trade while Branobel, Rothschild’s and others were to share the remaining 25 per cent. As the agreement had not been signed by all parties, however, it did not come into force and the division of the world markets was postponed once again.

The problems seen from Robert’s vantage point It was not only Emanuel who regarded the future with unease. The unease was just as great in Paris, and, most of all, at Getå. The same type of criticism for mismanagement of the Naphtha Company that had affected Ludvig in 1883 and 1886 now affected his son, whose unwillingness or inability to get rid of Beliamin continued to worry Alfred and Robert. ‘You lack a leader and Beliamin is as little suited for that as your brother Carl’s little daughter,’ Alfred wrote to Emanuel and added: ‘Every time a limited company is without an energetic leader, like a ship without steering sooner or later it goes to hell.’19

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The problem was discussed when Edla and Anna and Hjalmar Sjögren visited Getå in August 1892. The unanimous conclusion was that ‘Emanuel is not the man to run the company independently and Beliamin is therefore all-powerful’. However fond Robert was of his nephew, he had never seen him as ‘a competent manager for such a difficult mechanism as the Nobel Brothers’. To get rid of Beliamin as soon as possible Robert, Edla and the Sjögrens suggested calling a meeting with Emanuel and other shareholders in the family.20 ‘It would be desirable to hear your opinion about this,’ Robert stressed in a letter to Alfred, ‘for I have long been prepared for the worst and through the failure of the Company I have had my income reduced by 2/3.’21 Alfred agreed and told Emanuel so: ‘Our family has such a strong interest in the affair that it may in no way surprise you if they wish to know something about it. Robert, Sjögren and, as I have reason to believe, the others too, are concerned.’ If the family did not find out ‘whether any seriously shady aspects exist’, it could lead to their being forced to sell their shares, which risked lowering the market value and worrying the State bank and other banks.22 If his rump had not become fatter over the years, Alfred added jokingly, then he would ‘immediately bound off to St Petersburg and one fine morning I would take Emanuel unawares as he snores away during his morning nap’.23 The acerbity in Alfred’s criticism is softened by his fundamental sympathy for Emanuel and by his sense of humour. It was otherwise with his sterner brother, for whom more was at stake and whose choleric temperament would not be denied. ‘For me, the affair is of much more importance than it is for you, for I am utterly reliant on my Russian shares,’ Robert complained, continuing: ‘I am patiently awaiting the day when they become worthless, for my sons have neither the strength nor the ability to intervene and I myself am too much of an old codger to be able to exercise any influence.’24 Emanuel, according to Robert, was ‘a good person, whom we are all very fond of ’, but not up to ‘the great calling’ that circumstances had laid on his shoulders. ‘If the business falls apart, so that we lose our capital, there will be no point in reproaching E., for he will quite simply say to us that we ought not to have left such a large affair to a mere youth and – he is right.’25 Since Beliamin, despite massive opposition from Alfred, Robert and Lagerwall, was not dismissed by Emanuel, Robert’s criticism of his nephew continued and intensified, only to erupt in November 1894 in an outburst of the kind he was known for: As far as E. is concerned . . . I don’t feel sorry for him nowadays. I know from a reliable source that he is out on the spree at night and seldom comes home before 3 in the morning. When he is wasting time and energy in this way there will be nothing left over for the business. I said to his mother recently that in every area things will inevitably end up very badly for him if he continues to sacrifice everyone’s interests for his own

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selfish ends, placing his all on a throw of the dice that can never win and taking on himself a responsibility that can ruin him so fundamentally that it will be impossible to save him . . . . If E. himself is to choose managers then there will never be a capable fellow in charge. In order to be able to choose people and use them properly one must in the first place free oneself from the influence that flattery can exert and he will never manage that . . . . That the lifestyle E. leads is not unknown to the managers and employees in the areas where he is in charge is all too obvious. Given that he is moreover not in the least leadership material, we can be quite sure that many have already made the same sharp observations that I have expressed here and I therefore consider it is high time to rescue both him and the business from what may happen.26

Not ‘what’ but ‘who’ Robert’s fear of ‘what may happen’ turned out, despite the poor odds, to be groundless. What happened was in fact not a ‘what’ but a ‘who’, named Hans Olsen. After the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Russia had turned into a country that many people moved to who found only poor prospects of a livelihood in their homeland – a European alternative to America. One person who was tempted there was the young Norwegian Hans Olsen, who in 1880 left Drammen to take up employment as a clerk with a Norwegian ship’s chandler in Kronstadt.27 The son of a furrier, Olsen was born in 1859 and was thus a contemporary of Emanuel. As he did not know Russian he naturally homed in on the Scandinavian colony in St Petersburg, where he came into contact with the brothers Emanuel and Carl as well as with their father, with whom he soon struck up a good relationship. In 1887, Olsen helped Emanuel to audit the accounts of the Scandinavian charitable society and when Ludvig died the young Norwegian was one of those who carried the coffin to the grave. In that same year, 1888, Emanuel invited Olsen to start working for the Naphtha Company, but he had just put together an agency and export firm dealing in herring, casks and timber and declined the offer. Five years later, in the middle of the worst company crisis, when the dividend was zero, Emanuel made another attempt to recruit Olsen, who since 1890 had been the agent for Sweden’s general exporters’ association. This time he accepted the offer and was elected on to the company’s council. The following autumn he was handed his first important assignment for Branobel: to hold discussions in London with the company’s English agent, Bessler, Waechter & Co., which handled sales in England and which were suspected of financial irregularities. However, Olsen was able to show that the agency’s calculations were completely sound.

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FIGURE 10.2 Hans Olsen.

After this assignment, Olsen’s career progressed very quickly. In July 1895 he was asked by Emanuel to join the board of the company as acting director while Emanuel himself and some of the other board members were on their summer holiday. Emanuel was mightily impressed by Olsen’s capacity for work and his initiative and about a month later, in a letter to Alfred, he sketched the following portrait of Olsen: He is a man of about my age, a merchant here in the city, quick and enterprising in character, and I have complete confidence in him and high hopes that we will

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find in him a reliable and useful colleague. Olsen is a Norwegian by nationality and certainly the most outstanding man among the newly-arrived Scandinavians in St Petersburg. He will have to give up his own business as soon as he definitively joins the Company, which I hope will take place in the month of October.28 Olsen did indeed join the Naphtha Company during the autumn as a permanent member of the board and in connection with this he wound up his own business affairs. In two years, Olsen had gone from nothing to director of Branobel with responsibility for sales questions – for which Beliamin had formally been responsible. Despite this, relations between himself and Beliamin (who was induced to leave the board in 1899) were good and in 1896 they took a trip together to Europe to acquaint Olsen with the sales organization and to introduce him to the Naphtha Company’s overseas agents. It was not long before Olsen realized that if Branobel wanted to compete with Standard Oil they would have to restructure their sales organization. At this time, the firm’s products were sold both in Russia and abroad by freelance agents who sometimes thought more about their own profit than that of the company and moreover sometimes competed among themselves. Standard Oil had instead collected its retailers into a company subject to and controlled by the mother company. It was a model that Hans Olsen, in the coming years, would work hard to introduce into the Naphtha Company.

The fateful year of 1896 This, as it would turn out, successful work of reconstruction was something that neither Robert nor Alfred got to experience. Robert died on 10 August 1896 at Getå. His heart had finally stopped after all the years of illness. He was sixty-seven years old. Alfred, obsessed by his fear of premature death, immediately sent a telegram to Robert’s son Hjalmar: ‘You ought to have an autopsy done or the arteries cut.’29 From Branobel’s board in St Petersburg, Pauline received the following telegram: ‘The whole company’s multilingual workforce, its board and council express their deepest sympathy to you and your children and mourn the loss of their founder. Without Robert Nobel’s initiative and his creative energy we would not now be assembled in our joint endeavour. His memory will always live among us.’30 The funeral took place on 16 August in the large sepulchre chapel in the New Cemetery – now the North Burial Ground – where his parents were buried. Alfred came up from Paris and Edla and her older children from St Petersburg. Representatives of the machine factory and the Naphtha Company were also present.

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Prominent among the more than fifty wreaths, according to the newspapers, was ‘a particularly attractive wreath from the Nobel Brothers’ Company, Baku branch’ along with ‘a magnificent one, shaped like a grave-mound; on broad, goldfringed bands in the Swedish colours could be read: “Nobel Brothers’ Company board, St Petersburg. Thank you and farewell”.’ Wreaths had also come from the workers at Getå as well as from the Nitroglycerine Company and the dynamite factories in Hamburg and Kristiania.31 Apart from his wife Pauline, Robert left four children: Hjalmar, Ingeborg, Ludvig and Thyra. Ingeborg had been married since 1894 to Count Carl Ridderstolpe and Ludvig, for a year past, to Valborg Wettergrund, daughter of Josefina Wettergrund, also known as ‘Lea’ (see Chapter 3). In Hjalmar’s case, as we saw, it would take twenty-seven years before he married. Thyra on the other hand never married. On 21 December, in the middle of doing the Christmas baking, she fell to the floor and died after an hour, only twenty-three years old.32 The cause of death could not be established. When Thyra was buried on 29 December 1896 at the New Cemetery her remains were not the only ones interred in the family grave. It was a double interment – at the same time the remains of her uncle Alfred, who had died on 10 December, were laid to rest.33 In accordance with his will his arteries had been cut after his death and the corpse cremated. Alfred had died in his home at San Remo as a result of a brain haemorrhage, surrounded only by his servants. Emanuel, who had been informed two days earlier by telegram of his illness, came to San Remo on 10 December but too late to find his uncle alive. Later that same day there arrived from Sweden Alfred’s secretary, the chemical engineer Ragnar Sohlmann, son of August Sohlman, editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet. With him was Hjalmar Nobel. ‘Alfred Nobel died, as he had lived, alone,’ was Sohlman’s laconic comment.34 The fortune that Alfred left was enormous, a good 33 million kronor, corresponding to around £100,600,000 in today’s values. (For an alternative calculation of Alfred’s wealth see p. 399.) The largest amounts, between 5 and 7 million, were divided between the following countries: Sweden, Germany, Scotland and Russia. The combined worth of Alfred’s assets in Russia was 5,232,000 kronor. Of this, 850,000 was in Russian government bonds, 20,000 was shares in gas and electricity companies, 2,109,000 was shares in Branobel, the same amount was in debts due from the company and a personal debt from Emanuel for 191,000 kronor. In a Berlin bank, moreover, were deposited naphtha shares and Russian government bonds to a value of fully 2 million kronor. The will, written by Alfred in his own hand without the help of a lawyer, was dated 27 November 1895 and witnessed by four witnesses at the Swedish club in Paris. The executors were the engineer Rudolf Lilljeqvist and Ragnar Sohlman. It was the latter who would be mainly instrumental in carrying out the terms of Alfred’s last will.35

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This would turn out to be difficult. When the will was published at the beginning of January 1897 it attracted criticism from several quarters and for several reasons. Objections concerned formal flaws as well as the actual basic idea of the will, namely that the greater part of the inheritance should go to ‘a fund, the interest on which is to be distributed annually as prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind’. There was to be no reference to nationality attached to this, a stipulation which by many was seen as unpatriotic. As the prize-giving institutions, moreover, reacted either doubtfully or downright negatively to the task that had been set them the will, according to some, should quite simply have been declared invalid. The French authorities also claimed to be entitled to levy inheritance tax on Alfred’s resources, something which however was forestalled by a court judgement that his domicile was Karlskoga. After a few years of legal disputes in Sweden and abroad, the will was approved: the Nobel Foundation was set up in 1900 and in the following year the first Nobel Prize was awarded. The many turnabouts around the founding of the Nobel Prize are well-known and will not be repeated here.36 More interesting in our context was the conflict between Alfred’s relatives in Sweden and those in Russia to which the will gave rise. When details of the will became known Emanuel had hinted to Ragnar Sohlman that some of the relatives might be expected to appeal against it, as indeed happened. According to the will, of the 33 million that Alfred left 31 were to go to the scientific foundation and only two to private individuals, among them Alfred’s

FIGURE 10.3 and 10.4 Ragnar Sohlman (1890) and Alfred Nobel (1896).

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female companion of many years, Sofie Hess, and his old partner Alarik Liedbeck. The family received one million kronor to divide among themselves, as follows: Emanuel 300,000 and his sister Mina 100,000, Robert’s sons Hjalmar and Ludvig 200,000 each and his daughters Ingeborg and Thyra each received 100,000 kronor. Robert’s children would moreover be paid the 20,000 kronor each that he gifted them while he was alive (see Chapter 9). Neither Emanuel’s sister Anna nor Carl’s widow Mary was awarded any legacy in the will. That Emanuel received the largest amount was natural – of Alfred’s nephews, he was the one who was closest to him and moreover he was the guardian of his younger siblings. Emanuel’s and Mina’s share corresponded to 8/20 of the total. All except Emanuel and his siblings chose to dispute the will: Robert’s family, Hjalmar Sjögren, as guardian for his wife Anna Nobel, together with Åke Sjögren, who in March 1896 married Carl’s widow Mary and was guardian of her three under-age children (a responsibility that at this time was denied to women in Sweden). In connection with the proving of the will at Stockholm’s municipal court and Karlskoga district court at the beginning of February 1897 it emerged that there had been an earlier will, dated 14 March 1893, also witnessed at the Swedish Club in Paris. It had been found among Alfred’s papers and bore the superscription: ‘Cancelled and replaced by will dated 27 November 1897. A. Nobel.’37 According to this will Alfred’s nephews and nieces were to receive 2.7 million kronor in cash and bonds together with properties to a value of half a million kronor. It has not been possible to establish how the money was divided up as the will has not been found. We must therefore make do with Sohlman’s information that the total sum was fully 3 million kronor, which corresponds to around £1,600,000 today. In the later will Alfred’s nephews and nieces inherited a million kronor (around £5,170,000 today), i.e. about a third as much. That they would only inherit 3 per cent of Alfred’s fortune was not what his relatives had expected. The fact that they were set to inherit considerably more in an earlier will was also shocking. They were certainly equally shocked when acquainted with the oral testimony and written affidavits of the engineers R.V. Strehlenert and Leonard Hvass which were presented at the proving of the will in Stockholm’s municipal court on 5 February. They had both witnessed the will in Paris and affirmed that Alfred, in connection therewith, ‘had declared decisively that this was his last will’. Strehlenert, who had worked closely with Nobel during his last months of life, testified under oath that the latter on several occasions shared with him his view of ‘inheritance questions in general’ and in connection with his testimony he explained that he had ‘changed a former will, whereby his brother’s children, who already possessed a large fortune, were getting too much, and that in his new will he had donated the greater part of his fortune to scientific ends’. At a meeting in Stockholm several months before his death Alfred had explained: ‘I am at heart a

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social democrat, but with moderation, in particular I regard large inherited fortunes as an affliction which only contributes to sapping the moral fibre of the human race.’ Only a small part of a large fortune, therefore, should pass to the relatives. This applied also to direct heirs, who should not receive more than required for their upbringing. An opposite course of action, Alfred thought, ‘would simply foster idleness and be a hindrance to a healthy development of the individual’s ability to work out their own independent position’. He therefore regretted that ‘his recently deceased brother, the engineer R. Nobel, who he had believed to have the same views, nevertheless left all his fortune to his children’. Leonard Hvass confirmed Strehlenert’s information in his own testimony. ‘From Dr Nobel’s utterances . . . it was obvious and clear that it was his decided wish that his fortune under no circumstances should go to his relatives, but rather should benefit such persons as through unselfish and honourable work in the service of mankind have acquired a better right to be his heirs.’ Yet another written testimony came from Charles Wærn, a friend of Alfred’s since the 1870s who met him on several occasions in his later years. Alfred had said to him that ‘he would only be kin to those with whom he had “Wahlverwandschaft” [Affinity]’. Wærn too had ‘heard engineer Nobel express himself sharply against the current laws governing inheritance’.38 Alfred thus held the same opinion on the inheritance question as his brother Ludvig. The latter had, as we saw, declared that ‘capital in pure money left as inheritance to children is pure moral corruption’ while ‘capital in industrial form is a good weapon in the struggle for existence’.39 There is every reason to suppose, like Alfred, that Robert essentially took the same position. In contrast to Ludvig, however, Robert had no business affairs to leave to his sons, to whom in any case, as we saw, he ascribed ‘neither the strength nor the ability’ in ‘the struggle for existence’. He therefore let them inherit the ‘independent position’ that he himself had struggled all his life to achieve. The property left by Robert, according to the inventory of his estate, was 1,533,693 kronor after deduction of debts, corresponding to around £5,170,000 in today’s values. 137,300 of this sum consisted of Getå (taxable value). The largest items were shares (592,575), bonds (18,060), deposit certificates (492,053) and claims (239,899). The rest was made up of carts, loose change, animals and more. The bonds – shares in Branobel – were declared at their nominal value (5,000 and 250 roubles respectively), which corresponded to 408,500 Swedish kronor or almost £2,227,000 today.40 Robert also owned a property in Stockholm, acquired the year before.41 It was declared at a taxable value of 260,000 kronor, which corresponds to around £1,350,000 today. The total fortune that Robert left was thus a good £6,365,000 in today’s values. As the properties were declared at their taxable value and the shares at their nominal value the inheritance was in fact considerably larger.

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Robert’s heirs were, in other words, already very rich when they chose to contest Alfred’s will. To Sohlman’s question as to what they intended with their complaint and how much of the estate they wanted to hold onto, Robert’s son Ludvig replied that the family thought it was only just that they should receive ‘the family papers’, i.e. all the shares in the dynamite companies in various countries, shares in the Naphtha Company and Bofors as well as the house on Rue Malakoff in Paris – a third of the whole fortune.42 On 1 February 1898 Alfred’s relatives submitted an application for a summons to Karlskoga district court in which they insisted that the will be declared null and void. The application was signed by Robert’s widow and children, who represented 10/20 of those entitled to inherit, Hjalmar and Anna Sjögren together with Åke Sjögren on behalf of his step-daughters (2/20 of the shares of the inheritance). There were several arguments. One was that it was not stated in the will who should take charge of administering the assets of the estate after it was wound up, another was that those institutions that had been designated to award the prizes had declared themselves unwilling to take on the assignment under the terms stipulated in the will, a third was that it was unclear how Nobel, by his death, could be regarded as a Swedish citizen and whether therefore Swedish or foreign law should apply. Should the family members win their case and the proceeds fall to them, however, they pledged to implement the fundamental idea in Nobel’s will. A great deal of pressure was applied to Emanuel to ally himself to the Getå branch in their complaint, especially as his younger siblings, for whom he was guardian, had not been remembered by Alfred. But Emanuel hesitated, as the outcome of the appeal was uncertain. ‘Admit that when you and your friends demand that I take out a lawsuit in my capacity as guardian then even greater consideration will be required of the possible consequences that such a battle might bring in its wake,’ he wrote to his cousin Hjalmar two months after Alfred’s death. ‘I am not casting myself blindly into the hands of lawyers and will not consent to venture on a trial without first having weighed the chances.’43 However, it was not just the legal uncertainty regarding a possible objection to the will that made Emanuel hesitate. He quite simply did not want to go against his uncle’s express wish, and at the beginning of 1898 he called his siblings to St Petersburg to make clear his attitude and win support for it. Marta, then aged seventeen, recalled later: ‘Emanuel made an indelible impression on his young siblings when . . . in a short speech marked by solemnity and the utmost seriousness, standing in the spacious drawing-room in his home by the quay, he asked them if, with him, they would respect their deceased uncle’s last wishes and thereby abstain from a possible inheritance. The young ones felt themselves inspired by Emanuel’s idealistic view of their uncle’s will and agreed without hesitation, an agreement they never needed to regret.’44 As an argument for respecting the will Emanuel stated that the Russian word for the executor of a will – dusheprikazchik – means ‘soul steward’; despite its formal weaknesses the spirit of the will had to be respected.

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Pressure came not only from the family but also from the highest official circles. King Oscar II, given the hesitation or simple unwillingness of the prizegiving institutions to concern themselves with the task, wanted to have the will declared invalid and summoned Emanuel to the palace to discuss the matter. The king tried to convince Emanuel that he ought to see to it that his siblings’ interests were not neglected to the benefit of their uncle’s ‘fantastic ideas’, but Emanuel stood his ground and replied: ‘Your Majesty. I do not wish to expose my siblings to the risk of being reproached in future by highly deserving scientists for having appropriated to themselves funds which rightfully ought to have come to them.’ When his attorney Nachmann – the same German lawyer who had dealt with Ludvig’s estate inventory and who Emanuel had also engaged for this matter – got to hear this he insisted that he and Emanuel should immediately leave Stockholm as he was afraid that Emanuel had laid himself open to a charge of lèse-majesté.45 Emanuel’s position can be explained by the fact that he was wealthy and had no private financial interests to look after, but that would be to underestimate his feelings and respect for Alfred and to ignore the fact that the basic idea of the will, the furtherance of science, was close to his heart. On the other hand, he had a keen interest in ensuring the family’s control over the Naphtha Company. Alfred’s shares were not therefore to be sold on the stock exchange. The problem was solved by the fact that his assets in Branobel were bought by Emanuel in the name of the relatives domiciled in Russia. The price was that given in the estate inventory, 250 roubles and 5,000 roubles respectively, i.e. the nominal amount. The price-tag was two million roubles (almost double that in Swedish money, which corresponds to almost £6 million in today’s values). It was a good haul given that the stock market valuation in 1898 was significantly higher – in 1898 the big shares oscillated between 7,375 and 11,600 and smaller between 370 and 582.5 roubles.46 Emanuel’s attitude made it difficult for the other relatives to pursue the action. Instead, a settlement was reached which did away with the need to apply for a summons. The first agreement was with the Sjögren brothers as representatives of their wives and wards respectively. These persons, who had been completely passed over in the will, were allotted 100,000 kronor each on a promise to abstain from further demands on Alfred’s property. The agreement was signed on 29 May 1898. One week later, an agreement with Hjalmar, Ludvig and Pauline Nobel and Carl Ridderstolpe (in his capacity of guardian for Ingeborg) was settled. Like the Sjögren brothers, the representatives of Robert’s family declared that they recognized Alfred’s will and would abstain from any further demands. In return, they demanded, among other things, that a representative appointed by the family of Robert Nobel should be consulted in the process of drawing-up the ‘the Articles of the Foundation dealing with the conditions governing the award of the prizes’, and also that the value of the prizes was not to be less than 60 per cent ‘of the yearly accumulated interest available for

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distribution’.47 The agreement gladdened Emanuel. ‘Irrespective of the fine detail, it is good that the question of the will has come closer to being finally settled, for the academic world is awaiting for its conclusion,’ he wrote to Hjalmar. ‘Even the Russian press is talking about it.’48 According to Sohlman the Getå branch’s demands came up first in the final stages of the negotiations and were aimed at ‘removing any impression of purely financial bargaining’.49 However matters stood in that affair, it can be stated that Robert’s family emerged the winners from the settlement. Instead of the 500,000 kronor that Hjalmar, Ludvig and Ingeborg had been allotted in the will, they received a million. (Thyra’s inheritance of 100,000 was no longer relevant as she was deceased.) Moreover, they were entitled to acquire 4,000 shares in Nobel Dynamite Trust Co. for a price that was lower than the average price on the stock market. Hjalmar Nobel’s 400 ordinary shares in the Bofors Company, which he got from Alfred, were cashed in for the sake of the surviving relatives for 200,000 kronor, which exceeded the value of the estate inventory by 30,000 kronor. Some distant relatives were compensated finally with 100,000 kronor. In other words, the Getå branch were allotted 1,594,000 kronor altogether, or almost £8 million in today’s values.

FIGURE 10.5 Robert surrounded by his family at Getå in the early 1890s. Standing from left Hjalmar, Ludvig and Filip Langlet, civil engineer and responsible for the building work both at Getå and with Alfred at Björkborn. Sitting to the right of Robert: his wife Pauline and their daughter Thyra; in the middle in front of them their daughter Ingeborg. The other persons are unidentified.

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To these millions can be added the inheritance from Robert, which was nearly as big. That is to say, the Getå branch, within the course of a few years, had become very rich. Around the turn of the century, Robert’s youngest son Ludvig used a large part of his fortune to almost single-handedly turn Båstad in the south of Sweden from a sleepy fishing village into an exclusive seaside resort and residential district with tennis courts and golf courses. As for Anna and Mary, they were already wealthy and it is questionable whether they would have appealed against Alfred’s last will if it had not been for their husbands, who indeed were also their guardians. The Sjögren brothers were extraordinarily competent and energetic personalities, Åke, moreover, having a strong touch of the adventurer about him. The possibilities for realizing their ideas and plans, however, were utterly dependent on their spouses’ money. It is interesting to note, therefore, that the agreement with the executors of the will also included financial arrangements that made their various building projects possible. In 1892, Hjalmar and Anna had bought Nynäs manor house, erected in 1835 to plans by Immanuel Nobel’s teacher Fredrik Blom. Hjalmar was very active in the local community and took the initiative for the Nynäs railway between Stockholm and Nynäshamn. He was also involved in planning Nynäs residential district. The building of the railway began in 1898, the same year that the dispute about the will was settled, and it was ready three years later. Hjalmar’s brother, Åke, spent his wife’s money in a grander manner. Just before his death Alfred had bought the baroque palace of Mälsåker on Lake Mälar, supposedly as a wedding present for Robert’s daughter Ingeborg, the niece who was closest to him. The palace was run-down and the year before the contents had been auctioned off. A limited company to look after the property was set up with Ingeborg’s husband, Carl Ridderstolpe, as managing director. The first year saw losses, however, and as Mälsåker was included in Alfred’s estate the executors of his will bought out Ridderstolpe and sold the property. The buyer was none other than Ridderstolpe’s brother-in-law, Åke Sjögren, who carried out a thorough modernization and renovation of the palace: electricity, central heating and hot and cold water were installed, a magnificent garden was laid out and the palace, which had been standing empty, was fitted out anew with expensive paintings and furniture.50 The palace went through a period of greatness, but when Sjögren, who lived in grand style, wanted to borrow his step-daughters’ shares of the inheritance from Carl, their husbands put a stop to it. This led to the property being put up for auction in 1916 and passing out of the family.

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11 THE AGE OF GREATNESS

With the deaths of Robert and Alfred the last links to the two founder generations – Immanuel Nobel & Sons – were severed. Hitherto, Emanuel had been able to count on advice and moral and financial support particularly from Alfred, but from now on he was forced to rely on himself. Despite all the financial and political difficulties that faced the Nobel Company, things would turn out remarkably well, partly because of Emanuel’s skill as a businessman, partly thanks to the good colleagues with whom he surrounded himself. At the same time that Alfred’s will was published in January 1897, Emanuel negotiated a new bond loan from Disconto Gesellschaft in Berlin. It was for 21,600,000 Reichsmarks, which was about the same amount in Swedish kronor and corresponds to around £40 million in today’s values. It was the second bond loan in Berlin. The first, as we saw, had been taken out in 1884 and thanks to the company’s profitability it was paid off ten years later. Finances were therefore good and would be strengthened further, very much thanks to Hans Olsen, who was now involved in the Naphtha Company’s affairs in earnest and, moreover, was part of the family: in 1897 he had married Emanuel’s half-sister, Mina. Olsen’s efforts to rationalize the sales organization began with negotiations with the Moscow agency, which was owned by Bruno Wunderlich, one of the founders of the Naphtha Company. Wunderlich, however, lived not in Russia but in his castle outside Dresden. Business was taken care of by the Swede, Knut Littorin, and a Doctor Vogel, who agreed to take over responsibility for the Moscow district in Branobel from 1 January 1899. With this, an important part of the domestic sales organization was reformed. After this agreement was secured, an arrangement was reached with Rothschild’s BNITO (represented by the Poliak brothers) which led to a division of the Russian market whereby the rivalry between companies came to an end. ‘It felt like a personal triumph that I managed to carry the thing to a conclusion,’ Hans Olsen recollected, ‘both because it very soon showed itself to have been a successful stratagem, as the turnover and profits in this region, so important for our business,

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increased to an extent that exceeded my boldest expectations, and because I had thereby permanently attached to our company an individual like Knut Littorin with his outstanding qualifications in the business world.’1 The agreement with Rothschild’s in Moscow led to several contracts. Jules Aron and Hans Olsen worked well together and in the same year that Littorin and Vogel came together with Branobel a contract was agreed with Rothschild’s regarding distribution in Germany, which hitherto had been handled by the Naphtha Company’s subsidiary, Naftaport. Rothschild’s became involved in Naftaport (and Aron joined the board) and the share capital rose from 1,500,000 Reichsmarks to 5,000,000. The year 1899 was record breaking for Branobel, with a dividend amounting to 18 per cent. On the other hand, Olsen’s attempt to reach an agreement with Standard Oil’s German company, Deutsch-Amerikanische Petroleum Gesellschaft in Hamburg, fell through. In England, things went better. When the contract with the British agent Bessler, Waechter & Co. ran out Branobel and Rothschild’s set up a mutual sales company, in which the British agent was included with a minor share. The new company, which was given the name The British Petroleum Company, became very profitable. Olsen tried to bring about the same type of ‘peace treaty’ that the Naphtha Company succeeded in agreeing with its rivals in the naphtha trade with sales of crude oils. The Pennsylvanian oil had characteristics that made it more suitable for the manufacture of paraffin, while the Baku oil was better suited to making lubricants – from machine oils to spindle oils for weaving, etc. This meant that competition for Caucasian lubricating oil on the international market was less than for lighting oil. Sales of lubricating oil were carried out via a different distribution network than for paraffin. The sole seller of Branobel’s lubricating oils in Europe since 1886 had been Alexandre Barbé in Paris, with whom over the years the Nobel family had maintained close and friendly relations. The great rival was Charles Good, who was based in Antwerp in Belgium and whose company had sole rights to the sale of Standard Oil’s products. Both Barbé and Good realized that it would be better to co-operate and divide up the market than to compete for it. Olsen was of the same opinion but thought that not only the agents but also the producers ought to work together, and he drew up a suggestion along those lines. In 1900, the discussions led to the founding of a new lubricating oil company with its headquarters in Antwerp: the Société d’Armement, d’Industrie et de Commerce, abbreviated to SAIC. Most of the shares were owned by the producers (of whom Branobel had the majority), while the sellers held the rest. The founding of SAIC meant that Hans Olsen’s work of reform had been crowned with total success: the interests of all the large European naphtha companies had been combined in one organization. The result was soon evident. In the year 1900 Branobel’s dividend was 20 per cent.

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FIGURE 11.1 and 11.2 The photo corresponds to the letters A, B and C on the plan. Viborg side 1. Samson Quay 2. Samson Church 3. Samson Prospekt 4. Battalion Lane 5. Nyslott Street 6. Viborg Street 7. Nystad Street (Lesnoy Prospekt)

A. The Ludvig Nobel Machine Factory and ‘the house on the quay’ B. Houses for the workers (‘second yard’) C. The People’s House and park

Petersburg side 8. Petersburg Quay. 9. The Nobel family’s first house D. Immanuel’s machine workshop

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Now Olsen wanted to go further and also negotiate a collaboration with Standard Oil. The plan was that the American company and Branobel would exchange shares. This was, as we saw, an idea that had already been proposed by Alfred. Talks were initiated at the beginning of 1903, but this time too the project fell through. To work out production capacity, the extent of the works and their value, etc., was no problem. The difficult thing was to determine the real value of the naphtha shares. The stock exchange quoted them at double the nominal price, i.e. 500 roubles per share, which according to Olsen and Emanuel was far too low and was because no account was taken of the large hidden reserves. Hjalmar Crusell’s inventory of the Naphtha Company’s assets showed that the real value of the shares in fact was eight to ten times higher than the nominal value. It represented such an enormous amount that this time too the affair ran out in the sand.

Karl Vassilievitch While Ludvig had had the main responsibility for technical as well as financial questions Emanuel had gradually been able to concentrate more and more on the Naphtha Company’s finances. Around the turn of the century, with help from Olsen and Littorin, he had sorted out the sales organization both in Russia and abroad, and Baku was managed extremely well by Wilhelm Hagelin, who began working for Robert as early as 1879 and who thereafter had a meteoric career. Karl Vassilievitch, as he was called in Russia, was unanimously agreed to be the single individual who had the greatest importance for the Naphtha Company’s technical advances in the decades around the turn of the century. Hagelin demonstrated a progressive spirit and a talent that was matched only by his capacity for work, which he commented on as follows: ‘I am industrious because I am really lazy. I want to get a lot of work done so that afterwards I can take it easy, but the work has always grown quicker than I can get it done.’2 Hagelin had a significant eye to the main chance, but his education was insufficient, and he realized that he had to educate himself if he wanted to rise in the company. He therefore took private lessons in mathematics and other subjects, and in 1883 he used money he had saved to take himself off to Stockholm where for two years he studied at the Royal Institute of Technology as a private student. On his return to Russia, Hagelin was employed by Ludvig in the research laboratory in St Petersburg. With Alfred’s theoretical model to guide them, together they worked out a method for ‘thermal cracking’, a method for converting heavier hydrocarbons in petroleum into lighter ones. However, the process halted at the laboratory stage and had its practical breakthrough much later, especially in the car industry. ‘In this experiment too Ludvig Nobel . . . showed the great foresight and the broad views that he possessed,’ Hagelin recalled.3 In 1887, after a few years

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in the Naphtha Company’s technical department in St Petersburg, he was appointed technical head of the Volga district (a part of the country that he had been well acquainted with since childhood years) and in 1891 technical head of Branobel in Baku with responsibility for oil production and refining as well as for transport questions. The array of Hagelin’s talents was impressively broad, and it is well-nigh impossible to reckon up all his contributions to the company.4 During his time in Baku several new oil fields were exploited, among others, in Bibi-Eibat south of Baku, and on one occasion he bought 35 million pud of oil from a rival who had got a gusher but couldn’t make use of it. By pumping the oil over to the Nobel reservoirs, in five weeks he made 1.5 million roubles for the company, which corresponded to a year’s dividend. Hagelin also turned his eyes to the oil finds on the island of Cheleken, the first for which Robert had taken out a claim but which had since been forgotten. The Cheleken naphtha was especially rich in paraffin. The Naphtha Company was increasingly successful during the 1890s, not least thanks to the efforts of Hagelin. In connection with the imperial family’s visit to Branobel’s pavilion at the industrial exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896, the Company was allowed the privilege of using the national coat of arms, an honour that on two previous occasions had befallen the machine factory. The citation read: ‘For a broad and good business organization, for improvements to apparatus for naphtha distillation, for the high quality of their machines and for their considerate attitude to their workers.’ In 1899, Karl Vassilievitch was called to St Petersburg to join the board of the Naphtha Company. There he continued to manage the work on the Volga and in Baku at the same time as taking responsibility for the expansion of the Nobel trading fleet. Olsen and Hagelin worked well together on the board which at this time was dominated by Scandinavians: the chairman Emanuel Nobel, the directors Olsen, Hagelin and Crusell. The Russian in the group was Beliamin’s son, Mikhail Beliamin the younger, who was a mining engineer and had joined the board in 1902.

Cream separators and internal combustion engines At the same time as the Naphtha Company was being consolidated financially the mechanical workshop was undergoing a significant development. Carl Nobel, as we saw, had concluded a licensing agreement with Gustaf de Laval about the manufacture of cream separators. The Russian market was big and its potential even bigger. The reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II were characterized by political reaction and repression, but on the economic front the work of reform initiated by Alexander II continued. Under the leadership of the finance minister

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Sergei Witte, enormous advances were made in every sector of industry, not least metallurgy, and the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway was commenced. In 1897, the rouble was linked to the gold standard, which stabilized the currency, increased trade with Europe and encouraged foreign capitalists to invest in Russia. The growth of private credit institutions also facilitated access to loans for businesses as well as private individuals.5 These reforms meant that Russia’s industrial development in the 1890s had no European equivalent in scope and tempo and can best be compared with what was happening in the USA at the same time. The building of the Trans-Siberian Railway made it possible to realize Witte’s project to colonize Siberia and change the area into agricultural land. In 1893, seven tons of butter were produced in the Siberian region of Russia, and ten years later five times as much. A large part of the success can be ascribed to the cream separator, which in Russian folk parlance was called lavalka. In the beginning it was mostly powerful separators for dairies and large estates that were in use but after the turn of the century came the breakthrough for hand-separators. From 1907 the company’s largest export market was Russia, where they had about 80 per cent of the market.6 Nobel’s licensed manufacture of separators ended in 1897, when the Russian protective duties on agricultural machinery were abolished and the separators could be imported duty free. Then the machine factory instead became the agent for Separator Ltd in Stockholm. During the first years of the twentieth century sales were so great that the machine factory did not have the capacity to handle them itself. Therefore, the Ludvig Nobel Trading Company was founded in 1903, with Separator Ltd, Emanuel and his brother Emil as owners, and it in turn was converted in 1908 into a Russian limited company under the name Alfa-Nobel.

FIGURE 11.3 Alfa-Nobel’s advertisement for Laval’s separators.

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Through this merger, the Swedish company was able to benefit from the Nobels’ good name, knowledge of the Russian business world and good connections to the Russian authorities. Indeed, Alfa-Nobel soon came to occupy a unique position on the Russian market. So, for example, despite the competition from other manufacturers of separators (like International Harvester) they succeeded in getting agricultural experts to recommend the lavalka to farmers, who were forced to follow the advice if they wanted to receive state subsidies. That the formation of Alfa-Nobel was a lucky throw is proven by the statistics: in the years 1888–93, 500 products were sold, in 1908–12 all of 55,000. In 1912 alone, 20,000 separators were sold by 3,000 agents around the empire. Branobel also gained from the founding of the company as the lubricating oil Alfa, which was used for separators, was made by them. Lavalka’s victory parade through Russia was something that Carl did not get to experience. The same goes for another revolutionary invention, where the Ludvig Nobel machine factory played a key role: the diesel engine. When the principles of a ‘rational heat engine’ were presented in 1893 by the German engineer Rudolf Diesel they were received with scepticism, but not in the machine factory in St Petersburg, where the engineer Anton Carlsund had for some years been busy trying to construct an engine that could replace the imported coal used to power the Naphtha Company’s tankers.

FIGURE 11.4 Anton Carlsund.

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Carlsund had been born in 1865 and came from a family of engineers. His paternal grandfather and namesake was a major in the design corps of the navy and a pioneer of steam propulsion in Sweden, his brother Otto was in charge of the Motala workshop from 1843 to 1870 and Anton’s father was operational manager of the Ludvigsberg Workshop in Stockholm. After graduating from the Royal Institute of Technology in 1889, Anton moved to St Petersburg, where he found employment in an English mechanical workshop. In 1892, during the visit to the Russian capital of Crown Prince Gustaf of Sweden-Norway, Carlsund got to know Carl Nobel, who offered him a job as designer in the machine factory.7 In 1897, Carlsund was sent by Emanuel on a study trip to France and Germany. In Kassel he attended a meeting where Rudolf Diesel gave a presentation on his work on an internal combustion engine with fuel consumption twice as economical as conventional paraffin engines. Carlsund got to know Diesel and was given a demonstration of the new engine, which would become known under the designer’s name. ‘I realized that the Diesel engine meant a revolution for internal combustion engines and suggested to Emanuel Nobel that he should acquire the manufacturing rights for Russia,’ Carlsund recalled. Which is what happened: in February 1898, Emanuel and Diesel founded the company Russische Diesel Motor Co. (On the same day Diesel signed a similar agreement for Sweden with Marcus Wallenberg; the American rights were bought by the oil baron Adolphus Busch.) Emanuel, according to Diesel, ‘a considerate and generous person with an imposing, significant appearance,’ was the main shareholder and bought the Russian patent for 800,000 Reichsmarks (close to £4 million today), 600,000 in cash and 200,000 in shares in the new company.8 However, the diesel engine for which Carlsund received drawings caused him some ‘misgivings’ and he had it rebuilt ‘in many details’. With the help of the Swedish engineer Hans Nordström he constructed an 800-horsepower engine for use in factories and power-stations. With the help of fast pumps, it could also power the capital’s waterworks and the pipeline between Baku and Batum. The pumps in their turn were driven by the oil in the pipes. ‘Our machines showed themselves to be dependable and within a few years the manufacture of diesel engines became the factory’s most important speciality,’ Carlsund declared. The Naphtha Company was also keen to get out a diesel engine for propelling ships. This required the engine to go into reverse, something that Diesel’s model could not manage. Carlsund succeeded, however, in building a reversible engine that was coupled directly to the propeller axle, the first of its kind. ‘The solution of the steering problem has been my contribution to ship propulsion, through which, so to speak, I have followed in my father’s footsteps,’ Carlsund concluded with justified pride. The innovation persuaded Hagelin to order two tanker barges intended to traverse the river- and canal-system from Tsaritsyn to the capital, a stretch of 1,800 miles.

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In the spring of 1903, as soon as the Volga was ice-free, the world’s first diesel-powered tanker barge, Vandal, was launched, having been constructed in collaboration with the engineer Johnny Johnson of ASEA (Allmänna Svenska Eletriska Aktiebolaget). By the following summer, the next diesel-powered tanker barge, Sarmat, was ready for use. The new engines consumed 10 to 20 per cent less fuel than the traditional steam engines. ‘Our steam engines consume tons of the valuable natural product naphtha, but only drops of this fuel when in use,’ a delighted Emanuel declared.9 Although the diesel engines were built by Svenska Diesel Ltd and not in the machine factory in St Petersburg, the successes with the tanker bargers meant that the flow of orders to the machine factory increased dramatically, new factory buildings were erected and the workforce rose to over 1,000. The changeover to diesel engines – pretty soon not only within Branobel but in Russia as a whole – also led to an increase in production and sales of mazut oil, which in turn was to the advantage of the Naphtha Company.

Political unrest The reason why the planned merger with Standard Oil came to nothing was not only economic. As so often when foreign investments in Russia were contemplated, the political situation had to be taken into account in the risk assessment. The social divisions in the country were enormous and the poverty and oppression that the greater part of the population lived under meant there was a risk of disturbances and riots at any time. For twenty years the oil boom in Baku had created colossal riches but also a proletariat that lived and worked in almost bestial conditions. The workers lived in dirty and unhygienic barracks and their wages were barely sufficient to feed the worker himself, let alone his family. Overtime was compulsory and unpaid. The working day was twelve to fourteen hours, without a break. The ground and the air were polluted by the oil and its by-products and the water in the wells was undrinkable; for drinking and cooking food the workers were forced to collect rainwater. One of the characteristics of Russian capitalism was large-scale production. A third of the country’s factories had more than 500 employees. The concentration of workers in the oilfields and refineries in Baku constituted a fertile soil for socialist agitators and in July 1903 the first major strike broke out. It involved tens of thousands of workers, who demanded an eight-hour working day, improvements in their living conditions and the abolition of overtime and punishments. The strike and demonstrations spread to other parts of the Caucasus – among others, Batum and Tiflis – and led to a government crisis and the resignation of finance minister Witte.

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According to Stepan Gulishambarov, Russia’s leading oil expert and a close ally of the Nobels, Ludvig Nobel’s attitude to the workforce, like his payment system, meant that ‘even the most insignificant cog in the Nobels’ grandiose machinery was more or less interested in the welfare of the business’.10 Branobel’s workers were therefore, as Hagelin wrote in a report to the Swedish minister in St Petersburg, disinclined to strike in the first place – but when they and their families were exposed to threats from professional agitators they had no choice but to down tools. The strike was about wage conditions but also about organizational questions. The strike leaders were demanding partly a kind of collective agreement, partly that the workers’ representatives should be able to decide on wages and working conditions. ‘This we did not agree to, and soon we were the only ones left to fight the strike, as the others – vacillating as they were – gave in on this key question,’ writes Hagelin, continuing: ‘In the end the “leaders” were forced to give in, but nevertheless they had won a fair amount by reducing our well-off workers to beggary: now it would be easier to get them to join the next strike.’11 The idea of a ‘social contract’ between the Nobel companies and their workers was, as we saw, that the latter were offered good working conditions and wages but in return had to undertake to rigorously follow the rules regarding work. The next strike broke out in December 1904 and involved not just the city of Baku but also the oil fields. It also had a stronger political character than the previous one. In February, Japan had attacked and captured the Russian naval base of Port Arthur on the Liaodong Peninsula in southern Manchuria, which led to war between the countries. The war turned into a disaster for Russia and was a contributory factor in the disturbances that broke out all over the country. Demands for thoroughgoing political change were made more and more often and more stridently, not only, but most powerfully from forces on the left. Caught between the Russian state’s repressive and incompetent leadership and the radical workers’ movement was the Russian economy. ‘The battle was fought ruthlessly by both sides – the government and the revolutionary parties – and meanwhile, in common with industry all over the land, we had many hard nuts to crack,’ recalled Hagelin.12 In 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Party had split into a reformist (Menshevik) and a revolutionary (Bolshevik) wing. The party was illegal but agitated actively among the workers. The Mensheviks wanted to postpone the strike to a later occasion, but the Bolsheviks were keen to show drive and on 13/26 December 1904 the workers in almost forty factories, among them those of Nobel and Rothschild’s, downed tools. ‘This time it passed off fairly peacefully in the Black City, but out at the drilling fields those gentlemen, the workers, burned down about a hundred drilling towers, smashed in windows in the office and in the managers’ houses and destroyed other property,’ Torbern Fegræus reported in a letter to his father. ‘With us they burned down 36 drilling towers and wrecked the

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whole office and the manager’s house in Balakhani as well as in Bibi-Eibat.’13 About 40,000 workers took part in the protest actions, in which a twenty-six-year-old Josef Stalin played a part, although not so prominently as was claimed in Soviet times. The strike was not of course something that the oil companies welcomed, but now that it was a fact they chose to take advantage of it. Shortly after the strike broke out two individuals who claimed to represent Branobel offered the strike committee financial support of 30,000 roubles. The condition was that the support be kept secret and that the strike continued for one and a half to two weeks. The offer was turned down, however, as a provocation was suspected. When the same men turned up again two days later the amount offered had risen to 50,000 roubles (around £40,000 today). An employer wishing to give financial support to his opponents? In a letter from one of the strike leaders to Lenin an explanation was given for the remarkable offer: the enormous stocks that the oil producers had laid up.14 The reason for the surprising attitude of the Naphtha Company to the strike was thus over-production. A cessation of work for several weeks would diminish the oil stocks and lead to price rises. That it was this plan that inspired the Naphtha Company to offer the strike committee money is borne out by a telegram that Hagelin sent to the company’s Baku office the day after the strike broke out: ‘A peaceful strike is good for prices. Therefore avoid any violence.’15 That money was not only offered to but also finally accepted by the strike committee is attested by several contemporary sources. Whether or not the support came from Branobel only, on the other hand, is unclear; other oil producers also naturally had an interest in a raising of the price of oil. Oil production declined during the weeks of the strike by 30 million pud, which forced many smaller producers out of business. For Branobel on the other hand, with its large storage depots, the decrease in production had only a marginal effect and contributed to the desired price-increase, which is reflected in the dividend increasing year on year: from 12 per cent in 1905 to 20 per cent in 1907.16 After two weeks of negotiations between representatives of the oil producers and the workers the so-called Mazut Constitution was signed, which is usually described as Russia’s first collective agreement. According to its terms the working day was fixed at nine hours for all workers and for those working shifts and at the drilling rigs it was eight hours. Wages were increased and four days’ paid time off a month introduced. On each oil field a commission was set up with the task of seeing to it that the agreement was implemented, a sort of forerunner of the trade unions that would be founded in the years to come. That was the positive result of the strike and the disturbances. One negative consequence was that the latent hate between Tatars and Armenians flared up, whipped up by nationalistic forces in the government and above all the conservative interior minister Plehve. The conflict was a result of traditional religious differences

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between Muslims and Christians and was heightened by the class divide between well-to-do Armenian merchants and oil barons and poor Azeri oil workers, who made up the majority of the local population. ‘The result,’ Torbern Fegræus wrote to his father, ‘was a full-blown race war inside Baku between the two parties, which raged from Sunday to midday on Wednesday, when reconciliation (or an armistice?) occurred at the instigation of the Tatar mullahs and the Armenian clergy.’17 Two thousand people died in the riot and over 130 drilling rigs were set on fire.

‘Bloody Sunday’ A more long-term and serious effect of the strike in Baku was that the disturbances spread to St Petersburg. On Sunday 9 January a procession of peaceful demonstrators on their way to the Winter Palace to hand over to the Emperor a list of demands for political reform was fired on. Hundreds of workers were killed and wounded. The day has gone down in history as Bloody Sunday. So far, the great majority of workers had not actively joined in the demands for political change, which initially had been put forward by the liberal and socialist intelligentsia. As long as the demands for reform came from a little social elite it had been possible for the government to ignore them. On 9 January 1905 everything changed. ‘So-called Bloody Sunday spread the revolutionary fever to all strata of the population and made the Revolution truly a mass phenomenon,’ writes Richard Pipes, the Russian Revolution’s chronicler par excellence. According to him Bloody Sunday was Russia’s equivalent to the storming of the Bastille.18 Bloody Sunday enforced reforms that the Emperor and the government reluctantly agreed to. On 17 October 1905 the Emperor issued a manifesto that guaranteed freedom of conscience, of the press, the right of free assembly and freedom to form unions, the so-called October Manifesto. The following year elections were held for a national Duma, a sort of parliament. How did Emanuel react to the cataclysms that shook Russian society during this year? As the owner of two large and successful businesses his instincts were naturally conservative. At the same time, he and his father had always been conscious of the importance of good relations with their employees. Moreover, employers also wanted to see political and economic changes. The state sector was still disproportionately large, and the government was unwilling to relinquish its influence on private industry. It was the state that decided the rules of employment and wage conditions, and the person who in the end gave permission for the setting up of limited companies was the Emperor himself. Private industry was in addition still to a large extent dependent on government orders, customs privileges, and the like.19

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Finance minister Witte’s forced reform programme around the turn of the century had created an imbalance in Russian society, between those who saw reforms as necessary for the development of industry and the country and those who saw every change as a threat to traditional Russian values. Added to this was a general scepticism about private enterprise. ‘With us there is still a lack of insight into what constitutes the basis of the modern civilized state,’ was the summing-up of the magazine Enterprise and Trade in 1908: ‘To a broad strata of society in Russia enterprise and trade stand out as either a parasitical appendage to the agrarian base of the Russian national economy or as a source of scandalous profit for a relatively small number of bloodthirsty capitalists.’ The opponents of private capitalism were to be found not least within the state apparatus, where foreign entrepreneurs, especially such as exploited Russian natural resources, were frowned on. This led to suggestions about nationalization of oil finds, something which however was prevented by the ministry of trade and industry. One reason for the negative view of private enterprise was the absence in Russia of an influential middle class of the kind that had emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century in Western Europe. In a country with 150 million inhabitants only 30,000 people earned more than 10,000 roubles a year (about £80,000 today). That corresponded to less than 0.1 per cent of the population. The reforms that followed in the wake of Bloody Sunday meant that entrepreneurs too joined together to draw up their demands. However, there were no effective platforms for ‘business propaganda’. There were stock exchange committees, as well as certain branch organizations (among them the oil producers in Baku), but there was no organization that brought together different business interests – no employers’ association. That function came to be filled by the St Petersburg Association of Factory Owners and Manufacturers, which was founded one year after the publication of the October Manifesto.20 Emanuel played a central role in the association, and during these years he appeared as an active defender of the interests of the employers and at the inaugural meeting he was appointed an honorary member. In 1912 he was elected chairman.

Emanuel the politician The events of 1905 gave birth to hopes of a political and economic liberalization of the stagnant Russian society. There had been a few political parties earlier, but on an illegal basis. It was only with the introduction of freedom of association that parties could act lawfully. Only a few days after the publication of the October Manifesto several non-socialist parties were founded. The most important were the Constitutional Democratic party (called the Cadets, after its initials KD) and the Union of October 17, called after the day when the Emperor’s manifesto saw the light of day.

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Both parties were ‘liberal, with differences of nuance. The Cadets were seeking to obtain a parliamentarism on the British model while the Octobrists advocated a constitution in the Russian tradition, where there would be a parliament but where the Emperor had the right to choose the government. The party brought together mainly entrepreneurs and businessmen – 31 per cent of members belonged to the business world – but also representatives of the ‘urban intelligentsia’ (lawyers, professors, publishers, journalists). One of the party’s main aims was to oppose all sorts of revolutionaries ‘so as not to let them take power, not give them the opportunity to ruin Russia by means of disturbances and revolutions, . . . destroying the foundations of ownership and trying to realize utopian socialist ideas’. Emanuel represented one of the most highly quoted companies on the Russian stock exchange and had a wide network of contacts in industry as well as in government circles. That he was entrusted with a series of responsible assignments in the wake of the October Manifesto is therefore not to be wondered at. When the the Union of October 17 was founded, Emanuel was one of the initiators and he was to be included in the high command of the party, its ‘central committee’, where he had the role of treasurer. The leader of the party was the businessman Alexander Guchkov, who had been involved in drawing up the Emperor’s manifesto. Emanuel’s position in the party placed him in the absolute centre of political power; at the election for the Third Duma in 1907 the party got almost a third of the vote and in 1910 Guchkov became the speaker of the Duma. In parallel with his work for the Octobrists Emanuel was active in the Progressive Economic Party, which defended the interests of St Petersburg entrepreneurs and which he had been involved in founding in the autumn of 1905. To further weld together the entrepreneurs of St Petersburg a club was set up within the party with the goal of strengthening ‘loyalty to the principles of constitutional monarchy and working out and finding the correct solutions for the national economy and economic life’. Several years later, Emanuel figured as chairman in the Committee for the Protection of Industrial Property, with the task of protecting patents, drawings and models. For his contributions to the development of Russian industry Emanuel, just like his father Ludvig before him, was on several occasions the object of the Emperor’s and the government’s appreciation. As well as the Russian citizenship that was offered him during the Emperor’s visit to Baku in 1888, he was awarded a series of decorations and other distinctions. In May 1907, for example, he was presented with the honorary title of ‘technical engineer’ of St Petersburg’s Technological Institute, and that same year the Imperial Russian Technological Society’s Baku branch decided to establish a prize in his name similar to the one that had been instituted in Ludvig’s memory in 1889 – ‘for the best studies or discoveries in the fields of knowledge directly linked to the oil industry’.21 The value of the prize was 1,000 roubles and the prize was awarded three times, in 1909, 1911 and 1914, before the war broke out.

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The high point was reached in connection with the fiftieth anniversary in 1909, when Emanuel, through an imperial decree, was promoted to the rank of Active State Councillor ‘for exceptional services to the furtherance of science and education’. He had by then donated more than 600,000 roubles (almost £5 million today) to research and charitable ends. The donations were mostly to the workshop sector and the oil industry, but, as we saw, he also supported the Institute for Experimental Medicine as well as other branches of science. So, for example, he was involved in financing Oscar Backlund’s studies of Encke’s comet at the Pulkovo observatory, a piece of research that brought the astronomer international celebrity. ‘Over the years there were many, many more marks of favour and other distinctions, titles and honorary memberships, and it cannot be denied that Emanuel was pleased to receive them,’ noted his half-sister Marta with her trademark mild irony: ‘It was his little weakness.22

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In 1830 Russia’s national poet Alexander Pushkin wrote a verse-drama with the title A Feast in Time of Plague. That could have been the title of the extravagant celebration of the Naphtha Company’s twenty-fifth anniversary which was celebrated on 18 May 1904 in the shadow of the political disturbances in Baku and the war with Japan. Several hundred representatives of the government (no fewer than seven ministers), industry, the banking sector and science were present to celebrate one of Russia’s most successful businesses. Among the guests were the former finance minister and current chairman of the Council of Ministers, Sergei Witte, his successor as finance minister Vladimir Kokovtsov, the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, the astronomer Oscar Backlund, and others. Hundreds of congratulations in the form of telegrams and letters arrived from the Russian Academy of Sciences, from banks (Russian and foreign), oil producers (among others, Rothschild), Alfred Nobel’s Dynamite Aktien-Gesellschaft, the Motala workshop, Sweden’s prime minister and foreign minister Marcus Wallenberg, employees of the Naphtha Company from all over Russia, family in Sweden. In the magnificent volume that was published to celebrate the anniversary (In Celebration of the Nobel Brothers’ Naphtha Production Limited Company’s Twenty-fifth Anniversary 1879–1904) the list of guests and addresses takes up almost 100 pages. At the same time a history of the Naphtha Company was published, also in a splendid edition. Despite the thunder that was rumbling in the background, there was reason to celebrate. In 1904, Branobel’s share of oil production in Baku was 11.4 per cent and their share of production worldwide 3.8 per cent. During the company’s twentyfive-year existence they had extracted 900 million pud of crude oil from 433 boreholes and refined over a billion pud of their own oil and oil purchased elsewhere. Distribution within the Russian empire took in fifteen districts with 145 depots, from Polish Łódź in the west to Vladivostok in the east. The company had fully 12,000 employees: 3,800 workers in the oilfields, 3,600 in the workshops, the five refineries and half a dozen factories for the manufacture of spare parts, a

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hundred or so at the Baku office and as many in St Petersburg, 2,300 in their tanker fleet.1 ‘We had working for us Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Finns, Germans from Germany, Balts, Russians, Armenians, Persians, Georgians, yes, even a Frenchman, but all these different nationalities were first and foremost Nobelites,’ Hagelin declared.2

The Nobel towns The increasingly stable economic conditions during the years around the turn of the century led to a significant expansion of the facilities for the staff of the machine factory and the Naphtha Company. The Viborg side, where the machine factory was situated, was an industrial suburb consisting largely of factories and workshops together with a few large public buildings. There was no house building adequate to modern needs. Just as Ludvig had built houses for the staff at Baku, so Emanuel built dwelling-houses for the employees of the machine factory in St Petersburg.3 The aim was to create a rational social structure that united work, daily life and leisure. The great migration of workers to the cities during the second half of the nineteenth century – both in Western Europe and in Russia – had led to major social problems. One way of solving them was the setting up of so-called workers’ suburbs, which not only offered hygienic dwellings but also opportunities for the employees to socialize in their free time. The concept of building housing for the workers was new in Russia but not in Western Europe. Great Britain, the first industrialized country, gave birth to the idea at the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, the project that originally inspired Ludvig and Emanuel probably lay closer to hand. Essen in Germany was home to the Krupp works, which the Nobel machine factory both competed and did business with. During a ten-year period in the 1860s and 1870s a number of workers’ suburbs were constructed, directly connected to the factory (Schederhof, Baumhof, Nordhof and Kronenberg), with 2,368 apartments.4 It is likely that Ludvig and Emanuel got to know these during their trips to Germany and it was these suburbs that served as the model for the ‘Nobeltown’ (Nobeveskii gorodok) that was built on the site behind Samson Prospekt, in the extension to the machine factory. An older source of inspiration was undoubtedly the factory communities that sprang up in Sweden from the 1600s around a dominant industry, for example iron working. The 56,000-square-metre site bought by Ludvig in the 1880s stretched from Samson Prospekt to Nystad Street (now Lesnoy Prospekt) and was called the Second Yard. A passage was created straight across the site along which thirteen dwelling houses and a school were erected in the years around the turn of the twentieth century (see Figure 12.2).

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FIGURE 12.1 and 12.2 Above: Houses by the oil fields in Balakhani. Below: Houses for the employees of the machine factory in St Petersburg.

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The houses were reserved for the salaried employees and skilled workers of the factory. They were designed by the city’s leading architects, first by Viktor Schröter and after his death in 1901 by Roman Meltzer, who was a court architect. Some of the houses, the biggest and most elegant, were designed by Fredrik Lidvall, one of St Petersburg’s most celebrated architects and a close friend of the Nobel family. Lidvall’s houses, particularly the one on Nystad Street, were occupied by the senior officials and engineers in the machine factory. Lullu Nobel and Hjalmar Crusell also lived here with their families. The Nobel town consisted of two- to four-storey houses with three-room apartments furnished with central heating, a bathtub and other conveniences. The rents were subsidized. There were small, paved courtyards between the houses. The three-year (later, five-year) school, named after Emanuel, was opened in 1901, it answered to the Imperial Russian Technological Society and was part of the Russian school system. In the first year there were seventeen boys and twenty girls and in 1912 almost 200 pupils, equally divided between the sexes. The subjects were arithmetic (four hours a week), Russian (ten hours),‘God’s law’, i.e. Christianity (three hours), singing and drawing (two hours each). From 1909 there was also a handwork class for girls. The school fee was 30 kopecks a month, a fee that ‘impecunious families’ were exempt from. Every day at 12 o’clock a hot meal was served consisting of two courses (cabbage or meat soup, milk and porridge). The school had a woman doctor who took charge of the pupils’ health and the weaker children were sent to a school holiday camp at Angela, in Viborg county, financed by Emanuel’s half-sister Marta, where they could rest and be looked after for several weeks in the summer. A similar charitable foundation was created by Emanuel’s other half-sister Mina Olsen, who founded a ‘Milk Drop’, an institution distributing sterilized milk to mothers who could not breastfeed that had been around in France for several years (Goutte de lait), in the factory grounds on the Viborg side. Mortality in new-borns was high among the poor of Russia and here they could get sterilized milk or its equivalent free of charge.5 Nobel towns were built not only by the machine factory in the capital but around the country where the Naphtha Company had employees, like Baku, Astrakhan, Tsaritsyn and Rybinsk. One of the first measures in Baku, as we saw, was to arrange living quarters for the company’s leading engineers and salaried employees. This was associated with major problems as the ownership rights were unregulated, but the problems were solved and the Villa Petrolea could be built. Out in the oil fields, in Balakhani, Sabunchi and elsewhere, the situation was even more complicated. As the ground since 1873 consisted of private oil land it was impossible to find sites for housing, which meant that in the beginning the Naphtha Company was forced to build on land where at the same time they were extracting or drilling for oil. At long last, in 1898, they were allowed to lease from the state an area in Sabunchi where they set up a ‘workers’ colony’ that was given the name On the Hill (Na goryé), as it lay on a hill. Nine two-storey houses were

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erected here for families (671 people) and four barracks for 368 unmarried workers. In the year 1909, when the Naphtha Company celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, the total number in Baku and its surroundings looked as follows: in the factory area in the Black City there were sixty-four houses for married salaried employees and workers, in all 1,536 individuals, together with rented properties for another 274. Out in the drilling fields seventy-two buildings had been put up for 1,718 workers. In all, the company had at this time 159 dwelling houses of its own and fourteen rented ones with in total 3,947 tenants.6 The same building work was going on along the Volga, where the company had its storage yards. In Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan altogether sixty-six dwelling houses were built for salaried employees and workers, and three workers’ barracks for bachelors. There were dining rooms that served subsidized meals, co-operative organizations with their own shops, schools and medical facilities, including a women’s clinic. Great importance was placed on hygiene, not least in the workers’ barracks. Fear of infectious diseases and other contagion was great. Foodstuffs, for example, were not to be kept in the barracks but only in cellars or portable ice boxes. Also, the storage of dirty and wet outer clothing and boots was not allowed there. Instead, ventilated drying rooms were built, separate from the living quarters.

The People’s House An important component in the Nobel towns was facilities for leisure and recreation. In the Villa Petrolea as in the oil fields in Balakhani and at the depots in Astrakhan and Tsaritsyn, there were clubs with libraries and reading rooms for the salaried employees. Here lectures, concerts and dance evenings were organized, and outside there were bowling alleys and tennis courts. However, none of these club premises were as magnificent and lavish as the one that Emanuel built in St Petersburg. In 1897, he acquired a site stretching for 59,000 square metres on the other side of Nystad Street, which meant that the Nobel territory now stretched all the way from Samson Quay to the Finnish railway station. Here, in 1901, he had a People’s House built at the address Nystad Street 19, the architect was again Roman Meltzer. The building contained two large auditoria, toilets and more besides. The largest room was the lecture hall, with dais, lectern and lantern-slide projector. The premises also served as a tennis-court. On the north wall hung a panel representing the Zoroastrian temple in Surachani. The initiative was not unique. During these years, a number of similar establishments were erected in Russia. At the same time as Emanuel’s, for example, Emperor Nicholas II’s People’s House was opened in St Petersburg. The aim was to give the people a meaningful leisure time, to combat illiteracy and stimulate education with the help of courses and lectures. That was also the idea behind Nobel’s People’s House, whose official title was ‘Lecture Hall for the People’. Here,

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FIGURE 12.3 Nobel’s People’s House.

popular science lectures were given in history, physics, chemistry, biology, geography, engineering and more besides to the salaried employees, engineers and workers of the machine factory and their families. In Russia, all forms of enlightenment were viewed with suspicion by the regime. Permission from the police was required for even for the most politically innocuous lectures. Nobel’s People’s House, therefore, gradually changed more and more into a private club for entertainment – and was also often just called the Nobel club. The superfluity that characterized Emanuel’s own entertainments at the ‘club’, according to his radically inclined half-sister Marta, conformed ‘very little to the noble idea that had given rise to the name “People’s House”.’7 It was at the ‘club’ that the Naphtha Company’s grand twenty-fifth anniversary was celebrated. Its double function as a festive venue for the society and a house for the people is illustrated by a letter that Maja Huss, who was employed as a nurse to Edla’s sister Lilly Mellgren, wrote in January 1909 to her mother in Sweden after having been a guest at Hjalmar Crusell’s and his wife Sigrid’s silver wedding: The bride . . . in white, blooming in a wig of golden curls and with sparkling pivot teeth drank champagne all morning and at 7 o’clock we were invited to the Club. . . . 200 people is a large number especially when most of them are Russians. A string orchestra played the bridal march and we processed up the staircase to a drawing-room, the biggest I have seen and handsome above all. Garlands of pink roses hung from the ceiling and down from the walls – all the tables were decorated with red roses and there was a bouquet of red carnations for each lady. I have never seen anything so magnificent and what toilets! . . . I sat with the Swedes and had a nice dinner – despite the fact that my gentleman

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escorts were teetotallers – conversation only in Russian and music the whole time, so that one’s ears hurt and dinner lasted for 3 hours with Tatars as waitingstaff – they are supposed to be excellent as waiters although they are dark and ugly to look at. After dinner we again filled the lower saloon which had now been fitted out as a theatre-ditto and saw dancing, first a minuet with rococo folk and then genuine Russian dances performed by a member of the ballet corps here. A day or so later, Huss writes, the club offered ‘a quite different picture’: Yesterday we saw 650 children shabbily dressed and pale performing little stage plays themselves, singing and dancing around the Christmas tree and finally receiving a present each and being treated to tea – it was the factory children here. I took a little three-year-old to lift him up onto the dais and I noticed when I put him down that he was standing naked in a pair of small trousers – his only garment – I had pulled up his Russian blouse under his arms. There is no end of poverty and misery here and most of it can be blamed on vodka.8

Marta In light of the Naphtha Company’s twenty-fifth anniversary and in the shadow of the political unrest in Baku and St Petersburg a revolutionary change took place in the Nobel family’s private sphere. In September 1904 Marta, born in 1881, married Dr Georgi Oleinikov, who was seventeen years older her senior. The engagement provoked strong feelings in the family, none of whom had previously married a Russian. ‘What it was like for poor Marta in those days I do not know,’ writes Hans Olsen, who was in London when the engagement was announced, ‘but she probably soon found out that her choice made no one happy.’ That her fiancé was Russian and Orthodox was, according to Olsen, nothing to ‘cross yourself for’ in view of how well versed the Nobel family were in Russian conditions after all their years in the country. However, the family ‘had remained far too exclusively Swedish and foreign and had far too few connections with purely Russian circles’, which was why ‘Georg’s joining the family felt like the intrusion of a stranger who really did not belong there’.9 The fact that the family was being enriched by a member of Russian extraction was remarkable enough in itself. Even more startling, and disturbing, was the spouse’s political sympathies – he moved in radical, socialist circles. The story of the Nobel family is to a large extent a story of men. Certainly, there were intelligent and strong women, like Andriette and Edla, but they lacked a vocational education and occupied traditional women’s roles. Edla’s daughter, Marta, recalled that her mother had no ambition whatsoever to ‘work outside the

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FIGURE 12.4 Marta Nobel in 1898.

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home nor did she have the slightest inclination to appear in public or to play any part in public life, which in any case was completely foreign to her in Russia, whose language she never mastered’.10 The only woman in the Nobel family who found herself a profession was Marta. This even though her mother and her guardian, Emanuel, saw her as ‘not at all made for the school desk’ and therefore decided not to let her go to school. Instead, she was to be educated at home, ‘and I hope that will be equally good’, Emanuel wrote to Alfred.11 When the decision was taken about Marta’s schooling, in March 1896, she was fourteen years old. Emanuel’s and Edla’s conclusion, however, proved to be premature; the girl had a good brain and in the autumn of 1897 she started at Miss Waldschmidt’s girls’ boarding school. It was an eight-year education, but Marta completed it in four terms and left as the top student, which bears witness to an exceptional talent.12 That same autumn she passed her examinations with the highest marks in every subject at St Petersburg’s VIth gymnasium and won the right to work as a private teacher of German and French. Her ambitions stretched further than that, however: she wanted to be a doctor, something that met with opposition in a family where no woman had previously managed to get a higher education. ‘It was, to put it mildly, a palace revolution inside our own strict, bourgeois home milieu, when Marta declared that she wanted to study medicine,’ her brother Gösta recalled, ‘but with the refined tactfulness that is all her own, and the unusual energy that is her private patent, this revolution was for once in the history of the world a bloodless one.’13 After following even more courses and completing her education with Latin, in 1901 Marta applied to the Medical Institute for Women, founded in 1897. The institute was the first educational establishment in the world to train female doctors (who only had the right to work in hospitals for women). Her application was turned down on the grounds that there were no places free. When in the spring of 1902 Marta applied again, she enclosed a testimonial from Emanuel, who approved that she studied at the institute, and from the St Petersburg police authorities, who testified that ‘The department for the maintenance of security and order’ had no compromising political evidence against her. This time Marta was accepted and in the autumn of 1902, she began her studies. The institute had been founded on the initiative of prominent doctors and researchers. Its leading promoter, Nicholas II’s personal doctor Yevgenii Botkin, contributed himself with large sums to the institute, which lacked state financing. The operational budget consisted of student fees and an annual subsidy from St Petersburg city of 15,000 roubles. Most of the pupils were poor. ‘Among the institute’s student body abysmal destitution is prevalent,’ one of the professors lamented to a journalist. ‘The majority live on starvation rations and cannot eat every day.’ Among those studying, however, there were also rich individuals, he stated, like the daughter of Grand Duke Dolgoruky and Miss Nobel.14

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Among the teachers employed were some of the most outstanding contemporary physicians, among them the psychiatrist and neurologist Vladimir Bechterew, who gave his name to Bechterew’s disease (ankylosing spondylitis). One of the lecturers was Georgi Oleinikov, born in 1864 in Ukraine, the son of a barber-surgeon. He was a doctor of medicine at the Naval Academy after completing his thesis, ‘Artificial immunity to cholera bacteria’ and since 1897 he had been a freelance lecturer at the same academy. If the police testimonial about Marta’s political irreproachability had been drawn up after she made Georgi’s acquaintance it is hardly likely to have been so favourably worded. For her fiancé had a political biography that compromised not only himself but, through guilt by association, all who were in contact with him. At St Petersburg University Georgi had been a classmate of Alexander Ulyanov, the older brother of Vladimir Ulyanov (who would later take the name Lenin) and he belonged to the latter’s circle of acquaintances. Alexander belonged to People’s Will, a terrorist organization founded in 1879 with political assassination as top of the agenda and the Emperor as the foremost target. On 1 March 1881, Alexander II was murdered in a bombing outrage. The next attempted assassination in 1887 was directed at his successor Alexander III but never got beyond the planning stage. The person who planned the murder was Alexander Ulyanov, who was executed. The fact that Oleinikov moved in radical political circles led to his being arrested in 1903 and imprisoned for two months. The following autumn, while the disturbances in Baku were under way, he signed a petition demanding the summoning of a constituent assembly and in 1905 he was one of the founders of

FIGURE 12.5 Georgi Oleinikov in the uniform of the Naval Military Academy.

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the Ukrainian Radical-Democratic Party, which demanded the nationalization of private business monopolies that were exploiting natural resources. At the same time, he was arrested for a second time.15 No available documents, however, hint that he could have held any leading positions within these organizations; in Tsarist times it didn’t take much for a person to be arrested on political grounds. It was this odd bird who the twenty-four-year-old Marta Ludvigovna married on 16 January (Russian calendar) 1905 in an Orthodox ceremony in the Exaltation Church in St Petersburg IIIrd gymnasium. The bridegroom’s witnesses were the former member of Branobel’s board of directors, Charles Nellis, and a doctor colleague; the bride’s witnesses were Marta’s brother Lullu and Hjalmar Backlund, an ensign in the sharpshooter division of the Artillery.16 The latter was the son of the head of the Pulkovo observatory, Oscar Backlund, and was a close friend of the younger generation of Nobels. Of the six Backlund children, three in particular stood out: Hjalmar had a successful career in the Russian army, finishing up as a colonel, Helge was a geologist with an international reputation and Elsa (later with the married name of Celsing) was a talented artist who produced a series of fine watercolours on commission from the Nobel family (see colour plate, p. 3). That Hjalmar Backlund was a witness at Marta’s wedding, therefore, was not to be wondered at. More surprising was that the person representing the Nobel family was Lullu and not Emanuel, who after all was Marta’s long-time guardian – a fact that can perhaps be seen as an indication of Emanuel’s attitude to his sister’s other ‘palace revolution’. After the Orthodox wedding Pastor Kajanus conducted a Protestant ceremony in the bride’s home. The fact that Marta was one of the Medical Institute’s rich students was something that would be of great benefit to them. When in November 1907 they opened an eye clinic the family of ‘Commercial Councillor E.L. Nobel’ defrayed half of the building cost of 70,000 roubles, the St Petersburg city parliament paid 20,000 and the institute the rest. At the clinic’s opening ceremony, Marta’s husband spoke, in her absence, on behalf of the Nobel family. Whether this should be seen as a token that he was now an accepted family member of the family or as Marta’s way of showing that he was, is an open question. Marta took her degree in January 1909 with excellent marks in every subject. When she asked the director of the institute to recommend a new project that she could support financially he suggested a surgical faculty clinic. There was none in existence; the institute’s practical instruction in surgery took place in a hospital. The building work was begun in May 1910. The clinic was designed by the Helsinki architect, Gustaf Nyström, and was opened just two years after building commenced, in September 1912.17 In terms of equipment, the clinic is said to have been the best not only in St Petersburg but in the whole of Russia. As an expression of its gratitude, Marta was appointed an honorary member of the institute. As she was not present on this occasion either – out of tactfulness, one may presume – the diploma was presented

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to her husband, who pointed out in his speech that his wife’s idea had been realized in an, in every way, successful manner, adding ironically, not least because the Education Ministry had not laid any obstacles in the way. Other members of the Nobel family also made donations: Edla contributed a supply of linen, Emanuel the iron fence, Rolf the lift, Emil the nickel-plated beds and Gösta the fitting-out of the students’ laboratory. In her medical practice, Marta concentrated on radiology and skeletal damage (especially broken thigh bones), two specialities to which she devoted a couple of scientific treatises and which she had reason to practise during the First World War, when Nobel’s People’s House was converted into a hospital.

‘A little Sweden on Russian soil’ Around the turn of the twentieth century ‘Swedish St Petersburg’ consisted partly of business people who had long lived and worked in the city, like the Nobels, the tailoring families of Lidvall and Nordenström and Bolin the court jewellers, partly of representatives of businesses based in Sweden itself like L.M. Ericsson, ASEA and SKF (Svenska Kullagerfabriken). The latter often stayed for only a few years in Russia and for the most part never learned to speak the language of the country. This, however, was not a major handicap. At the beginning of the twentieth century St Petersburg’s linguistic minorities amounted to around 200,000 individuals and the language of business was German. Nor did Edla, who had lived in Russia for decades, ever learn to speak the national language. According to her daughter Marta she could only write one sentence in Russian, Shvedskaya poddannaya Edla Konstantinovna Nobel – ‘Swedish citizen Edla Konstantinovna Nobel’ – a phrase that she was sometimes obliged to inscribe on some document or other; she did not even succeed in pronouncing these few words correctly. In the smarter shops of St Petersburg, however, the assistants spoke French or German and in the food shops they learned gradually how to interpret her wishes as she was a good and loyal customer. In the Nobels’ home the whole staff, except for the coachman and the chauffeur, were Swedish- or German-speaking and had been brought in from Sweden, Finland and the Baltics.18 In Swedish St Petersburg, the Nobel family occupied a special position: because of their industrial successes, their contacts within Russian society and, not least, for their fortune. There were other successful families, like Lidvall and Bolin, but none could match Nobel. Alongside St Katarina’s church their house on Samson Quay was the centre of the city’s Swedish-speaking colony. Maja Huss described it as ‘a lovely house’ with ‘a little garden and orangery and a master gardener who every morning comes and plants new flowers – a magnificent salon and a delightful winter garden, with a

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splendid philodendron that winds round the roof and walls of the whole garden, and also each and every one has his or her own parlour’. There were always many guests here and ‘at-home days twice a week like in a bazaar’.19 A similar picture is painted by the explorer Sven Hedin, who had known the Nobel family ever since 1885 when he had worked as a private tutor to the son of the drilling master at the Balakhani oilfield. Hedin’s research expeditions in Russia were partly financed by Alfred and Emanuel and he was a frequent guest at the house on Samson Quay. ‘There was never any question of everyday life, for guests were constantly being invited by Edla and Emanuel,’ he writes: They kept an excellent table, where one met Swedish, Finnish and Russian engineers and officials, employed in St Petersburg or on their way to Baku or one of the countless depots or focal points for the oil trade, which were to be found all over the Russian empire. At great dinners and balls everything was on a majestic scale. And despite the foreign guests one had the feeling of being in a little Sweden on Russian soil.20

Selma Lagerlöf’s visit When in 1909 Selma Lagerlöf was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Emanuel invited her to be his guest in St Petersburg. The visit took place three years later. ‘It will be a real pleasure to be able to entertain you in our old house here in the city and please be assured that you yourself, and your friend too, are heartily welcome here,’ Emanuel wrote to her. He also urged her not to forget her passport – ‘unfortunately we are still so old-fashioned in holy mother Russia’.21 On 16 February 1912, Selma Lagerlöf and her friend Valborg Olander arrived in St Petersburg, where they were met at the Finland station by Emanuel. ‘From this moment on,’ Selma Lagerlöf recalled, ‘we were under the protection of the Nobel name.’22 ‘That she was warmly received in Mrs Nobel’s hospitable home hardly needs to be said,’ the Sydsvenska Dagbladet reported. ‘She was then on Swedish soil.’ This is how the author herself remembered it: Several blocks here were occupied by the Nobel Brothers’ factories, business premises, workers’ houses, hospital and school, for which the whole of the magnificent dwelling house formed a worthy centrepiece. After passing a large hall on the ground floor you came to a high, imposing staircase up to the servants’ quarters, where you found a large winter garden. To the left of it were the dining-room and Dr Nobel’s attractive workroom side by side. Further in you came across a huge drawing-room, the biggest room I have ever seen in a private house. . . . They lived in grand style with manservants, cook, etc. Several lovely artworks could be seen in the rooms.

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A drawing room was placed at the disposal of the two ladies and two bedrooms with a bathroom. With the thermometer showing -20° to -25°C, Nobel’s motor cars came in handy. On the first day they paid a visit to the opera and the following evening Emanuel and Edla invited them to dinner with about seventy guests: oysters, sturgeon soup à l’impériale, caviar from Astrakhan, ham mousse with hazel-grouse cutlets and Cumberland sauce, braised quail, young spring chicken on skewers . . . The high point of the visit was the Swedish Society’s party in the Hôtel d’Europe’s winter garden, designed by Fredrik Lidvall. ‘It was overcast and cold when Selma Lagerlöf came,’ reported the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet, ‘but she knew how to spread warming rays of sunshine to almost 100 of us Swedes and Finns during the festive lunch at the hotel d’Europe. . . . All of our Scandinavian colony were there, gentlemen and ladies, and the coolly strained atmosphere one always tends to encounter while waiting with an empty stomach disappeared, like snow in the spring sunshine, when Selma Lagerlöf crossed the threshold, followed by Mr Emanuel Nobel and the Swedish minister, General Brändström.’23

Kirjola The house on Samson Quay was the Nobel family’s winter dwelling. The summers were spent, as we saw, in the Finnish and Swedish archipelagos, where they rented villas and to which ‘their removal entailed veritable excursions in Noah’s Ark with wet-nurses, children, governesses, teachers, servants and pets and so on and so forth’.24 As the family increased so the need grew for a permanent summer dwelling which they could return to every year without needing to drag their possessions with them from the city. In the summer of 1894, Edla acquired the property of Kirjola in Johannes parish, on the Karelian isthmus. It was 1,000 hectares in extent and situated in a bay of an archipelago thirty kilometres south of Viborg. The area was well known to the family, who in the years immediately preceding had spent the summers in the vicinity of Viborg and the Saima canal. Kirjola soon became the Nobels’ other base in addition to their house in St Petersburg. Edla and the children went there every year in May.25 The property included a large manor-house of wood and two further wooden houses, the ‘Big Villa’ and the ‘Small Villa’. Edla promptly initiated an ambitious renovation project. ‘She is busy creating a little paradise for herself here’, noted Torbern Fegræus after a visit in the summer of 1895 – ‘but it’s costing a lot.’26 Ten years after its acquisition, the old house was pulled down and a new main building of brick was erected to designs by, and under the direction of, the same Gustaf Nyström who had designed Marta’s clinic. It was ready by 1905: an imposing villa with twenty rooms and all modern conveniences.

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It was at Kirjola in the summer of 1908 that Maja Huss began her employment with Edla’s sister, Lilly. This is how the observant nurse described her first impressions, immediately after arriving by boat from Viborg: Mrs Nobel met me at St Johannes, where the boat puts in, and then we drove like racehorses to Kirjola – the coach swayed from one side of the road to the other – sand and stones flew around so that you could hardly see the sky. I was so glad when the manor-house came into view with the Swedish flag over it. . . . Everything here is so magnificently fitted out and at the same time comfortable with electric light, central heating, sauna, hot bath and cold bath, etc. There is a chaos of people. Nine grandchildren from four nations – five women teachers from three nations and daddies and mummies of all sorts.27 The Nobels lived at Kirjola in the same grand style as in the capital. The dinner table, as in the capital, had places for twenty-eight guests and dinner was served at 2 p.m. by a German waiter in white gloves. Supper was taken at 7 p.m. when evening dress was obligatory. Afterwards they drove in a coach, a motor boat or went sailing. At 9 p.m. they gathered again for tea and fruit and at 10 they parted for the night. ‘Wine was generally not drunk on weekdays,’ Marta recollected, ‘but if there was an opened bottle of red wine it was served after madam’s rhetorical question [to the servant]: “Hugo! Haben wir eine geöffnete Flasche Wein?” – “Jawohl, gnädige Frau!” But as one bottle never sufficed for the many guests at table Hugo had to open another bottle and then usually there was some left over for the following day, after which the manoeuvre was repeated.’28

FIGURE 12.6 Kirjola, built in 1905.

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FIGURE 12.7 The staircase in Kirjola with the portrait of Ludvig, painted posthumously by Nikolai Shakhovskoy.

According to Maja Huss, all members of the family were ‘incredibly simple’ – there was ‘no haughtiness or over-refinement’. However, they were monarchists, she declared, not democrats. With two exceptions: Georgi and Marta, who ‘live for the workers utterly and completely’. The newcomer noted and described with mild forgiveness the contrast between the upper-class life lived on Kirjola and the asceticism that Georgi, the amateur botanist, practised out on the little island he rowed to every evening and that bore his name, ‘Georgi’s Island’: To the family’s great sorrow he is a revolutionary and has even been imprisoned. Thus he is the family’s bête noire . . . The doctor has built himself a hut à la Tolstoy on an island here and he goes there in the evenings clad in a Russian blouse (to mortify the flesh in an uncomfortable bed) and comes home in the morning with stockings and shirt under his arm.29 Maja Huss was glad that the Swedish flag waved over Kirjola. Swedishness was a given for the Nobel family, who for three generations had kept up close contacts with the fatherland, and all of them except Emanuel were Swedish citizens. An example of this is the poem ‘The Swedish Flag at Kirjola’, which the twenty-yearold Emil wrote at Christmas 1905, the first Christmas they spent in the new house:

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When the wind, it whistles in Finland’s woods and the blue wave caresses the shore, and Mother labours with harrow and plough and gladly greets her kinsfolk, then shall you flutter, flag of yellow and blue, in your new garb of freedom and pride, show your cross to the squatting hare, to the black grouse that coos to its bride. Show to friends from the Swedish soil that we hold dear the land of our fathers, that honoured you are on a foreign strand, that the Swede lives where you have been hoisted.30

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The disturbances in St Petersburg in the winter of 1905 were not as serious as those in the Caucasus, where the strikes and riots had got out of control, but businesses in the capital were also affected by strike actions, sabotage and other interruptions. Nobel’s machine factory came off lightly as its employees had relatively favourable working conditions. Not for nothing had the Nobels been granted the right to use the national coat of arms for the third time at the Industrial Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896, with the justification that they had a ‘considerate attitude to their workers’. However, there was no question of giving the said workers influence over production and personnel issues. Yet as a concession to the new social climate a workers’ committee was set up at the machine factory with the task of ‘eliminating misunderstandings between the factory management and the workers’ and deciding on ‘remuneration for new articles of production’.1 The Naphtha Company celebrated not only the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the business but also its thirtieth anniversary in 1909. It was in that same year that Emanuel had his fiftieth birthday. These anniversaries were also celebrated with pomp and circumstance and with the production of magnificent volumes similar to those published in 1904, one about the Naphtha Company and one about Emanuel’s birthday. In 1912 there was yet another date to celebrate: the fiftieth anniversary of the machine factory, it too commemorated with a handsomely-produced book. During these years, the machine factory was the world’s biggest manufacturer of diesel engines. Nobel’s engines were installed in an acetylene factory in St Petersburg, in rolling mills in Moscow and in textile mills in Tsaritsyn. Powerstations in Moscow, Astrakhan, Kherson and other cities were equipped with 400 horsepower engines while flour mills in country districts were powered by engines with lesser capacity. After his success with the tanker barges Vandal and Sarmat,

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FIGURE 13.1 Illustration in the magnificent volume published for Emanuel’s fiftieth birthday.

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Wilhelm Hagelin drew up plans for a tanker ship powered by 500-horsepower engines, four times bigger than anything else on the Caspian Sea. When Emanuel and the board of directors opposed the idea, Hagelin turned to the Kolomna shipyard, from whose dock the world’s first diesel-powered tanker Delo (Action) was launched in the summer of 1908. Its success persuaded Branobel’s board that they had been mistaken to oppose the project and Hagelin was given responsibility for modernizing the Nobel trading fleet, which in the course of a few years grew to one of the world’s largest: of the sixteen vessels that were driven by engines in 1912 with a capacity of over 600 horsepower, fourteen were Russian, equipped with Nobel’s diesels. Three years later, the Nobel fleet consisted of altogether 350 vessels of various kinds. Only the Russian navy had at their disposal a greater tonnage.2 It was also the Russian navy that was responsible for the machine factory’s largest orders during the decade after the defeat in the war against Japan when almost the whole Russian fleet had been lost. With a degree of foresight unusual for the Russian military leadership they decided to invest in diesel power. Just as the government during the Crimean War and the Russo-Turkish War had placed large orders with Immanuel and Ludvig they now turned to Emanuel with an order for thirty-two engines for gunboats in the Siberian Amur fleet, which had been severely decimated after the war. As the order was too big for the machine factory alone to handle, the commission was shared with the Kolomna shipyard, which built boats to designs by the Nobel engineers. The first gunboat was delivered in 1908 and in the following year a Nobel diesel engine was installed in Russia’s first submarine, Minoga. In the next few years, the pressure of orders from the military was so great that the factory was forced to sideline the needs of the civil market, which meant that the Naphtha Company could also only count on receiving deliveries of smaller diesel engines. Besides the diesel engines, which over the years would turn into the machine factory’s specialism, production continued of traditional workshop products like wheels and coach axles, pumps, valves, armour plating and so forth. Over the years, the operation became so comprehensive and diversified, and the orders from the navy so important for its finances, that in October 1912, the same year in which the factory celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, it was restructured as a limited company. The founder of the company and the chairman of the board was Emanuel and their starting capital of 4 million roubles consisted of 8,000 shares at 500 roubles each. Of these, Emanuel owned 6,000 while Rolf, Emil and Lullu (who was a member of the board) had 600 each. The company was thus controlled completely by the family, who owned 7,800 of the 8,000 shares. Just as with the Naphtha Company, the original shareholders had the right to buy in advance when new shares were issued, which guaranteed that the Ludvig Nobel Machine Factory Ltd remained in the family’s hands.3

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FIGURE 13.2 The family assembled in St Petersburg on Emanuel’s fiftieth birthday on 10 June 1909. Sitting from left: Rolf, Emil, Marta, Hans Olsen, Edla, Emanuel, Anna, Walter Ahlqvist. Standing from left: Georgi Oleinikov, Mina Olsen, Lullu, Ingrid Ahlqvist, Gösta, Minnie Nobel, Hjalmar Sjögren.

The turnover for the first fourteen months was 2,926,000 roubles (about £2.1 million today). Eighty-eight per cent of this sum was made up of sales of eighty-one diesel engines, of which thirty-four were delivered to the navy. Despite all the orders, however, the financial position of the factory was unstable and when Emanuel was no longer willing to inject more credit than he had already done – 751,000 roubles to begin with, all in all close to 2 million (£1.5 million today) – St Petersburg’s Discount Bank intervened in 1916 as lender and half-owner. The amassing of new share capital was connected with a project that Emanuel and the Discount Bank both entered into as part owners. The state-owned Neva Works in St Petersburg and the Baltic Works in Reval (Tallinn) had shown themselves to be incapable of satisfying the navy’s requirement of a new battle fleet in time and help was sought from private machine workshops. As we saw, however, none of these had enough capacity on their own to fulfil the need. At about the same time as the machine factory was being restructured as a limited company, therefore, the idea was conceived of a new business that could exploit the potential

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of two workshops with similar aims but different specialisms: the machine factories of Ludvig Nobel and G.A. Lessner. G.A. Lessner Ltd, founded by the German Gustav Lessner in 1853 (see the Chapter 4) was situated not far from Nobel’s machine factory on Samson Quay and was one of the biggest factories in the capital. Like Nobel, they manufactured products for civilian use as well as war materiel for the Russian military. The first category included petrol and paraffin engines. In collaboration with the German Daimler company, they also made Russia’s first automobile (which, however, was not a success because of its high price and poor demand). Military production consisted largely of underwater mines and torpedoes that were employed successfully during the Russo-Turkish war. At this time the factory was owned by Gustav Lessner’s four sons. Of these, Artur was employed for two decades with Branobel, first as technical head in Baku and from 1904 at the Balakhani oilfields. During the years 1907–14 he was managing director in Baku and on his return to the capital he took up his place on the board of Branobel. Artur Lessner was born in 1867 and thus belonged to the same generation as Carl Nobel. The idea behind the planned company was to use Lessner’s and Nobel’s expertise in their capacity as Russia’s largest manufacturers of torpedoes and diesel engines respectively. That the fuel for the engines was supplied by the Naphtha Company was a significant case of synergy.4 A key person in the founding of the new company was Mikhail Plotnikov, technical engineer, director of the Discount Bank and someone with profound knowledge of everything to do with mechanics and machine construction. He also had excellent contacts in the Ministry of the Navy and an ability to get his way that made him the envy of colleagues as well as rivals. The limited company, which was given the name Noblessner, was founded in 1912. The choice of Lessner as a partner for Nobel, in view of the factory’s specialization, was well motivated from an economic point of view. Moreover, the founders of the company had had close relations even earlier. Plotnikov was not only a director of St Petersburg’s Discount Bank but also Lessner’s technical head and adviser to the managing director. Charles Nellis, an earlier member of Branobel’s board, was also on the board of G.A. Lessner as a representative of Nobel’s machine factory. In addition, the families socialized privately. The capital’s workshop world was small, which meant that the new company was as much a personal as a business union. ‘The Lessner family lived almost next-door to us in St Petersburg, there were only two factories between us, and [the Lessner brothers] have all danced at our balls, and God knows they all flirted with my sisters,’ Gösta Nobel recalled.5 In the draft of the company’s articles of association it was stated that the chairman of the board could be a subject of a foreign country, but this clause was rejected by the Ministry of Trade and Industry, who laid down that all board members had to be ‘Russian subjects of non-Jewish faith’. State-sponsored Russian

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anti-Semitism was not to be denied. The board was therefore to consist exclusively of Russian subjects, with Emanuel and Plotnikov as directors. Their initial capital was 3 million roubles, consisting of 30,000 shares at 100 roubles each. The Discount Bank owned 10,000 shares and two of the bank’s board members owned 3,000 each while the rest were spread among a number of individuals, among them Emanuel (3,000) and Lullu (1,000). The new factory was built outside the naval base in Reval. By offering high wages they managed to attract a large number of top engineers from other shipyards, including Russia’s leading designer of submarines, Major General and professor at the Naval Academy Ivan Bubnov. In September 1912, Noblessner received an order for four submarines and during the course of 1913 for another twelve. The most difficult commission fell to Nobel’s machine factory, which was forced to expand its workshops and procure new equipment. Although the Discount Bank, as we saw, became the owner of half the company in 1916, by the end of the same year only eight of the twenty submarines ordered had been delivered.6

The king and his princes The founding of Noblessner led to the price of the Naphtha Company’s 5,000 rouble shares climbing to 15,961 roubles in that year and to 20,513 roubles the following year, i.e. more than four times the nominal value. In a few years, through the creation of three new limited companies (the Ludvig Nobel machine factory, Noblessner and Alfa-Nobel) Emanuel had fundamentally altered the structure of the Nobel family’s businesses. From now on they were contained in a concern with the Naphtha Company as its hub and economic driving-force. The guarantee that everything would hold together was the head of the family, Emanuel, crowned as he was with innumerable laurels, and with his unique position in Russian commercial life and his excellent contacts in the highest circles of government. He was, as a Russian economic historian has put it, ‘deeply integrated into Russia’s financial circles and power structures, with access to information priceless to his partners and an ability to use this in the running of his enormous industrial, trading and transport empire’.7 In the years around 1910, Branobel was by far the highest-rated company quoted on the Russian stockexchange with a total market value of almost 150 million roubles.8 This corresponds to around £1.2 billion today (insofar as it is at all possible to make a reasonable estimate for an enterprise of that size). As long as Emanuel’s father, his brother Carl and his uncles were alive there had been counterbalancing forces within the family businesses, but this was no longer the case. There were counterbalancing forces within the boards of directors of the businesses, but not within the family. Here Emanuel was king – a king without a queen (he never married), surrounded by the queen mother Edla and four princes,

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his younger half-brothers Lullu, Rolf, Emil and Gösta. There had been another two brothers, the twins Peter and Alexander, but they had died in 1877, only one year old. Three girls too had died in infancy: Marta in 1879, Svea in 1881 and Edla Ludovica in 1885, but the women played no part in the family’s business activities. The age difference between Emanuel and his half-brothers was very great, between fifteen and twenty-seven years – the three youngest could have been his sons. Eventually it became time for them too to become involved in the family businesses and to shoulder their responsibility. It was no easy task. Emanuel had had difficulty making a name for himself in a family consisting of such colourful and successful individuals as his father and uncle. Doubts about his abilities had, as we saw, been aired not only among professionals but also inside the family. For Emanuel’s younger brothers the difficulties were even greater, as the man who owned and ran the business was their own brother. That disagreements should arise was therefore almost inevitable.9 Lullu, born in 1874, was the eldest. His schooling was not a success story and in the best Nobel tradition he was removed from the Annenschule after a while and placed in the machine factory. Afterwards he gained experience at Avesta ironworks in Sweden and in 1893 he did his military service as a bicycle orderly in the Svea Lifeguards. In Stockholm he carried out preparatory technical studies but did not receive any proper education. One summer he was taught chemistry at Kirjola by one of Branobel’s leading Baku engineers, Knut Malm. When Lullu returned to St Petersburg in 1896, the machine factory had lost its manager, with the death of Carl, which made it difficult to seem relevant to ‘a youth with Lullu’s less than eager inclination for work’ – his sister Marta’s characterization of him – who moreover lacked the necessary theoretical knowledge. Hans Olsen painted the following picture of him: ‘Lullu Nobel was not specially trained for any profession, the closest was engineering which he was engaged in from a young age at the Ludvig Nobel machine factory in St Petersburg. And his position there was really unclear, a great cause of concern to both himself and his mother, who often talked to me about it.’10 Lullu later became a member of the board of Alfa-Nobel and when in 1912 the machine factory was restructured into a limited company he took up his place on the board there too, but according to Marta he lacked ‘the consistency that a real boss must demonstrate in order to lead the work effectively’. In addition, Emanuel, because of his commitment to the Naphtha Company, paid less attention to the machine factory. With his conservative and generally indecisive nature he regularly turned down the suggestions for change and the ideas that Lullu came up with, something that according to Marta ‘had a depressing effect on one’s pleasure in the work and dedication to it’. However, the younger brother did manage to get the support for certain suggestions, among others, the setting-up of a new pig-iron foundry with electric ovens for forging steel. Disappointed by Emanuel’s treatment of him he devoted himself to building, with

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(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

FIGURE 13.3 (a) Lullu; (b) Rolf; (c) Emil; (d) Gösta.

the help of four of the factory’s engineers, a motor boat with a reversible diesel engine which he hoped would be beat the world record. Lullu was a passionate Anglophile and in 1901 he married Scotswoman Minnie Johnson, daughter of the owner of a cotton mill situated opposite the machine factory. Ten years later the family was struck by tragedy: during a summer stay at Lahti in Finland both their children, Manuel and Lorna, aged seven and nine respectively, died in a fire which was said to have been caused by a forgotten flat iron. Two years later their son Alec was born.

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Rolf was born in 1882 and was therefore eight years younger than Lullu. After several years of education at home and in the Annenschule he was sent to Sweden, where in 1906 he graduated in engineering from the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. Rolf worshipped Emanuel, and according to Marta, Emanuel’s views were the word of the law as far as he was concerned. So much the greater, then, was his disillusionment when, after his return home to St Petersburg, he ended up in the same predicament as Lullu and his ideas and suggestions were ignored or rejected. When the brothers tired of Emanuel’s attitude and hinted that they could seek employment elsewhere, however, Emanuel became upset – how would it look if two Nobel brothers left the family firm! However, Rolf managed to get the odd thing carried out, for example the introduction of hydraulic presses for the fabrication of coach axles. In 1911 he married Luise Winkler, daughter of the Bavarian Karl Winkler, owner of an art metal work factory. They had four sons – Helge, Carl, Ludvig Hjalmar (known as Bubik) and Victor – as well as a daughter, Marie-Louise. Emil’s early trajectory was similar to that of his brothers: home schooling and poor marks in the Annenschule. He was born in 1885. In 1901, he and his younger brother Gösta were sent to Sweden. According to Marta, the reason was that Edla ‘thought that the atmosphere at home, such as it had become over the years thanks to the brilliant success of the Naphtha Company and Emanuel’s many social commitments, was not favourable for their growing sons’.11 In Stockholm, the boys boarded with the headmaster Carl Lundberg, who had been tutor to the sons of King Oscar II and who, thanks to his hospitality, received a set of Fabergé silverware from the Nobel family.12 Emil started at the Nya Elementar gymnasium, but his studies did not go well. The teaching that he and his brothers had received in Russia was ill-suited to Swedish study requirements and instead, in 1905, he graduated from Schartau’s commercial college. Apart from several brief visits to St Petersburg, Emil spent the next few years abroad. He did his military service in the Svea Artillery Regiment in Stockholm and worked for a short while at the Motala workshop. From 1907 to 1909 he was employed with Branobel’s agent Bessler, Waechter & Co. in London and in 1910 he stayed in Paris to learn French. He did not return to St Petersburg until 1911, where he became a member of the board of Alfa-Nobel and a part owner of the machine factory. He never married. Of the four princes, it was Gösta, who was born in 1886 and was only one-anda-half years old when his father died, who would come to play the most important role. Like his other siblings he was taught first at home and then in the Annenschule. Gösta also failed to graduate from that school but, as we saw, moved with Emil to stay with headmaster Lundberg in Stockholm. Here he passed his higher school certificate in 1906 – the only one in the family to do so! After a trip to Baku, Odessa and Kiev in the summer of that year he continued his studies at the commercial college in Cologne. This was interrupted the following spring by his military service in the Svea Lifeguards, which however he was released from following a

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knee injury. Instead, he found employment in the summer of 1907 with Knut Littorin in Branobel’s Moscow office. Two years later he graduated in Cologne with his business diploma. ‘Strangely enough,’ Gösta himself commented, ‘I passed my diploma examinations with honours after exactly three years, as one should.’13 After Gösta had obtained his business diploma he took himself off to Paris, where for the whole of 1910 he worked for Alexandre André, Branobel’s lubricating oil agent in France. His work in Russia began the following year with Littorin in Moscow, where he worked as a managing clerk. In 1914, Gösta succeeded Artur Lessner as managing director in Baku and in the fateful year of 1917, alone among Emanuel’s younger brothers, he took his place on the board of Branobel. In this capacity, a few years later, he would make a historic contribution to the Naphtha Company. If among the younger Nobel brothers there was a crown prince, it was Gösta, who, according to Emanuel, was reared to be ‘an able man’ by Wilhelm Hagelin.14

Olsen and Hagelin depart The Emperor’s October Manifesto of 1905 allowed workers to organize themselves in trades-unions. Many of these were soon taken over by professional revolutionaries and the pure ‘workers’ issues’ – wages and working conditions – were put in the shade by purely political goals. The disturbances in the Black City and out in the oil fields continued, and it took several years before production flowed more or less normally again. In Baku, chaos and anarchy broke out in the wake of the manifesto. ‘The worst rabble have been absolute cocks of the walk for the last week and have used their “Svoboda” (so-called “Freedom”) to burn down houses, loot stalls and shops – and murder, murder,’ wrote Torbern Fegræus to his brother. ‘The authorities have as usual stood powerless or without intervening have allowed the atrocities to carry on – although now they have even in the main affected the Armenians.’ Nobel’s workers and the crews of the boats came out on strike too, ‘and one doesn’t know what they might get up to, now that they believe they have “Svoboda” to do exactly what they want.’15 When the board of the company in St Petersburg threatened to close the refinery in the Black City and sack all the staff they returned to work after striking for a fortnight.16 However, the disturbances continued well into the following year. In the summer of 1906, new strikes broke out on the drilling fields and in the workshops. Emanuel, who was in Karlsbad to take the waters, was fed disturbing reports from Baku. ‘For the time being we have nothing else to do but bide our time and see who holds out longest,’ he wrote to Hagelin: The saddest thing in all this is that it is the Tatars who are pleading their cause in Baku, or rather, in Balakhani, although the Russians by contrast are more

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amenable. In the Black City we have had no trouble, neither in the Mechanical Workshop nor in the Distillation Works. . . . so far we have not noticed any unrest among the population or in the crews of our vessels on the river. There is a presumption however that as soon as the strike in Baku has ended and the work has picked up again there, there will be stagnation on the Volga. It cannot be denied that the socialist party is pursuing a systematic course of action and I would not be at all surprised if this takes place during the month of September or October.17 Although employment conditions were better at Branobel than in other oil companies the firm’s employees were not spared outrages from radical elements who were not content with peaceful protests but advocated violence and assassinations. In 1907 alone, three Swedish engineers were murdered and bosses and others received death threats. The murders were sometimes carried out by hired bandits. The lowest charge was 50 kopeks, while the murder of officials, officers, engineers, doctors and the like cost 3 roubles. The most exposed engineers, among them the bosses on the oilfields, were therefore given armed protection in the form of a mounted policeman with a cocked gun over his saddle.18 One of those who had an armed escort was Gustaf Eklundh, employed with Branobel since 1893 and since 1904 managing director in Baku. He was a skilful engineer who had made decisive contributions to the exploitation of the Balakhani oilfields, but he was extremely unpopular among the workers. ‘May he come out of here in one piece, for he is strongly disliked if anyone is,’ the engineer Gunnar Dahlgren noted in his diary.19 The situation was so threatening that in 1907 Eklundh chose to leave Baku, where that same year he was succeeded by Artur Lessner. He joined the board of the Naphtha Company, where however he only stayed for a few years before he went over to Shell. The murders of Branobel’s employees and the threats to Eklundh were a direct consequence of the political disturbances of those years, but not only that. The Caucasus had always been a dangerous area to be. In a letter to Ludvig in 1878, for example, Robert tells of a Swedish pipelayer who was attacked in the middle of the day by a gang of Tatars who were after his money. He managed, however, to get his knife out and ‘cut open the stomach of the one who was sitting astride him and at the same time cut the throat of the one who was trying to strangle him’.20 Eklundh was not the only victim of the aggravated political situation. Events had taken their toll on Wilhelm Hagelin, who was completely worn out. In addition, he was displeased with the work of the board, where other board members were interfering in what he saw as his area of competence. In the winter of 1905–6, he decided to leave the Naphtha Company and settled with his family on an estate he had obtained in Sweden. But Emanuel was unwilling to lose touch with Hagelin. He therefore sent him to the USA to recuperate and at the same time to form an impression of the situation inside the American oil industry – just as Bari and

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Törnqvist had once done on Ludvig’s initiative. His trip took Hagelin from Pennsylvania in the east to California in the west. After four months in the USA, Hagelin reported to Emanuel that many new oil deposits had been located, that test borings had given good results and that it would not be long ‘before we Russians will be overtaken: America’s production can be expected to climb to double what it is now’.21 His stay in the USA had convinced Hagelin that oil was his life’s calling and once back in Sweden he abandoned thoughts of leaving Branobel. ‘My almost six months’ absence from work had not swallowed up my feelings for my old company, rather the opposite,’ he recalled. ‘Like the old cavalry horse that heard the trumpet calls, it was impossible for me not to take part in my comrades’ forward march – and I decided to stay.’22 When Hagelin returned to Russia in September 1906, he was able to add a new title to his CV: Swedish consul-general in St Petersburg, a post which, in view of his professional background, could be seen as purely ceremonial. At this time, however, the post was separate from the purely diplomatic representation and the consul-general had as his main task to promote Swedish business. It was a new post and a result of the severing of the union between Sweden and Norway in 1905; earlier consul-generals had represented both countries. At the same time as Hagelin became Swedish consul-general, Hans Olsen, was named as Norway’s consul-general in St Petersburg, which meant that both posts were occupied by top officials of Branobel. Hagelin held his post until 1911 while Olsen left his after only two years. He had been working hard in previous years and moreover had a gloomy view of Russia’s political future. In 1908 he stepped down both as a director on the board of Branobel and as consul-general. He persuaded his wife Mina to sell a large part of her shareholding in the Naphtha Company, corresponding to a million Swedish kronor or £4 million today. They moved to Norway’s capital Kristiania, where they had a magnificent villa built in the Jugendstil. When in 1924 they moved to Stockholm it was sold to the United States government and since then it has been the residence of the American ambassador. The address in Kristiania was 28 Nobel Street, which was hardly a coincidence. After so many years in the service of Branobel ,Hans Olsen’s identification with the Nobel family was almost total, and after a year in Norway his children Alf, Edla and Leif were allowed ‘with royal permission’ to take their mother’s surname. ‘When you . . . now assume such a respected surname as that of Nobel, you also assume thereby the duty to safeguard it, cultivate it and do everything you can not to dishonour it, but to keep it pure, unsullied and highly honoured,’ he impressed on them.23 The move to Norway did not mean that Hans Olsen sat twiddling his thumbs. He was an energetic person with considerable business experience and after he had rested and recovered his strength, he became involved once again in industry, e.g. in Norsk Hydro. Rothschild’s had major interests there and Olsen’s experience of negotiations with the French banking house came in handy.

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Economic growth After the situation in the Caucasus had gradually quietened down, a period of strong economic growth began in Russia, due to Prime Minister Stolypin’s agricultural reforms, which led to the old village communities being dissolved and the peasants encouraged to get their own land to cultivate. The result was such a large increase in wheat production that income from the export of wheat surpassed that generated by oil exports. In the years up to the outbreak of the First World War, Russia, along with Sweden, was one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies. For Sweden, moreover, Russia was an important export market. The Swedish market was small and Russia’s geographical proximity and growing economy offered great potential.24 During these years the Nobel concern also stood at the pinnacle of its industrial and economic might. Decreased oil production, which was a result not only of the political and ethnic disturbances but also had natural causes – a decrease in pressure in the oil deposits – had the consequence that oil prices rose as well as the dividend, which in 1907 was once again 20 per cent. In that year, the Naphtha Company represented a third of the capacity of Baku’s twenty largest refineries and by the time of their thirtieth anniversary two years later they had no fewer than thirteen different plants in the Black City: five refineries, five chemical works, a gasworks, a sawmill, a cooperage and a workshop. The refineries consisted of seven separate buildings which were so big that Robert Nobel’s little two-ton refinery had been fitted into a little corner of them.25 The ‘thirty years’ war’ over the oil market that began in the 1880s continued for a few more years. While the small producers had difficulties dealing with the decrease in production Branobel and the other larger-scale producers managed better because of their bigger margins and their possibilities for moving their workforce around. At the same time the decreased production meant a smaller share of the world market. The year after the revolution of 1905, Russian oil exports were only a seventh of American exports, half as big as three years earlier. At this point there were also more players in the court, in particular the Romanian company Steaua-Romana. Large deposits had been found in Romania. The majority of shares in Steaua-Romana were owned by Deutsche Bank, which opposed Nobel’s, Rothschild’s and Mantashev’s plans to establish themselves in the country and obtain control of the Romanian deposits. At the same time the Germans were keen to check Standard Oil’s influence in Europe and therefore sought to collaborate with Branobel and BNITO. June 1906 saw the setting-up of the European Petroleum Union (EPU), which was structured on the same principles as the lubricating oil union SAIC. Market shares and delivery quotas were decided, oil depots and tanker fleets were amalgamated, and the market was divided up. Branobel had 36 per cent of EPU, Rothschild 29 per cent and Deutsche Bank 28 per cent.

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FIGURE 13.4 Branobel’s successes manifested themselves in, for example, the erection of a magnificent new building, the first since the ‘house on the quay’. The Naphtha Company had an office in Baku but the head office was in St Petersburg, where it was housed in the office part of the building on Samson Quay and where the machine factory’s office was also located. As Branobel developed into an international business the workforce also grew and more room was needed. Emanuel therefore charged Fredrik Lidvall with designing a separate head office for the firm. Lidvall, a few years earlier, had designed the Nobels’ dwelling house on Nystad Street as well as the Swedish congregation’s dwelling house on Little Stableyard Street, and after the death of Karl Andersson he was the Nobels’ favourite architect. The fine new office was put up on Catherine canal, opposite the ‘Swedish quarter’ on the other side of the canal.

With Steaua-Romana, Branobel and BNITO under one umbrella, the EPU was able to confront Standard Oil, which was now forced to deal with a large organization instead of with individual oil producers. In the years after the formation of the EPU a number of agreements were reached with Standard Oil’s distributors and daughter companies which put an end to the decade-long price war. However, the decrease in Russian oil production meant that the EPU had to content themselves with 25 per cent of the European market, while Standard Oil got the remaining 75 per cent. The pill was hard to swallow for the Russian side, but there was no choice. Russia was simply no longer pumping out enough oil. Rothschild’s now invited

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Branobel to take over their holdings in Russia in exchange for shares, but the offer was turned down by Emanuel, who could not see any logistical or financial advantages to it. Added to that was the political uncertainty in the country. Emanuel’s decision was supported by Hans Olsen, who recommended him to invest instead in a different project: to take over the markets in the Far East together with the Parisian banking house, Shell and Royal Dutch. However, this also failed to win favour from Emanuel. He probably lacked knowledge of and interest in that part of the world. Perhaps he also feared to do business with the head of Royal Dutch, Henri Deterding, a brilliant businessman and organizer nicknamed ‘the Napoleon of oil’ and known for his toughness.26

New deposits The focus was now instead on Russia, where new oil deposits had been discovered. The biggest were in Grozny in Chechnya, 600 kilometres north of Baku, in Maykop, almost 600 kilometres west of Grozny, and in the Emba district on the north-east coast of the Caspian Sea in western Kazakhstan. The British, who had been late in arriving in Baku, were the first to exploit the new fields. However, Branobel also invested heavily and in the summer of 1912 test drilling began on the fields that the company’s naphtha geologists Torbern Fegræus and Frithiof Anderson (Nobel’s ‘Geological bureau’) had chosen. Four years later the oilfields in Grozny and Emba were the most productive in Russia after Baku. As a result of the exploitation of the deposits in Maykop and Grozny Batum’s importance as a port of shipment diminished. From Grozny it was closer to the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, and Maykop was only 100 kilometres from another Black Sea port, Tuapse. The decreased oil production in Baku and the decrease in exports gradually made the port in Batum less profitable, and when BNITO, 80 per cent of which was owned by Rothschild’s, moved production to Maykop and Grozny, its history as a leading port of shipment was over. By 1911 Rothschild’s history as a Russian oil firm was also over. BNITO, the Mazut Company and the whole infrastructure were sold – not to Branobel, but to Deterding, which paid 27.5 million roubles for the majority shareholding in the company, ten tankers, forty barges, 800,000 tons of storage space, 436,000 tons of crude oil and 338,000 of refined oil. This did not even correspond to half of Branobel’s resources but was an important complement to Royal Dutch Shell, as the company was now called after the merger between Shell and Royal Dutch in 1907. Rothschild’s also got a good deal as the payment was not in money but in shares in Royal Dutch Shell, securely located in western Europe. ‘After 27 years of profits during the golden age of the Russian oil industry Rothschild knew when it was time to pull out,’ Robert W. Tolf states in his book about Branobel. ‘A few years later they would have lost everything.’27

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World war The Naphtha Company’s production in the decade after their twenty-fifth anniversary was characterized by stabilization and consolidation rather than by technical development. The struggle for the overseas markets was over, but on the home front Branobel was being pressurized from several directions. The greatest threat came from a London-based holding company, Russian General Oil Corporation (RGO), which collected a large number of independent Russian oil producers under its umbrella, among them Mantashev, Lianozov, Mirzoev and Gukasov, thereby gaining access to an impressive infrastructure of tankers, depots and refineries. In 1914, RGO tried, by acquiring a large number of Branobel shares, to vote out the Naphtha Company’s management, but the company’s shareholders and a number of banks expressed solidarity with Emanuel and the board, and the attempt failed. When, after the failed coup attempt, the Russian-Asiatic Bank instead invited Branobel to take over its shareholding in RGO – which Emanuel, after Hagelin and Olsen talked him into it, agreed to – the Naphtha Company on the contrary gained control of RGO. Thereafter Branobel controlled over a half of Russia’s oil industry. The Nobel concern grew even more during these years through acquisitions of majority shareholdings in smaller companies and founding of daughter companies. Apart from the four large companies – Branobel, the Ludvig Nobel Machine Factory, Alfa-Nobel and Noblessner – through shareholdings the concern came to control over a dozen other companies with a link to the oil industry. The expansion was costly. The share capital, which ever since 1880 had been 15 million roubles, rose in 1912 to double that amount. Old shareholders were entitled to advance buying of shares whose price was fixed at 449 roubles 70 kopeks, compared with the 1879 nominal value of 250 roubles.28 At this point, Branobel presided over an empire that owned, controlled or had major interests in businesses with 50,000 employees and that produced a third of Russia’s crude oil and 40 per cent of the refined oil. A third of all paraffin, a quarter of fuel oil and over a half of the lubricating oils were shipped via Branobel’s extensive transport system, so ingeniously thought out by Robert, Ludvig and Hagelin.29 The accelerating economic development is illustrated by the following figures: it took twenty-five years before the value of their resources reached 100 million (1904), but only a decade before the 200-million mark was surpassed (1914).30 This development would come to a sudden halt. On 28 June 1914 the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was murdered by Serbian nationalists. Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to the Serbian government which meant that they must deal with the subversive forces who threatened the territorial security of the empire. Germany lent its weight to the demands, while Russia supported Orthodox Serbia. When Serbia refused to make concessions, AustriaHungary declared war. When Germany then declared war on Russia and France, Britain took their side and went to war against Austria-Hungary and Germany.

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The First World War had broken out, the Russian capital’s name was changed to the more Russian-sounding Petrograd and the country mobilized. Emanuel, who was staying at Professor Dapper’s famous sanatorium at Bad Kissingen, rushed home to St Petersburg. ‘Stories about the way in which Germans are treating Russians who were not fortunate enough to escape in time are causing indignation and despair here in the highest degree,’ he reported to Marcus Wallenberg on his arrival home.31 To help Nobel employees who were in western Europe to get back to Russia, Emanuel chartered boats with the help of a shipping company in Stockholm. In the Russian wartime economy, both the machine factory and the Naphtha Company played important strategic roles. The former produced diesel engines and war materiel for the military and Branobel delivered oil. Already during the early days Branobel was ordered to increase production and deliver as much oil as possible to industrial enterprises in St Petersburg, which were threatening to cease production since the British coal deliveries had ceased. The Russian coal had to be transported by rail and the railways were busy with military transports. It was easier with fuel oil, which could be transported along the country’s waterways. ‘We bought up all the barges that could be used on canals, expanded our storage facilities of mazut on the upper Volga and in St Petersburg,’ Hagelin recalled. ‘St Petersburg’s industry, as long as it was “working for the war”, now received the mazut it was able to use without needing to use the railways.’32 Alongside its traditional products, Branobel was tasked with producing a new one. The hydrocarbon toluene was used in the production of explosives, but Russia had no production of its own; before the war all toluene had been imported from Germany. The substance was extracted from coal tar, where it was found readymade, and factories were set up in Russia’s coal fields. Branobel was asked by the high command of the Artillery to build a factory in Baku to try to extract the substance from naphtha tar, something that had never been done before. The factory was to be ready within a very short time. The job went to Knut Malm, one of the company’s leading naphtha engineers, and production came on stream on the appointed date. ‘We were the only ones who were ready with all our buildings,’ Gösta Nobel recalled.33 During the work, interestingly enough, Malm had found drawings by Ludvig from the 1880s about the production of toluene from naphtha.34 As early as the end of September 1914, Emanuel went off to Baku to put the company on a war footing. With him were Gösta and his family – his wife Eugenie, called Zhenya, and children Alfred, Gunnar and Nina.35 After fourteen days, Emanuel returned to St Petersburg but Gösta stayed behind in Baku, where he replaced Artur Lessner as local manager. The war had led to strong anti-German feeling in Russia, German-owned land was confiscated, and German-owned businesses shut down, places with German names were given new Russian names and hundreds of thousands of Germans settled in the border areas were deported.

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To allow Lessner to stay on with responsibility for the strategically important Baku office was in this situation impossible. The Russian economy continued to grow for a while after the outbreak of war, but gradually its inherent weaknesses betrayed themselves: it was too small and undeveloped to be able to fund a war which was expected to be short but proved to be long-drawn-out. The German, French and British governments earmarked more than a third of their national income for military ends, but Russia was not capable of such an effort. After some initial successes Russia was hit by severe defeats and major territorial losses. In the spring of 1915, Poland, Galicia and Lithuania were occupied by German troops and by the end of the summer the Russian army had lost four million men. One reason for the setbacks was the lack of weapons. In the summer of 1915 this led to the creation of a national system of ‘Military-industrial committees’, the purpose of which was to mobilize the private business world for the requirements of the war and to co-ordinate work between the state authorities and the 1,300 large- and medium-sized industrial enterprises that were connected with the committee. Just as with the founding of the Octobrist Party, Emanuel and Alexander Guchkov had prominent roles here, the former as a member of the committees’ central organization and the latter as its chairman. Their slogan was ‘Everything for the Front, Everything for Victory’. The problem was that when all resources were invested in the military front, the home front was left to suffer. The Nobel’s civil production fell in the wake of the war economy. Although the machine factory was working three shifts, they could not satisfy civilian society’s need for machines, and because of the general economic disorder and the rouble being reduced to half of its value Alfa-Nobel was forced to close its branches in Warsaw, Odessa and Riga.36 The decreased production of agricultural machinery led to a food shortage, raised prices and social unrest. ‘It was not the result of any conscious strategy to lower the living standard of the people,’ writes one economic historian, ‘but a consequence of war mobilization with limited resources.’37 The war turned into a catastrophe for Russia, but for the Nobel businesses that lived on government orders all was well. The machine factory’s book value doubled and by the end of 1915 had gone up to 11,690,000 roubles. By this stage the rouble had lost 50 per cent of its value, but the sum still amounted to about £37 million in today’s values. By the end of 1914, two funds had been opened that would be used for investments in the business; one year later these funds contained 830,000 roubles (£2.7 million today). Noblessner was also doing very well. During 1915 their book value increased by 64 per cent to 21,000,000 roubles or almost a £800 million today. The dividend was 8 per cent.38 As for the Naphtha Company, the government orders meant that things went even better. In 1915, 70 per cent of Branobel’s production went for military requirements39 and during the war years the dividends hit record highs: 25 per

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cent in 1914, 30 per cent in 1915 and in 1916 all of 40 per cent. In the last year the profit was 75 million, of which 50 million was paid out as dividend and 25 million was set aside in a reserve fund. Even taking into account the fall in value of the rouble, the result was impressive: 75 million in profit with a share capital of 45 (it had increased by another 15 million by 1916).40

Consumer societies and hospitals The Nobels’ businesses contributions to the war were not confined to deliveries of oil and war materiel. The social institutions were also put on a war footing. The co-operative societies in the ‘Nobel towns’ adjusted their activities in line with commodity shortages and periods of high living costs. The workers were able to borrow up to 2,000 roubles interest free and the prices of some goods were lowered. Also, during the war the family’s work for the public benefit took a new direction. In November 1914, a Red Cross hospital for wounded soldiers was opened in Nobel’s People’s House under the direction of Marta and her husband. In the autumn of 1915, it had 180 beds. During the first year of the war over 800 soldiers were treated for their wounds. Wounded men were also treated in the eye clinic that was set up with Marta’s money.41 Wilhelm Hagelin too, and other members of the management of the Nobel businesses, among them Mikhail Beliamin junior, organized medical facilities in the capital at their own expense. Likewise, medical services were set up in Baku and in other places where the Naphtha Company was represented. The Nobel businesses also set aside considerable sums for ‘cultural and educational ends’ during the war. It was an attempt to deal with the growing discontent among their workers, whom the high cost of living and war setbacks had rendered susceptible to radical propaganda. For three days around Christmas and New Year 1915–16 there was a strike in the machine factory. It was a new type of strike: no financial demands were put forward and the workers’ leaders, who normally pleaded the employees’ cause, were not allowed to be present. Instead, those who turned up at the factory office, according to Emanuel, were ‘new people altogether, boys of 18 to 20, who had been in the workshop for three days’. The whole thing ended with everyone being sacked – ‘to enable a thinning-out, but whether this will lead to any positive result is a question mark’, Emanuel reported to Hagelin.42 The question mark was justified. They were no longer dealing now with workers’ leaders fighting for improved working and living conditions, i.e. traditional workers’ and trade union issues, but with professional agitators whose main objective was overturning the prevailing social order. Against these forces, as we shall see, the firm’s funds for ‘cultural and educational ends’ had little to oppose.

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FIGURE 13.5 and 13.6 During the First World War, Nobel’s People’s House was converted into a Red Cross hospital where Marta and Georgi Oleinikov worked as doctors.

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14 ANNO 1917

‘Up there in the right-hand corner of the letter I am writing for the first time anno 1917. May it be a year of peace and be called so, by the young people too, when they learn history in school,’ Emanuel wrote on 1 January 1917 from Petrograd to Edla, who was at Kirjola. ‘Here this turn of the year will bring with it its own history which will no doubt be difficult and dark, but it is under just such circumstances that a desire for well-being in the coming year is not just a conventional slogan.’1 Emanuel’s hope came to nothing: peace did not arrive in 1917, but his prophecy about a difficult and dark history came true in a way that not even the worst prophet of doom could have imagined. Before the year was at an end Russia had been devastated by what his father had foreseen twenty years earlier: the revolution that ‘sweeps away all wealth and all private ownership in one go’.2 Three months after Emanuel wrote his letter to Edla, on 8 March, a demonstration was held in Petrograd in connection with International Women’s Day. The demonstrating women were demanding bread and peace. In the next few days new demonstrations took place. All were put down with force. On 12 March, the Pavlovsk garrison refused to obey orders to shoot at civilians and already by that same day large parts of Petrograd were in the hands of the garrison. The following day, the unrest spread to Moscow. Two days later Nicholas II abdicated. The 300-year-old Romanov dynasty was at an end. Within the course of a week Tsarist Russia – misgoverned, corrupt through and through, split asunder by unbridgeable social gulfs – had collapsed like a house of cards. The ‘February Revolution’ – so-called because, according to the Julian calendar, it started thirteen days earlier, in February – was a fact. It excited great enthusiasm in a broad spectrum of social classes and hopes of thoroughgoing political and social changes. There was a general feeling of freedom in the air, of political spring. There were concrete demands made of the new government: the supply situation must be improved, and the war won or brought to an honourable conclusion. Exactly how the political future would look in a post-Tsarist Russia, nobody knew. Few were prepared for the collapse of the empire, which was not unexpected but

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which happened so suddenly. ‘With a calmness that typifies great and solemn events the whole enormous country abandoned the old and embraced the new in less than a week,’ wrote the philosopher Lev Shestov.3 Albin Herlitz, a Swedish entrepreneur in St Petersburg, reported to his wife in Stockholm a week after the outbreak of revolution that he could not make his way home from the office because of the hail of bullets: ‘I will never forget the continuous firing of rifles, machine-guns and artillery during the night of Monday into Tuesday.’ At the same time, he could not help being impressed by how quickly everything had gone, ‘so that you can believe it’s true that Russia is now living free without gendarmes, police & secret police, which have all been destroyed by the people – while the young students are forming a militia’. There is already ‘a surprising orderliness & one hears of no plundering of private houses like in 1905, the soldiers do not have to salute officers when not on duty etc. – just like after the French Revolution’. No Swede, he added, had ‘suffered bodily injury as far as is known today’.4 There are also reports about shootings in Hagelin’s notes from these March days. Mrs Beliamina’s nephew was killed by a stray bullet while standing at the window watching the life in the streets and Hagelin himself was forced to throw himself to the ground when he ended up in crossfire. At the Hotel Europa Emanuel met General Gustaf Mannerheim, who was on his way to the front. The hall porter advised him to leave immediately as ‘they are going around in the hotel looking for officers’. Emanuel took Mannerheim with him to the Naphtha Company’s head office, which was around the corner, and sent for his own clothes for the general. The problem was that Emanuel was rather short and sturdy and his clothes were a poor fit for the tall and clothes-conscious Mannerheim, who instead of immediately making himself scarce took the utmost care in choosing a tie.5 Just like Herlitz, after about a week Hagelin was able to state that ‘the worst of it must be over’. On 15 March Nicholas II abdicated and a ‘provisional government’ led by Prince Lvov and with Alexander Guchkov as minister for war and Alexander Kerensky as justice minister was formed. Emanuel’s party colleague Guchkov was one of those who negotiated the Emperor’s abdication. On 17 March, Hagelin noted: ‘Today we – the naphtha industrialists – should combine our interests and organize the transport of our products all over the country.’6 Even if, in Hagelin’s words, it ‘became relatively quiet in the country, as the new regime was recognized everywhere’, the situation had fundamentally changed. Simultaneously with the building of the new regime, in the factories workers’ and soldiers’ councils were formed which were to constitute a parallel power structure; over time there came into being a ‘dual government’. It was these workers’ committees that the employers, ‘the capitalists’, had to deal with, and it was their growing influence that prepared the ground for the Bolshevik seizure of power in October of the same year.

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As soon as the disturbances in Petrograd had abated, Hagelin travelled to Baku to ‘try to fix the difficult work question’. It was mostly the intellectuals, he recalled, who rejoiced in the political turnaround, among the workers ‘there was no sign of enthusiasm’, through ‘the strikes that had been more or less forced on them they had fought for better living conditions, but they had no thought of revolution’. In Baku, in contrast to Petrograd, therefore, it was ‘fairly quiet’ and after some compromising the Naphtha Company and the workers’ committee were able to achieve a deal that satisfied both sides. As business was good, the increased cost of wages was not something that worried the company. The price of oil was high and the dividend for 1916 was, as we saw, 40 per cent – something they did all they could to hide from their competitors! When Hagelin left Baku after a couple of months in the city it was, ironically enough, on the tanker K.W. Hagelin – ‘not suspecting that I was travelling on that boat for the last time and that I would not see Baku again’.7 Biographical details about the Nobel family from this time are few and far between. Edla spent the years of war and revolution at Kirjola and Emanuel spent the winter and spring of 1917 in Petrograd. In July he travelled to the popular health resort of Yessentuki in the north Caucasus, where he rented a large villa where ‘everything is furnished and pleasantly fitted out, i.e. it matches the expectations that one is allowed to have at present’.8 For company on the journey he had Miss Anastasia Karelina, his housekeeper and his younger brothers’ Russian teacher. In previous years Emanuel had relaxed at West European health resorts, and as we saw he had spent the last summer of peacetime at Bad Kissingen, but the war had closed the borders and now, like others of his fellow countrymen, Emanuel had been directed to domestic resorts. It was the second summer that Emanuel had spent in Yessentuki, which is situated about 240 miles from the Black Sea coast in an area with a number of mineral water springs. The best-known health resorts in the area apart from Yessentuki are Kislovodsk, Pyatigorsk and Mineralnye Vody. During the war these spas received Russian visitors as well as wounded soldiers from the front and Armenians who had fled from the genocide in Turkey in 1915–16. Emanuel’s neighbours in Yessentuki were Hjalmar Crusell and his half-brother Adrian Böttcher, born to Anna Lindal in her second marriage. Living at the same time in Kislovodsk, fifteen miles from Yessentuki, was Emanuel’s youngest brother Gösta with his family.9 After his stay in Kislovodsk, Gösta, who during the war had been placed in Baku, returned to Petrograd, where he took up a seat on the board of the Naphtha Company. His family remained in the Caucasus. He was succeeded as managing director in Baku by Artur Lessner, who now returned to his old place. In Petrograd, Gösta stayed with his brother Emil in the parental home on Samson Quay, not in his own house; with things as they were, it was safest not to live alone.

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The Bolshevik coup The provisional government quickly implemented a series of political reforms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, press freedom and freedom of association – i.e. measures that had been promised in the Emperor’s October Manifesto in 1905 but never fully implemented. A general election was promised with the vote for women too, but the work of reform went slowly. While Emanuel took the waters in the Caucasus, things were developing quickly on the political front. In July there was a clumsy attempt at a military coup by forces opposing the democratization of society. Afterwards the grip of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils on both businesses and opinion was strengthened and the strikes spread. Although the composition of the government changed several times during the year it proved incapable of solving the issues that were most important for the people, viz. bread, land and peace. In the current ‘diarchy’, therefore, the power gradually shifted over to the workers’ council and on 25 October an upheaval took place that in Soviet times was called the Great Socialist October Revolution, but which in reality was a coup d’état carried out by a hard core within the Bolshevik party. Their goal was a total reshaping of Russian society. This was to happen through the abolition of private property and the transfer of all means of production to state, communal or co-operative ownership. As a consequence, there ensued a veritable witch-hunt directed against ‘capitalists’, ‘bourgeois’ and aristocrats. The Nobel family belonged to the high-risk group. Gösta and Emil hid themselves for a while after the coup in the Hotel Medved, which lay next to Edla’s apartment house on Great Stableyard Street. Several other Swedes were also residing there, among them the above-mentioned Albin Herlitz.10 Edla was in Kirjola, which after Finnish independence on 6 December 1917 was suddenly in another country. Even if the border was still relatively porous for a further few months, she would never again see her home in Petrograd. Rolf spent the winter of 1917–18 at Kirjola, as did Marta, who had been conscripted in her capacity as a doctor but released in August 1917.11 They visited Petrograd in February, as it transpired, for the last time. The only siblings who remained in Petrograd during the Bolshevik coup were Emil and Gösta, who managed to make their way over to Kirjola to celebrate their mother’s seventieth birthday on 3 March 1918.12 Emanuel was not present on that day, but he had a valid excuse. He did not in fact return to Petrograd after taking the waters at Yessentuki in August but stayed on in the Caucasus. The fact that he could not be there on that day was very distressing for him, not least because it was the first time he had been absent not only on his step-mother’s birthday but also on Edla and Ludvig’s wedding anniversary on 1 October and the family’s Fanny and Alexander-like Christmas celebrations.13 These days of celebration were sacrosanct for the Nobel family.

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In the autumn of 1917, Emanuel moved from Yessentuki to Kislovodsk, where, as we saw, Gösta’s family were already living.14 Kislovodsk was known for the mineral water Narzan but that was not what drew Emanuel. In the course of 1917, the town had been transformed into a place of exile for refugees from the political unrest in central and northern Russia. After the Emperor’s abdication in February, a number of people who were close to the court moved there, among them Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, the widow of one of the Emperor’s brothers, with her sons, as well as a series of high-ranking aristocrats. Other refugees included the prima ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya, leading representatives of the business world, bankers and ordinary ‘bourgeois’ who chose to sit out the Bolshevik regime in a more peaceful spot. Few believed that it would last long. One of the most prominent exiles was Count Vladimir Kokovtsov, Witte’s successor as finance minister, chairman of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) from 1911 to 1914 and one of those who congratulated the Naphtha Company when it celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. When Emanuel arrived in Kislovodsk the town was already overcrowded with refugees and all houses fit for winter conditions were already let. ‘Half of Petrograd is here,’ Emanuel reported to Edla, and ‘quite unbelievable prices are being paid.’15 He took a room in the Grand Hotel. Among the other hotel guests were the composer Sergei Prokofiev, who later emigrated to Paris. Life in Kislovodsk passed relatively quietly. Emmanuel reported to Edla that Gösta’s wife Genya was living in a large house, had ‘two female teachers, five girls, one groom, two horses and a donkey’ and that she rode and played tennis.16 He felt himself ‘quite happy with the area and the people I meet on a daily basis’. Some of his time was spent sitting for a portrait that Noblessner’s board had ordered.17 After the Bolshevik coup Gösta and Emil hurried down to Kislovodsk. The brothers celebrated Christmas ‘peacefully together, and if we did not have our usual lutfisk [boiled ling, a Swedish Christmas speciality], at least we did not go without porridge with almonds and milk. And the New Year was brought in ‘as we do it in the old traditional way’.18 Emil and Gösta stayed on over the New Year but returned to Petrograd at the beginning of January 1918.19 ‘Emil is hurrying home more decisively than Gösta and it is with a feeling of great unease that I allow them to go,’ Emanuel wrote to Edla. ‘But they both think that they ought to return home and I will not oppose their decision.’20 Lullu was also living in the city in November–December 1917, but then went off to Sweden, where he had a house and where his family were waiting.21 There were plans also for Edla and Marta to come to Kislovodsk, but it didn’t come off; instead Artur Lessner moved with his family into the house that Emanuel had rented for them.22 Emanuel was stuck in Kislovodsk. He did not dare travel to Petrograd or Baku, both his brothers and his friends were against it. ‘It is more than distressing for me not to be welcome and not even needed for our great organization in our main

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centres,’ he complained, ‘but I cannot deny that our friends are justified when they press me with such urgency to keep away from Petrograd and from Baku as well as Grozny, where large crowds of workers are clamouring for more and yet more concessions’.23 In April 1918, ‘citizen Emanuel Ludvigovich Nobel’ was summoned to Moscow by the finance minister and commissar for oil matters Isidor Gukovsky to discuss ‘pressing issues concerning the Nobel Brothers’ Naphtha Company with regard to the delivery of liquid fuel to Volga, Moscow and Petrograd’. All Soviet institutions and officials were asked in the letter to guarantee Emanuel and his family safe passage from Kislovodsk to Moscow, but Emanuel decided to stay on in the Caucasus.24

Civil war Kislovodsk was isolated, the postal service was not functioning, telegraphic connections with north Russia were unreliable or broken off completely. Hagelin’s secretary Ragnar Werner reported in February 1918 from Petrograd that ‘literally all connection with southern Russia is broken off ’.25 Letters were therefore delivered by courier. The same was true of communications between Petrograd and Kirjola. One of these couriers was Mikhail Yevlanov, a former officer and son of one of the Naphtha Company’s treasurers, who travelled between the different locations. When he came from the north, he was forced to make his way along the coast of the Caspian Sea to the mouth of the River Terek, from where he rode or made long detours on a peasant’s cart before he finally reached Kislovodsk.26 The number of letters that could be exchanged, given the practical obstacles, was thus very limited. From the period July 1917 to June 1918 only five letters from Emanuel to Edla are preserved. The total number may have been rather more but to judge from the content of the letters there were long gaps between courier deliveries. Information about what was happening in the capital and other parts of the country thus reached Kislovodsk sporadically and belatedly. Emanuel’s abovementioned letter to Edla is dated 27 October 1917, two days after the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power – an event that Emanuel at the time of writing was blissfully unaware. Nor, of course, could he have known that several important government decrees were published on the same day that he sent the letter. According to the ‘Decree on Land’ all privately-owned land as well as church and monastery land was confiscated, and the ‘Decree on the Press’, which forbade all non-socialist newspapers, abolished the freedom of the press that had been introduced in March. Neither of these two decrees affected the Nobel family directly, but they were a foretaste of what was to come: nationalization of the private trading fleet and of the workshop and oil industry, as well as the banks. In agreement with the decree forbidding private ownership of real property in the cities, in August 1918 the

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Nobel family were also stripped of their apartment houses in St Petersburg. One year after the Bolshevik coup, 9,500 businesses were nationalized. The biggest confiscation of private property in the history of the world was a fact. To be sure, all of this did not happen without protests and opposition from those who were affected: the aristocracy, estate owners, entrepreneurs (big and small), the ‘bourgeoisie’ in general, the military, many intellectuals, among them disillusioned socialists. Differences between these groups and the Bolshevik regime developed gradually into a civil war. The opposition began directly after the coup-d’état in October 1917, but not until the autumn of 1918 did it develop into a veritable war. There were several reasons, among them a series of events and political decisions during the spring and summer that helped to concentrate political power in the hands of the Bolshevik party: ●

In January there was an election for a constitutional assembly that would decide Russia’s future political fate, including its constitution. When it emerged that the Bolshevik party was receiving fewer votes than other socialist parties the assembly was dissolved, which in turn led to these parties breaking with the government.

●

On 3 March a separate peace was concluded in Brest-Litovsk between Russia and the Central Powers – Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire. It led to Russia being forced to give up large lands, in the east, among others, Poland, Ukraine, White Russia and the Baltic States, which represented half of the empire’s European territories, in the south – Transcaucasia. This was regarded as a treachery by many Russians, not least in the army. In addition, Finland had already become independent in December 1917.

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At the end of June, the large industrial concerns as well as the oil industry were nationalized.

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In July all socialist parties apart from the Bolsheviks were forbidden, which led to a one-party system.

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In that same month the imperial family were murdered.

Although the opposition to the regime was split, the territory that the Soviet regime controlled by the end of the summer of 1918 had been reduced to Petrograd and Moscow with surrounding areas as well as a few districts around the Volga. Almost three quarters of the country was in the hands of different anti-Bolshevik – ‘White’ – armies and forces, which by this point had received reinforcements from foreign interventionist troops. The major turning point came at the beginning of September, after Lenin had been the victim of an assassination attempt and the chief of the security service (Cheka) in Petrograd, Moisey Uritsky, had been murdered. Both these events

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caused the Soviet regime to mobilize. A ‘military revolutionary council’ was formed, and the Soviet Republic was declared to be a ‘war zone’. At the same time the ‘Red Terror’ was proclaimed, giving the security police unlimited opportunities to persecute and execute opponents. People were arrested and executed indiscriminately and concentration camps for ‘class enemies’ were set up – two years later 75,000 individuals were interned in altogether 100 camps.

Exile in Kislovodsk As large parts of southern Russia were controlled by White forces in 1918, the Caucasus long remained relatively untouched by the tidal waves of revolution. ‘Bolshevism did not reach Kislovodsk all at once but rather gradually, they appeared suddenly in their armoured trains and then they disappeared, and then it was quiet again,’ recalled Matilda Kshesinskaya, whose memoirs are based on diaries and are a goldmine for knowledge of life in Kislovodsk from 1917 to 1919. ‘During these quiet periods we continued to meet and play cards, as none of us liked being at home alone.’27 During the spring of 1918, power in Kislovodsk shifted several times between the Whites and the Reds. When the Bolsheviks had taken over, often for only a few days, there were raids on the homes of the rich and items of value were confiscated. At the end of April, a ‘finance commission’ arrived tasked with levying a tax on ‘the wealthy inhabitants of the city of Kislovodsk’, as the objects of the taxation were described. The tax was for 30 million roubles and the scale of taxation was decided by criteria drawn up by the workers’ council. Anyone who refused to pay up within two weeks was threatened with prison. The commission had its headquarters at the Grand Hotel, where those liable for taxation were called to give an account of their assets.28 Emanuel, who was one of the richest of the refugees in Kislovodsk, was taxed at 250,000 roubles. Of this, seven thousand was paid in cash while 240,000 was guaranteed with a letter to the board of the Naphtha Company in Petrograd and 3,000 with a letter the International Commercial Bank in Kislovodsk.29 (That corresponds to almost £2 million in today’s values, according to the pre-war rate of exchange for the rouble; in 1918 the rouble had no quoted transactional value.) By way of comparison, it may be mentioned that Kokovtsov was let off with 3,000 roubles. Emanuel was not short of activities during his time in Kislovodsk. The Grand Hotel, he wrote in the last surviving letter to Edla (of 17 June 1918), was ‘the centre for the whole town and a large number of people live here whom I know from before’. Nearly all Baku’s ‘naphtha industrialists’ are gathered together in Kislovodsk and he is in regular contact with people who either come from the town or are on their way there. ‘I have a typewriter in my room and from 9 in the morning it’s on the go and at that time people come to visit me.’ Emanuel was in fact so busy that his

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plans to ‘occupy myself here with literature and science have not at all been realized’. Several books were waiting to be read and he longed to come to a quieter place. One of Emanuel’s assignments was the founding of a co-operative for the purchase of goods and necessities. However, the greater part of his time and attention was occupied with another, more important project. As the Caucasus was isolated it did not take long after the Bolshevik coup before legal tender ran out. The city’s mayor then asked the former finance minister Kokovtsov to help by issuing a local currency. Similar measures were taken in several parts of the country as the State bank had stopped printing roubles. Kokovtsov certainly had the necessary authority but intended to leave Kislovodsk and therefore passed on the task to Emanuel, whom he knew well. Emanuel became chairman of the finance committee, which consisted of two former generals, seven colonels and several employees of the Naphtha Company who happened to be in the place. The notes were printed in the nearby town of Pyatigorsk. ‘We have already printed and put into circulation over 28,000,000 roubles, so in this place there is hardly any other money among the population,’ Emanuel reported to Edla. The notes were distributed out in return for deposits of share certificates and objects of value.30 The banknote project seems to have been a major reason why Emanuel stayed on in the Caucasus. He had an opportunity to leave Kislovodsk in May 1918, when the first train since December 1917 left the city, but gave up his place to Kokovtsov.31 On 20 June 1918, three days after Emanuel’s last surviving letter to Edla, a decree was issued regarding the nationalization of the oil industry. This meant that all oil extraction and oil production companies were nationalized, and the oil trade was turned into a state monopoly. One week later the large workshop enterprises were nationalized, among them the machine industry. This meant that both legs on which the Nobel empire stood were severed with a single blow.32 The nationalization of the oil industry was driven through after long discussions and pressure from the Bolsheviks in Baku, with strong support from Stalin. The central government in Moscow was doubtful about the measure as they feared that it would endanger the oil deliveries that were so vital for the country. Lenin therefore suggested that the nationalization should be implemented after river trade finished for the year, i.e. in late autumn. Nor did the workers’ council at Branobel see the speedy nationalization of the oil industry as desirable. However, the pressure from Baku was relentless and the government in Moscow gave way. Despite the oil companies’ property being formally nationalized, according to Artur Lessner it was not a question of ‘a total transfer of power in Baku and its industrial hinterland to the Bolsheviks’.33 No one – neither the new power brokers nor the industrialists – knew how the oil industry should be organized under the new circumstances. The newly-founded National Oil Board (Glavkoneft) was, according to the decree, planned to set up a state oil industry and to regulate the private industry. However, there was no state-owned oil industry anywhere in the world and thus no experience to lean on. In Great Britain during the First World

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War the state had taken over a large part of the shares of the oil company AngloPersian (the future British Petroleum), among them Branobel’s holdings, but that was all. A suggestion to amalgamate the three biggest companies, including Branobel, into one and to introduce common bookkeeping was withdrawn before it could be implemented. The decree gave the National Oil Board the right to insert its own commissars into the management of the companies, but it went slowly. There was quite simply a lack of qualified people. The boards of management remained intact and there were no major acts of violence. One exception was Artur Lessner, who was arrested and sentenced to death for ‘oppositional activities’, but he was set free after intervention by some ‘influential Armenians’ and left Baku at the end of July. In September, board members Gösta Nobel and Mikhail Beliamin – now Soviet government officials! – were called to Moscow to discuss with the National Oil Board the formation of a Central Board for the Nationalized Oil Industry. Of the twelve seats on the management of the board it was decided that half should be occupied by directors of Branobel (among them Gösta and Beliamin) or by people close to the company, the rest by the National Oil Board. However, the collaborative project was not realized. The National Oil Board did not wish to meet the oil companies’ demands for operational independence and preferred to recruit individual specialists instead of collaborating at company level. At the end of October, the project foundered.

Flight The reason that Emanuel did not leave his refuge after the nationalization decree and settle in safety in Sweden or somewhere else was that, like so many others, he expected that the Bolshevik regime would soon collapse and everything would return to normal. Then it might be a good idea not to be too far from Baku. There was every reason to believe this would happen – the Bolshevik government in Baku was only a little Red island, surrounded on every side by areas controlled by White forces. Nor did it take more than about a month after the decision about nationalization of the oil industry before the Red government in Baku fell. Branobel’s management in Baku then tried to bring Emanuel, Zhenya and family and Mrs Lessner to the city and sent two expeditions to Kislovodsk to fetch them.34 When in mid-October Emanuel and Gösta’s family left Kislovodsk, however, their course was set not to Baku but in a completely different direction.35 The reason for their departure was that, a few weeks earlier, the city had been captured by the Bolsheviks, which made most of those who sympathized with the Whites beat a hasty retreat. To leave the Caucasus, where the political situation changed from one day to another, was both complicated and risky. Everything had to be planned meticulously

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and a false step could mean death. A further complication was that Emanuel had just recovered from a severe illness and had to be moved in a semi-recumbent position.36 When in September Matilda Kshesinskaya left Kislovodsk she did so hidden in a horse-drawn cart. Emanuel used the same means of transport when, along with Zhenya and her three small children (the youngest of whom, Nina, was only two), he departed from the city; also with them was a nursemaid. They were escorted by Mikhail Yevlanov and the former police chief in Baku, Vladimir Nazansky.37 To leave Kislovodsk passport documentation as well as exit permits were required. A passport in the name of Nobel was unthinkable, so the travellers were supplied with other identities. This was arranged with the help of Yevlanov and Nazansky. Zhenya pretended to be Emanuel’s daughter and Yevlanov her son-inlaw. Nazansky and his wife also travelled under false identities. Obtaining an exit permit turned out to be more difficult – no one was allowed to leave the city without permission from the local workers’ and soldiers’ council. One of those responsible, however, happened to be a former police gendarme who had worked for Nazansky and the permits were granted. Their flight was planned down to the slightest detail. To start their journey from Kislovodsk was out of the question; it would have attracted too much attention. Their departure therefore took place from a farm outside the city, to which all the necessary baggage was sent in advance in sacks which were said to contain washing. On the appointed day the party went on walks in different groups and in different directions to finally converge on the farm. Waiting there were two covered horsedrawn carriages which took them to Yessentuki, about twelve miles distant. In Yessentuki Emanuel was recognized and a war tax of 170,000 roubles was demanded from him, which was largely paid in cash. Now he was no longer anonymous and his fellow-workers and colleagues were anxious about his fate. In two documents – from the finance committee and from the People’s Bank in Pyatigorsk – the responsible authorities were assured that Emanuel, in his capacity as chairman of the committee, had for nine months ‘with his knowledge, his experience and unusual energy rescued us and the whole district from this difficult predicament’. The authorities were therefore urged not to take any ‘repressive measures’ against him. As everything that had to do with money and capital was a sensitive issue in the young Soviet republic it was affirmed for safety’s sake that Emanuel had no savings in the bank and that for the foreseeable future he was living ‘in very straitened circumstances’.38 Emanuel was not deprived of his freedom and after a few days the party was able to continue to the city of Stavropol, 135 miles north-west of Kislovodsk, which was held by the Whites. There they were taken in hand by the military governor Pyotr Glazenap, a general in the White ‘Volunteer Army’, to which Emanuel had contributed 5,000 roubles.39 From Stavropol their journey continued in a thirdclass train compartment to Rostov, where the Swedish consul at the mission, Birger Wessén, issued a passport valid for further stops on their travels: Kiev, Berlin and

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Stockholm. Rostov was held by the Germans and the German military command also issued identity papers to ‘the well-known top industrialist’ Emanuel Nobel, who ‘with his family and secretary (in all seven people) is on his way from Rostov to Kiev on a journey of interest to the German Empire’. When a few days later the party arrived in Kiev, which was also controlled by German forces, a similar letter of safe conduct was issued for the journey to Warsaw. In Warsaw they were granted safe conduct from the German legation that urged civil and military authorities to let the party pass unhindered as their journey was being undertaken by order of the German government. On 11 November, while the party was travelling between Kiev and Warsaw, the armistice was signed which meant that the First World War was over. The railway lines in Europe were completely dominated by military transport and in Warsaw Emanuel, for safety’s sake, was furnished with similar documents from both the German embassy and the Polish foreign office for the onward journey to Berlin.40 After a period in the German capital the party arrived in Stockholm sometime at the beginning of December. They had then been travelling for six weeks. ‘We never went short of food and drink, we were always able to get sufficient sleep, and not a single person was unfriendly towards us,’ was how Emanuel summed up his experiences of the flight from Kislovodsk: ‘Everything was fine, and I am only content.’41 Philosophical words from someone who in the course of one year had lost the whole of his and his family’s life’s work.

Gösta and Emil In Stockholm, Emanuel put up at the Grand Hotel. Already in the capital were Edla, Marta and her husband, Georgi, who had left Kirjola because of the civil war between Reds and Whites which had been raging there just as it had in Russia. Lullu and Minnie as well as Rolf and Luise had settled in Nynäshamn, where Anna and Hjalmar Sjögren had been living since 1892. After her husband’s death in March 1918, Emanuel’s sister Ingrid Ahlqvist, who had been living in Helsinki, also moved to Stockholm. With Emanuel’s arrival, then, all the siblings were in Sweden apart from Emil and Gösta who were still in Petrograd. At this time they were rather alone within the Swedish colony in Petrograd, which had been drastically reduced in the course of 1918. In the autumn of 1918, the Swedish government came to an agreement with the Svea shipping company – ‘in view of the distress in which according to information received a number of Swedes domiciled in Russia find themselves’ – regarding transport home of Swedish citizens for half-price. Luggage would be restricted to what was absolutely necessary and those intending to leave Russia for good were urged to seek export permits for belongings that could have an export ban slapped on them. The evacuation took place during October–November.

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One of those who left Petrograd in November 1918 was the architect Fredrik Lidvall. Emil and Gösta, however, stayed put despite the dangers that were threatening all ‘has-beens’ (byvshie, representatives of the earlier system). They had, after all, responsibility for the family’s businesses: the Naphtha Company, the machine factory, Alfa-Nobel and Noblessner. As representatives of big business Gösta and Emil attracted particular interest from the regime, and on the morning of 30 October they were arrested and interrogated at the headquarters of the Cheka. The interrogation was led by Varvara Yakovleva (successor to the murdered Uritsky), who, according to a Dutch diplomat, was known for her ‘inhuman cruelty’.42 In this case, though, she seems not to have shown her worst side. The motivation for the arrest was that Gösta was supposed to have ordered the British, who at this time were occupying Baku, to arrest a Bolshevik who had formerly been employed as secretary to a Swedish engineer in Balakhani. The accusation was without foundation, but Gösta’s protests went unheard. Nor did he succeed in his attempt to have Emil, who formally had nothing to do with the Naphtha Company, to be freed. Gösta and Emil had been taken as hostages. If the leader of the Bolsheviks in Baku was set free so would they, if anything happened to him the same would happen to them. Emil had already been the victim of an attempt at blackmail, but the situation had been cleared up thanks to the intervention of the Swedish legation. The same thing also happened now, with the help of an official called Oscar Lundberg who spoke fluent Russian and played a key role in the evacuation of Swedes from Petrograd. He explained that if the Nobel brothers were not set free, Sweden would feel itself obliged to arrest the Soviet government’s representative in Stockholm, Vatslav Vorovsky. That Gösta and Emil were Swedish citizens came as a total surprise to the Cheka, who had thought that they were Russians. The threat led to the brothers being released from the notorious Peter and Paul Fortress, where they had been held along with about a hundred other prisoners. Luckily their stay in prison was short, only a few days.43 The legation had guaranteed that the brothers would not leave the city. They were also obliged to report on a daily basis to the Cheka, but on 6 December Sweden broke off diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia and Vorovsky was declared persona non grata. This meant that Gösta and Emil lacked diplomatic protection and could be seized again at any time. They therefore began planning to flee, but this could not happen as long as the legation staff remained in place as this could have risked their security. On 17 December, as soon as the legation staff had left Petrograd, Gösta and Emil headed by sled and on foot over the border to Finland by Systerbäck. Their flight ‘lacked neither moments of drama nor severe risks’, Gösta explained: ‘The border itself consisted of an ordinary ditch extending over an open field. When I passed over this ditch I understood for the first time the real meaning of a

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FIGURE 14.1 The family gathered in Stockholm after their flight from Russia. Edla surrounded by Emanuel, Ingrid, Emil, Anna, Lullu, Mina, Gösta, Marta and Rolf. The photo was taken in January 1919.

border. For me, the one side probably meant death, the other side, in any case, freedom.’44 Their flight took place on the night of 18/19 December. The brothers then made their way via Viborg to Helsinki and Stockholm where they arrived on the steamer Oihonna on 22 December, two days before Christmas Eve. Although it was the second time that the Nobel family had been forced to leave Russia because of a ‘bankruptcy’ we can assume that this time too Christmas was celebrated properly – perhaps in the furnished apartment that the Oleinikovs rented, and no doubt with the usual courses on the table: lutfisk (boiled ling) with white sauce, melted butter, mustard, pepper and potatoes, white wine, oven-baked ham with green peas, rice pudding with one almond, sugar and cinnamon together with milk in small glasses and apple-cake to finish.45 There was after all good reason to celebrate this time. Firstly, it was the first time the family had celebrated Christmas together on Swedish soil for eighty-two years. Secondly, not a single member of the family had fallen victim to the Bolsheviks’ blood-lust, although they were in the highest degree lawful game. ‘The losses we have suffered and that we suffer daily are temporal and can be made good if conditions in Russia improve, but we have the great good fortune to be together and none of those who are dearest to us are missing – and that is happiness,’ was Edla’s summing up of the situation.46

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PART FOUR

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A few days after his arrival in Stockholm, Gösta commented in a newspaper interview on conditions in Petrograd and Moscow, which he summed up as ‘utterly indescribable’: ‘Not even the most intense imagination could have sufficed to depict the situation as it actually appears these days. Both cities are in a terminal condition and the death-fever, which has sunk its claws into them, is expressing itself as the most dreadful nightmare.’1 Details are scarce about the situation in the machine factory after the decree about nationalization of industry, but it seems that initially no major changes took place but that the managers worked on even if under the supervision of various workers’ committees. It was only after the intensification of the political situation and the mobilization against the Whites in the autumn of 1918 that the Bolsheviks, in Hagelin’s words, ‘went the whole way, sacked all the directors on the boards of the various companies and transferred power into the hands of the earlier committees, which to some extent were reorganized’.2 The actual October Revolution thus took place in October 1918, not in 1917. It was no coincidence that it was then that the Swedish government chose to evacuate its citizens from Russia. The situation for Branobel in Baku and in the oil fields is better documented than that in Petrograd, not least thanks to the many reports contained in letters and reminiscences that have been left by employees. News of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power quickly reached Baku, but their party comrades only gained control of the city in the spring of 1918. Initially, therefore, there were no administrative changes in Baku or in the oil fields, but on the other hand it was not long before the onset of spontaneous persecution of the oil companies’ engineers, who had many enemies among the workers. ‘The engineers were seized out at their work, dipped in oil, covered with feathers and down and driven in wheelbarrows out from their oil fields to be dumped on some compost heap,’ recalled the engineer Uno Åberg, head of several drilling fields in the years 1907–20. Sometimes it ended with them being set on fire. In this situation, Branobel’s management acted

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decisively and moved their engineers as far from their earlier workplaces as possible. Åberg tells us that he tried to get his colleagues – especially the Russian ones – to use their influence and ‘to take the lead and divert the movement into less dangerous paths’, but that his exhortations went unheard.3

The Battle of Baku Political and military developments in Azerbaijan were decided to a large extent by the terms of the separate peace agreement between Russia and Germany (and its allies) on 3 March 1918, which gave the Ottoman Empire the right to those territories they had lost in the war against Russia in 1877–8. These included the port town of Batum, which was annexed by Turkish forces on 13 April. On 28 May 1918, a month before the decree regarding nationalization of the oil industry was issued, Azerbaijan declared itself independent, after more than 100 years under Russian sway, under the name of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan (ADR); at the same time, Georgia and Armenia declared themselves independent of Russia. The ADR was the first parliamentary democracy in the Muslim world. The problem was that the republic did not control the whole territory. The government had its seat in the city of Ganja while Baku and the province of Baku were ruled by the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Stepan Shaumian, who in turn took orders from the government in Moscow (where the capital had moved from Petrograd in March). Therefore, a diarchy arose in Azerbaijan like that in Petrograd during the summer of 1917. The nationalization of the oil industry took place without support from the government in Ganja and from that perspective was illegal. The ADR could not accept that the nationalized oil industry’s products – the nation’s only natural riches! – should be exported to Russia when the country itself was in dire need of both the oil and of the income from it. At the same time other states were also interested in Azerbaijani oil, in particular the Entente Powers Britain and France, who feared that Germany – for whom oil was a part of their war planning – and the Ottoman Empire would lay claim to the oil finds. For Muslim Azerbaijan Turkey was a natural ally and on 4 June a peace and friendship agreement was drawn up between the countries which led to Turkish military forces being put at the disposal of the Azerbaijani government. The aim was to occupy Baku. The Turkish involvement did not appeal to Germany, which feared that the oil fields would be destroyed during the attempts at conquest. The Germans therefore sought support from the government in Moscow, which in turn supported the Bolsheviks in Baku. On this issue the interests of Soviet Russia and Germany coincided. However, before the Turkish-Azerbaijani forces were able to occupy Baku the political situation in the city had fundamentally changed. The city was governed by

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FIGURE 15.1 General Digby Shuttleworth inspecting the oilfields in Baku together with a Captain Walton.

a council of People’s Commissars with a majority of non-Bolshevik Socialists. These people doubted the Bolsheviks’ ability to defend Baku with the Turks and therefore invited British forces from Persia. On 31 July the Bolshevik party handed over power and a new government, ‘the Central Caspian Dictatorship’, consisting of right-of-centre Socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Dasnyaks (Armenian Socialists) was formed. Two days later Baku was occupied by British troops. Even if Russia had withdrawn from Transcaucasia under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and therefore could not intervene militarily, this was not something that could be accepted either in Moscow or in Berlin. In the middle of September, Germany sent two brigades to occupy Baku. However, before they could get there, on 15 September 1918, the Caucasian Islamic army, made up of Turks and Azeris, drove out the British and took control of Baku, which now became the capital of the ADR. The joint Turkish-Azerbaijani administration in Baku began with a bloodbath of Armenians which cost the lives of almost 10,000 people. It was a revenge action for the massacre of ‘Tatars’ which Armenian and Bolshevik forces carried out in March of the same year, when just as many people were killed. Otherwise, according to Artur Lessner, this was a quiet period, when life more or less returned to normal.4 Part of that ‘normality’ was that on 7 October, the oil industry was denationalized and all oilfields, refineries and oil tankers were returned to their previous owners. At the same time, collective agreements that had been reached were abolished

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along with worker control over production. The government’s express aim was to ‘get the workers to carry out their work without interfering in the running of businesses’.5 The paradoxical situation now arose that the oil that the government in Moscow had nationalized had been denationalized on the ground in Baku.

The final nationalization The Turkish occupation of Baku lasted for two months. With the armistice on 11 November the First World War was over and the Turks, who were among the losers, were forced to leave the city. This, briefly, was how the ‘Battle of Baku’ looked in 1918. How did Branobel act in these changing political circumstances? After the promulgation of the decree regarding the nationalization of oil at the end of June 1918 Hagelin travelled from Stockholm to Petrograd ‘to see how our remaining colleagues were getting on, as well as to investigate the possibilities of continued working under the new regime’. The decree on nationalization did not, as we saw, have any immediate effect and he could see that the Naphtha Company’s administrative apparatus was still functioning, even if the workers’ committee intervened in the administration.6 During Hagelin’s six-week stay in Petrograd, the various naphtha companies had several meetings to ‘co-ordinate work and thereby try to keep things going as normally as possible’. Here, in the absence of Emanuel, Gösta Nobel played an active role. Hagelin was offered a job as technical head of the whole of Baku’s (nationalized) naphtha industry by a Bolshevik-sympathizing colleague in the oil sector, something that he turned down, however, arguing that he could not be sure of the loyalty of his subordinates.7 After Artur Lessner was released from jail at the end of July he made his way to Petrograd, where he stayed for only a few weeks. In mid-August when he heard the news that the Bolshevik regime in Baku had fallen, he immediately returned there. Shortly after his arrival he witnessed the Tatars’ slaughter of Armenians, which went on for three days. According to Lessner, the Turkish forces did not take an active part in the events, ‘but, initially, neither did they do anything to stop them’.8 After three days of unrestrained ravages, the Turkish occupying forces finally issued strict regulations and those who did not follow them were hanged. The Naphtha Company was spared with a few exceptions, mainly because they had few Armenians among their employees and because of their good standing with Baku’s Tatar population. When the Turks left Baku the British returned, remaining until August 1919. According to Lessner, despite denationalization this period was not especially positive for the oil industry. The ‘worker question’ was still on the agenda – even if the Bolsheviks were gone, power in the city remained with the Socialist parties. The workers were posing ‘unreasonable and unjust demands’ and in this they were supported by the British. According to Lessner again, the government were less

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interested in denationalization than getting their hands on the oil producers’ reserves, which were very large as the major transport routes were closed. For a while, the road to Batum was open and a certain amount could also be sent to Persia, though only light oil products. Although production in Baku had declined after 1917, among other reasons, because of a famine in the oil region which halved the workforce, the reservoirs had been filled and Branobel began to plan for new large-scale plants. For work on the refineries and drilling fields to be started up again new machine parts and other equipment were needed. In the summer of 1919, the engineer Kristian Wannebo set off with a wish list for Emanuel and Gösta to Paris, where they had been staying since 1919 (see below), and at the beginning of 1920 goods worth several hundred thousand pounds were sent via Batum to Baku.9 However, they did not arrive as on 22 April the Red Army and the Bolsheviks occupied Baku – this time, to remain until 1991. About a month later, on 27 May, all ‘businesses involved in the extraction, refining, trading, drilling and transport of oil with all its moveable and fixed appurtenances, wherever they may be situated or however they appear’, were nationalized. The administration of the nationalized companies was turned over to Azerbaijan’s Oil Committee and the employees were forbidden to leave their work unless they wanted to be called to account ‘according to the laws of the revolutionary epoch’.10 It was almost a case of forced labour. The reason was that the authorities feared a mass flight, not least of qualified staff. ‘It can’t be said that the Bolsheviks employed much terror in Baku, but they didn’t need to, there was nobody offering opposition for they had support from the Red Army’s armed forces,’ Lessner recalled. Most of Nobel’s employees continued to work for the company and they ‘worked well’, according to Lessner: ‘Many obviously believed that this would not last long and the idea was to preserve and perhaps also expand resources for their bosses, who would soon return.’ (‘Expand’ meant that large companies like Branobel would take over naphtha land belonging to smaller producers who had been forced into bankruptcy by nationalization.) Another reason for the relatively peaceful shift of power, according to Uno Åberg, was that ‘the Bolsheviks had learned from the bloodbath over in Russia’, where they had ‘as good as rooted out, among others, engineers and doctors’. In Baku a decree was issued which punished murder of people in these categories with the death penalty.11 It was not only the nationalization of the oil industry that portended changed times. The right to private property was radically curtailed with a decree that Uno Åberg summed up laconically as follows: ‘Each man (and his family) was allowed to possess: a wife, a cow, two goats and four hens, and in the way of furniture, a chair, a bed (though here a married couple were counted as one person), a dining table and for engineers and doctors, a desk. Everything else was the property of the state, which one was allowed to borrow only to hand it back on when requested.’12 Artur Lessner remained for four months ‘under their yoke’, as he put it, then he found it best to leave. Obtaining permission for an outward journey was

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unbelievably difficult, and it was particularly complicated for skilled workers in demand and for managers. In September 1920, however, he received permission from the head of the Oil Committee, Alexander Serebrovsky, to ‘take sick leave’ and travel to the health resort of Borzhom in Georgia, which was still independent. Once out of Azerbaijan, Lessner changed his itinerary. Instead of heading for Borzhom he continued via Tiflis, Batum and Constantinople to Bad Kissingen, where on 27 September 1920 he was met by Emanuel and Wilhelm Hagelin.13 The idea that Bolshevik rule would soon be over was widespread. That was what kept Emanuel in the Caucasus, Lessner and other employees in Baku and Gösta, and Emil in Petrograd. It was quite simply hard to imagine that a little group of fanatical revolutionaries without administrative and financial experience and competence could be able to govern a country like Russia and administer its economy. This idea also explains the positive attitude to nationalization that Lessner gave expression to in a letter to the management in Petrograd: ‘The Bolshevik regime will be very short-lived, and given that the steeply increased prices of materials and the expenses of the collective agreement . . . are insurmountable for the company, we are of the opinion that the nationalization which has been introduced is better for us as all major costs not connected with production will not then be paid by us but will come out of the government’s pocket.’14 The idea was a simple one: nationalization would contribute to softening the economic crisis that had affected the Naphtha Company after 1917, and after the fall of Bolshevik rule they would get back their property in better condition than before. The idea of nationalization was not new in Russia. Oil was a strategic resource and the issue had, as we have seen, been looked at already under the Tsarist regime; then, because of a drop in production and rising prices. On this occasion the crisis was blamed on the fact that industry was controlled to a large extent by foreign capital (in which Branobel was also included, although it was a Russian company). The xenophobic mood strengthened during the First World War and the civil war, in which foreign forces took part, and contributed to the decision to nationalize in 1918. The decisive difference between the Bolsheviks’ nationalization and the one that was discussed before the revolution was that in Tsarist times the oil companies had been compensated financially; now they got nothing.

The Nobel companies’ losses With the nationalization of Branobel, the machine factory, Noblessner, Alfa-Nobel and other businesses, enormous sums were lost. The value of the company’s fixed assets is impossible to establish. When the limited company was set up in 1912 the value of the machine factory was put at 1,300,000 roubles, corresponding to almost £10 million today,15 but that was not, of course, the real market value; and what

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massive sums had not been invested in the Naphtha Company’s drilling towers, refineries, cisterns, pipelines, ships, barges, railway wagons! As regards the share capital that was lost to Branobel it is possible to arrive at an estimate, thanks to a list of the share owners as of 13 May 1917. The company’s nominal value was then 45 million roubles.16 Of this, 10 million consisted of 2,000 shares at 5,000 roubles and 35 million shares at 250 roubles. The market value was considerably higher than the nominal value. How high it was in May 1917 is impossible to establish as the market was no longer functioning, but the big shares, as we saw, had been quoted at fully four times as much before the First World War and the smaller shares at almost double. Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that the revolution had never taken place and that everything had returned to normal after the war. In that case the market value could have been about the same as in the years around 1910, i.e. around 150 million roubles or £1.2 billion in today’s values. The Bolsheviks’ seizure of power put about 3 million Russians to flight and in Europe two major centres of exile arose – Berlin and Paris. The former attracted mainly writers, artists and musicians, and during the first years of the 1920s the city was transformed into a centre for Russian culture in exile. Just like so many other Russians, a large number of intellectuals chose exile in order to reflect on their situation and their future and to try to understand what was happening to their homeland. If Berlin was the cultural centre of the Russian emigration, Paris was its political and economic capital. Here, leaders of the Russian political emigration gathered – liberals, conservatives, social democrats – and leading representatives of Russian big business, among them the oil companies. Anyone wishing to be involved in the competition for Russian oil had to be on the spot in Paris. Emanuel and Gösta moved there at the beginning of 1919, but while Emanuel returned to Stockholm after a few years, Gösta stayed on as Branobel’s representative in the French capital. To assist him he had Ragnar Werner, whom he had known since his time studying in Cologne and who had been an admired and trusted colleague in the machine factory since 1908. Branobel’s new main office was set up in Stockholm in 1919. Sweden had been neutral during the war, which was thought to result in certain advantages when it came to negotiations. Even if colossal wealth had been lost in the revolution the company had considerable financial interests outside of Russia and the board’s main task now was to secure and find new organizational structures for these. The initial measure was to collect resources and debts into a central bookkeeping system. The first balance sheet, on 1 October 1920, showed assets of 20,167,910 kronor consisting of cash, stocks and shares, boats, engines, goods and inventories, ‘various Russian valuable documents’ and more besides. This corresponds to around £27 million today. The debts to ‘rights owners’ – shareholders, etc. – amounted to 12,489,660 kronor or about £17 million today.17

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The company’s real assets outside of Russia consisted in the main of three parts: (1) tankers, (2) companies and plants and (3) part ownership of oil distribution companies. Already during the war, the Naphtha Company had ordered three tankers in Sweden. The greater part of the payment was handed over after the revolution. In addition, a new tanker was launched in 1924 and named Zoroaster in memory of the company’s first oil vessel. To operate the tanker a shipping company was set up that same year, also called Zoroaster. It was went well for several years but was wound up in the aftermath of the stock market crash in 1929. In countries that had formerly belonged to Russia but were now independent, Branobel did its utmost to look after its interests. In 1919 they set up a Polish company (Polnobel), bought an old refinery and obtained a licence for two oil concessions in the Galician oilfield in southern Poland. In addition, they started up a small Latvian company, Naphtha-Produktions-Gesellschaft Gebrüder Nobel. They also had interests outside Europe. Their plants in Persia, which supplied north Persia with oil from nearby Baku, were transferred in 1922 along with the three tankers to a separate company. These, however, were suited to the Russian river system and were disposed of at a considerable loss. Branobel was also part owner of three oil distribution companies, the smallest of which was the sales company Nobel-Standard in Finland, founded in 1920 and jointly owned with Standard Oil. A more important part ownership was the one in the EPU, the European Petroleum Union. Here they owned fully 20 per cent of the shares. As the Germans had interests in the company it had been nationalized during the war by the British government and it was only after major difficulties and costs that the shareholders were compensated. As Branobel was a nationalized Russian company with an uncertain legal status they were forced to sell their holdings and accept the offer that was made. In 1922 the shares were sold for £562,000, around £20 million today. The other large part ownership was in SAIC, which was partly a sales organization for lubricating oil in Europe, partly a shipping line specializing in transport of oil from the producing countries to the countries where they were sold. Here, Branobel owned a third of the parent company as well as the branches. As the company could no longer deliver any oil after nationalization their shareholdings were sold in 1928 to Gulf Oil for $3,575,000 or £30 million in today’s values. A lesser and rather odder real asset consisted of the Naphtha Company’s holdings of furs. During the revolutionary years, Branobel’s employees in Transcaucasia managed to buy furs, mainly of caracal, which were then transported via Persia and India to the European markets. The business was so big and profitable that a dedicated company was founded in London, the Indo-Persian Trading Corporation Ltd. However, the crisis in 1929 led to the business being wound up, resulting in a loss to Branobel of £100,000 or around £5 million today.

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In comparison with the value of the nationalized companies the amounts that Branobel were allowed to keep were insignificant, but at least they were able to secure them. That was not a matter of course; several other oil companies failed to do so. According to one report by the board, their success depended to a large extent on ‘the great prestige that the Nobel brothers have always enjoyed’.18 Apart from the capital that the Naphtha Company secured through selling oil shares they also acquired subsidies from the so-called Five Per Cent Fund, which was started up by some British producers of naphtha products setting aside five per cent of the price to be shared among the owners of confiscated companies. The amounts that accrued to Branobel were not large – £21,000/£1 million today – but they should be mentioned in this context. During the depressed economic conditions of the 1930s Branobel languished. The balance sheet for 31 December 1936 shows assets of 6,199,688 Swiss francs (the currency in which accounts were drawn up), which corresponds to about £18 million today. The general assembly in 1938 decided that Branobel should go into liquidation. However, this could not happen as a large part of the company’s assets could not be realized. The liquidation only took place in 1969. The capital, placed in shares, stocks and bank accounts, amounted then to nine-and-a-half million kronor (£5 million today).19

The family’s private losses Branobel had over 300 shareholders.20 The biggest institutional owners were a number of major Russian banks, but there were many who had only a small number of shares. The biggest private holding belonged, of course, to the Nobel family. They owned a quarter of the big shares, corresponding to 2,655,000 roubles. Emanuel had 120, Lullu seventy, Marta, Gösta and Ingrid fifty, Emil forty-nine, Edla forty, Mina Olsen thirty-five and so on. Even Robert’s son Ludvig had ten big shares. The family members’ holdings of the smaller shares were worth around 11 million roubles. The combined value of the big and small shares was thus 13,655,000 roubles, or, calculated in today’s values, around £58 million. Emanuel moreover had bonds in Branobel worth 500,000 roubles or £2.1 million today.21 However, members of the Nobel family had investments not only in their own companies but also in shares in industry, in banks, government bonds, real estate, etc. The value of these assets can be established with the help of information from the Russian Investigative Commission, set up in 1919, to which Swedish citizens who had had property confiscated by the Soviet state could turn to register their claim for compensation. These proceedings show that the family’s investments in Branobel, the machine factory and other family-related businesses constituted only a small part of the family members’ total fortune.

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The one who lost most money through the Bolsheviks’ confiscation of private property was Edla, who declared a fortune of 45,317,000 roubles, consisting of shares and bonds (23,817,000 roubles), the house on Great Stableyard Street (estimated value 21 million) and ‘personal property’ (500,000 roubles). Calculated in Swedish kronor this was the equivalent of 86 million, or £120 million, today. As stock market quotations were lacking, the shares were declared at ‘the nominal value or under’; that the total fortune was in fact many times greater. Edla was, in other words, a multi-billionaire in today’s Swedish money. Emanuel did not make a claim for restitution, so the size of his fortune cannot be ascertained, but there can be no doubt that he was the wealthiest member of the family. Emanuel’s four half-brothers declared fortunes that were strikingly similar in size: Lullu, Rolf and Emil all had around 18,000,000 roubles, while Gösta had a little more: 20,675,000. In today’s values this corresponds to around 60,000,000 and 68,000,000 respectively. By contrast with Edla, half of whose fortune consisted of a property, bonds and shares made up around 85 per cent of the brothers’ assets. In their case too these were declared at their nominal value, which meant that they too were billionaires. The women of the family had also lost large fortunes: Rolf ’s wife Luise around £1.6 million and Carl’s daughters Andriette and Mary £7.4 and £3 million respectively in today’s values.22

‘The American inheritance’ All of this disappeared in the revolutionary storms, but just like the Naphtha Company, the family managed to obtain compensation for at least part of the lost fortunes. This happened paradoxically enough with the help of the company with whom Branobel had for decades fought a war for markets: Standard Oil.23 As soon as the oil industry in Azerbaijan had been denationalized, the Americans started to take an active interest in Caucasian oil. In the war-torn and revolution-tossed Caucasus there were good business opportunities. Many small producers were glad to sell their drilling fields or refineries, or parts of them, in exchange for cash payments. The Azerbaijani government also had large reserves of refined oil taken as security for loans which was given to local oil producers so that the industry did not collapse. Because of its monopoly, in 1911 Standard Oil had been broken up by the American Supreme Court into thirty-four different companies, of which Standard Oil of New Jersey (Jersey Standard) handled Europe. The company’s interest in Azerbaijan was determined by a desire to increase their oil reserves outside the USA for the sake of the European market. It was significantly cheaper to transport oil to western Europe from Baku than over the Atlantic. Oil from there could also replace oil from Romania where production had decreased during the war. The

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approach to the Azerbaijani regime began cautiously, with the purchase in January 1919 of eleven unexploited parcels of oil field in the Baku region. Standard were not alone in acting. Royal Dutch Shell followed them, as did the Turkish, Italian, French and German governments, all of which were trying to exploit the unstable political situation. British interests were protected through the country’s military control of Batum. The contacts between Standard and Branobel during these years were close and relations were good. Several collaborative projects were discussed and fulfilled. Shortly after the setting up of Polnobel, Jersey Standard went in and bought 25 per cent of the company. When Nobel-Standard was founded in 1920, Jersey had 40 per cent of the shares, Branobel 30 per cent and Finnish interests the remaining 30 per cent. Both of these businesses were small beer compared to the project that was under discussion that same year. It began with Anglo-Persian inquiring about the possibility of buying into Branobel. However, this bit of business did not come off as the price that the British company was offering was far too low. However, the discussions, which were taking place in London, leaked out and Standard, keen to get their hands on part of the Russian market, became interested. During a meeting in Paris in November 1919 discussions were held about a collaboration between the Americans and Branobel, represented by Gösta and Emanuel. The result was that Standard were invited to take over half of the Nobel family’s holdings in the company, which in turn represented almost half of all Russian refining. Standard’s representatives found the proposal attractive and strongly recommended their head office in New York to agree to it. Partly, a collaboration with Branobel would ease their introduction into the Russian market, and partly they were afraid that, if they turned down the offer, Branobel could draw up agreements with other companies and thus obstruct Standard’s Russian plans. Branobel’s interest in an agreement was equally obvious. They would need financial muscle if their activities in Russia were to resume one day, and the American State Department had moreover promised increased protection for American firms abroad. All the details of Branobel’s assets and financial standing were passed on to Jersey Standard’s management in New York and in December the head of the company’s overseas production, Everett J. Sadler, went on a reconnaissance trip to Baku and Batum. During his stay there he visited oil fields and refineries and made inquiries of businessmen, politicians and the military about the prospects for the future. In a meticulously compiled report, Sadler observed that the Russian oil regions were a dream for an oil engineer and a paradise for a swindler. He also confirmed that Branobel was the most important company in the region with Royal Dutch Shell as their main rival. In 1919, Branobel represented 45 per cent of all Russian

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refining, and Shell 25 per cent. Nobel’s plants were also found to be in good shape despite the chaos that had prevailed in recent years. The political situation was certainly unstable but if they did not invest more than five million dollars, Sadler thought, the opportunities for profit more than outweighed the potential risk. During the last days of March 1920, Sadler and Gösta met in Paris. The political situation in Azerbaijan was now once again unstable. A few weeks later the Bolsheviks regained power in Baku and control over the oil fields, and on 7 July the British left Batum. Despite this the discussions between Standard and Branobel continued. At the same time as the Bolsheviks, for the second time, were nationalizing the company that Standard were planning to invest in, Branobel were being advanced $500,000 to buy further production facilities in Baku. Given the background of the political situation in the Caucasus, how could Standard Oil even think of doing this? The answer is simple: because they were convinced that the Bolshevik rule would soon be history. Paris was buzzing with rumours about conflicts within the Communist party’s leadership in Moscow and the administrative chaos prevailing in the country. It also seemed unthinkable that a political system founded on the rejection of such a universal principle as the right to private property should survive for long. Like other large businesses Standard wanted to be well prepared when the collapse came. ‘It seems to me that there is no other alternative but for us to accept the risk and make the investment at this time,’ was the conclusion drawn by Jersey Standard’s managing director, Walter Teagle. He went on: ‘If we do not do it now, I think we will be debarred from ever exercising any considerable influence in the Russian producing situation.’ Eight out of nine members of the board agreed with him, as did John D. Rockefeller Jr. Standard were simply afraid of missing the boat. If they didn’t have a share in Russian oil production when it got going again it would represent a real threat to Standard’s European market. The risk that Branobel would then be able to form an alliance with Royal Dutch Shell was, as they saw it, great. In July 1920, the American state department did away with all restrictions on trade with Soviet Russia and at the end of the month the agreement between Jersey Standard and Branobel was signed. Emanuel, in his usual way, had had his doubts right up to the last minute – according to his sister Marta, because he could not ‘realize or admit the seriousness of the situation as far as the family was concerned”.24 In the terms of the agreement, Jersey bound itself to buy half of the Nobel family’s assets in Branobel, which in turn had interests in twenty-eight Russian daughter companies. It is important to note that it was a question of half of the family’s shareholdings, not half of the company’s. The price was $11,500,000. However, there was a catch; the family owned only 20 per cent of the company’s shares. The $5 million needed to acquire the documents conveying the majority of the shares was to be shared between Jersey and Branobel. Another complication was that 26,000 of the family’s 36,000 shares were in Soviet Russia and probably in the hands of the authorities. Both these circumstances were to influence the

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conditions of the payment. On receipt of a certificate representing 13,000 shares in Branobel, Jersey were to pay $6,568,000 within two years. This was done. The remaining sum was to be paid when the remaining 5,000 shares were delivered and Branobel’s property was restored by the Soviet authorities. The payment that the Nobel family received for half their holdings of shares was thus $6,568,000, corresponding to around £50 million in today’s values. It was about the same amount that each one of the brothers had been robbed of by the Bolshevik regime, but given that the shares sold were out of reach, if they even existed in the real world, the agreement must be seen as brilliant – for the family. Viewed with hindsight, the agreement it may be regarded as one of the worst agreements the company ever signed., but the board were united almost to a man about the decision, which was based on the conviction that Soviet rule would soon be over. After all, the potential was enormous – control of large parts of the Russian oil industry for just fourteen million dollars! ‘Had fate turned a genial countenance upon this transaction, it would possibly have been hailed as among the most brilliant ever consummated in the petroleum industry,’ as the oil historians Gibb and Knowlton put it.25 As we know, fate did not turn a genial countenance on the deal. Instead, it became one of the most brilliant in the Nobel family’s history, this too undoubtedly a result of ‘the great prestige that the Nobel Brothers have always enjoyed’. In the family it was called ‘the American inheritance’.26

A united front? The American State Department gave its unofficial support to the agreement between Branobel and Standard but also explained that they could not contribute any help. At the same time, Royal Dutch Shell were holding talks with the Soviet authorities represented by finance minister Leonid Krasin, a brilliant diplomat with profound knowledge of the oil industry. It was also clear that Great Britain under prime minister David Lloyd George was beginning to adopt a more conciliatory attitude to negotiations with the Soviet state about Russian oil. This meant that the Russian oil industry was negotiable, and that Moscow could play off the different interests against each other. At the peace conference in Genoa in April 1922, the Soviet side hoped, by promising restitution to producers whose property had been confiscated, to be able to conclude agreements about collaboration with the major oil companies. However, there was great suspicion not only between the Soviet delegation and the oil companies but also among the oil companies themselves. For the rumour spread that secret agreements had been made allowing individual companies to take over nationalized property. As early as the winter of 1921, Standard and Branobel had declared themselves willing to work together with Royal Dutch Shell with respect to Soviet Russia.

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After the Genoa Conference, which from the perspective of the oil producers was a failure, and despite a degree of mistrust on the part of Henri Deterding, in July 1922 representatives of Standard/Branobel and Royal Dutch Shell met in London to discuss strategy against Russia. The meeting resulted in the so-called London Memorandum, which however was neither signed nor made public but was drawn up to avoid misunderstanding. In the memorandum, full compensation was demanded for confiscated property and the parties undertook not to negotiate separately with Soviet Russia. In the event that one of them was contacted by the Soviet authorities, the other party was to be informed immediately. In the course of 1922 several conferences were held in Paris with the involvement not only of Standard, Branobel and Royal Dutch Shell but also thirteen other companies which had had their assets confiscated. The result was what came to be known as Front uni, ‘United Front’, directed against the Communist regime. Just as in the London Memorandum, the companies bound themselves not to negotiate separately with the Soviet government. Yet self-interest proved to be strong, especially as it was fomented with great skill by Krasin and the Soviet authorities. The Russians continued to play the oil companies off against each other. The need for some form of agreement was mutual. Soviet Russia was in desperate need of capital and simultaneously it needed help to build up its oil industry. At the same time, the demand for petroleum products in Europe began to exceed supply. The problem was that no oil company dared take the risk of acquiring confiscated property. With regard to the agreements reached it would have looked bad. Import of oil was something else. Then it could be asserted that it was produced on land owned by the Soviet state. The temptation was great. When Royal Dutch Shell broke the Paris Agreement and bought large amounts of Soviet oil Deterding came in for a storm of criticism. His action led to Standard being forced to define its policy. To import cheap Russian oil to supply the markets in Europe was tempting, but the board in New York thought that any form of relaxation of the pressure on the Russians could have negative consequences for the strategic goal of recovering their confiscated property. Gösta Nobel agreed. As the Soviet regime would never be able to extricate itself from its difficulties without support from the major oil companies, he felt, a united front would contribute to speeding up restitution. It was the pragmatists who finally triumphed. In the coming years the Soviet regime dropped the prices of oil, the oil companies gave in and Front uni died the death along with all the demands for restitution of confiscated property, among them Branobel’s. In 1929, the first Five Year Plan was introduced, which meant that all the country’s industrial enterprises were nationalized, including the smaller ones. At the same time more or less all concessions certain businesses had had were terminated.

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The trial of Branobel’s employees Branobel’s first board meeting in pleno for four years was held in Paris in July 1920.27 The board now consisted of Emanuel, Gösta, Hagelin, Mikhail Beliamin and Kristian Wannebo, manager of the Emba field and latterly Gösta’s chief engineer in Baku. Alongside current issues the question of the company’s future in Russia was naturally discussed. They were convinced that the Bolshevik regime would not be long-lived. ‘To questions from our old employees as to whether our Board believes that our activities can recommence, my answer is, yes, and I am making every effort to hold on to as many of them as I can,’ Emanuel explained to Mikhail Beliamin’s wife.28 One central question was of particular relevance to the employees. When everything returned to normal one day the company would have to be ready. They were therefore very keen to have both the plants taken care of and to hold on to their highly skilled technical staff. Of those engineers who had settled in Sweden or elsewhere outside Russia the most qualified were salaried so as to be in place to build up the operation again when the time came.29 As late as 1939, seventy-one employees (or their descendants) in different countries were drawing a salary or receiving support from Branobel, among them the engineers Kristian Wannebo, Knut Malm, Ragnar Werner and Erik Delin as well as Branobel’s office managers, the brothers Oscar and Albin Kristoferson.30 The same solicitude was extended to the employees who were still in Russia, although for obvious reasons that was more a case of sporadic support. Before Gösta left Petrograd in the autumn of 1918, he gathered the company’s leading officials and engineers and explained that the board, on his departure, were transferring responsibility for the Naphtha Company to them. He asked them to keep themselves available for the company and promised to see to it that they were materially supported. At the same time, they were urged to keep out of politics. Similar meetings were held by Artur Lessner in the north Caucasus and Baku. The board’s appeal did not go unheard – the Nobel employees showed great solidarity with the company. ‘The trust that the company placed in me was based on the loyalty that I had given proof of on several occasions,’ explained one of the top officials in Baku, who had worked for the Naphtha Company for forty-three years, partly in close collaboration with Wilhelm Hagelin, continuing: ‘My own wishes and my actions after Sovietization therefore naturally coincided with the interests of the Naphtha Company and of course I would have welcomed their return in the form of a concession or otherwise.’31 It was not only Branobel’s board that valued the Nobel employees. As we saw, Hagelin was invited directly after the nationalization to become technical head of the naphtha industry in Baku, but declined. There was a strong demand for ‘Nobelites’, who according to a member of the National Oil Board distinguished

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themselves by ‘their capacity for work, their industry and professionalism’. In the recruitment of engineers and officials for the nationalized oil industry, therefore, these people were prioritized. Certain Nobel employees refused point-blank to collaborate with the new regime, but many went to work for the new owners, both in the National Oil Board and out at the workplaces. The process came to be called the ‘Nobelization’ of the Russian oil industry. In the early years the ‘Nobelization’ was relatively pain-free as the interests of the parties coincided. The engineers and officials needed to earn a living and the Soviet government was in dire need of specialists. Initially no coercive measures were taken, but at the beginning of 1920 compulsory working was introduced for all men between the ages of eighteen and fifty who were employed in the oil industry. In the following year, relations between the authorities and the former Nobel employees deteriorated radically, because of the support from abroad. The show trial as a political instrument is a judicial genre which for the most part is associated with the 1930s, but the method was practised long before. The first major trial was held in 1921 against what called the Petrograd Military Organization. It was said to be led by a professor of geography, Vladimir Tagantsev, who was accused of illegal possession of large sums of money and of helping people to flee the country. Another accused was Mikhail Tikhvinsky, head of the National Oil Board’s chemical laboratory and formerly a leading chemist with Branobel. After forced confessions they were executed at the end of August together with about sixty other people. Tikhvinsky was a socialist and knew Lenin, who, on being asked by Tikhvinsky if he was allowed to accept money from Nobel, is said to have answered that he had nothing against ‘gold floating in from abroad’ as long as nothing went in the opposite direction.32 And yet he was executed. The aim of the trial was not to see justice done but to show that no one was safe. On 31 August, in the wake of the Tagantsev trial, the Dutch citizen, Wicher Harmszen (in Russian Vassili Garmsen), formerly Branobel’s head of paraffin and now chairman of Petrograd’s oil committee, was arrested. He was accused of having, along with Tikhvinsky, distributed smuggled money to former Nobel employees and shared with Tagantsev production data from ‘the former Branobel’. Several days later another eight individuals connected with Branobel were seized, also accused of illegal handling of foreign currency, and a preliminary investigation was launched. One of them was also privately close to the Nobel family: Hjalmar Crusell’s half-brother Adrian Böttcher, formerly an official on the board of the company, now an inspector in the National Oil Board in Petrograd. There is no denying that money was sent from Nobel abroad. As we saw, it was the company’s policy to offer material support to its collaborator, and in 1921 Russia was struck by famine. A large number of former major Russian businessmen living in Paris, among them Emanuel, Gösta and Emil, therefore sent 3,000 francs each to a dedicated relief fund – although, as Emanuel put it, they knew that ‘as

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long as the Bolshevik model of government with its leading men persists, these funds, even if in the form of provisions, will end up supporting the Bolsheviks’.33 Harmsen accordingly admitted that he was guilty of the charges and declared that there were between twenty and thirty people in Petrograd who were receiving support from Nobel. The distribution was via smugglers and diplomats as well as official representatives of the famine relief. Among the latter was the worldrenowned author Maxim Gorky, who however could not be interrogated as he left Russia at the same time as the arrests were taking place. It is unclear how big the sums in question were, the figure of 200 million roubles a month named in the charge sheet cannot be verified. As for the production figures that were supposed to have been passed on to Tagantsev, Harmsen could show that they were taken from the Naphtha Company’s annual reports which had been published in the press and therefore could not be regarded as confidential. Those arrested were said to be part of a comprehensive and widely ramified sabotage organization that, according to the Cheka, ‘at the right moment on a nod from the Centre would stop production in the vital oil industry and thereby deal a devastating blow against the Soviet Republic’.34 The ‘Centre’ possibly meant the Russian Trade, Industry and Finance Union, or Torgprom, an organization of Russian businessmen in exile that had been founded in Paris in 1920 and in which Branobel, represented by Gösta, played a leading role. Even if it was in Branobel’s interests for the Bolshevik regime to be toppled, talk of conspiracy and sabotage were, of course, greatly exaggerated. Harmsen declared under interrogation that the money had been transferred without any demand whatsoever for a return favour in the form of anti-Soviet activity. ‘Nobel sent the money because he regarded himself as the owner of the company, and we agreed. We were convinced that sooner or later they would be forced to hand back the oilfields to their rightful owners, we were absolutely not working against the Soviet government, but nor of course did we do anything to help it.’ For various reasons – most of all, presumably, the Soviet regime’s need for foreign famine relief – the matter did not go to court, but Harmsen and his colleagues remained in custody. Not until May 1922, when the case was transferred to Moscow’s revolutionary tribunal, did events take off and on 24 to 26 July a trial was held of the former Nobel employees which was covered in the government mouthpiece Izvestiya.35 The accusations of conspiracy and planned sabotage were repeated and the prosecutor insisted that the money represented payment for services that Harmsen and his colleagues had rendered to Branobel in Russia. Harmsen’s explanation that the money transfers had been dictated by pure humanitarian considerations (‘as it is known abroad how we live here’) was not accepted by the judge but waved away as ‘a children’s fairy tale’: ‘We refuse to believe that a person who hitherto has devoted himself to exploiting his workers would take the profits from his foreign companies to send to his former employees.’

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Of the nine who were charged, four were sentenced to death and the others to five years’ hard labour. The only woman among those sentenced was Mikhail Beliamin junior’s sister, Anna Simonovich. She was set free but sentenced to three years’ ‘obligatory service in the community in her professional capacity’ – it is unclear what was meant as, in the trial record she was said to lack a defined occupation. Such contradictions, however, do not seem to have embarrassed the revolutionary tribunal. The trial caused a great stir in Sweden. The Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter reported it in a long and detailed article under the headline ‘Soviets execute two of Nobel’s white-collar workers’ and other newspapers also reported it.36 There was great indignation. ‘A letter has arrived from Fru Harmsen without any indication of where it was written, but informing that her husband is aliv,’ Emanuel reported in a letter to Hagelin a full month after the verdicts had been announced.37 Thanks to the fact that several people in Russia stepped up to defend the accused men, the death sentences were commuted to ten years’ hard labour and two years later Harmsen and most of the others were pardoned. Harmsen succeeded in leaving the Soviet Union in 1923 and was on Branobel’s benefit list right up to his death in 1941.38 Despite the obvious risks, benefits to the former Branobel employees continued even after the trial, both in the form of money and other necessities. In September 1922, Emanuel sent 3,000 kronor (about 75,000 today, or £6,000) in cash to the engineer John Tuneld, who was the representative of the Red Cross in Petrograd, for distribution to famine victims.39

1921: liberalization and tightening-up To understand the attacks on Branobel they have to be seen in a wider context, namely, the political change of course that took place in Russia in 1921. The economic policy that had been implemented since 1917, with sweeping, indiscriminate nationalizations, prohibitions on private trading, the abolition of the rouble as legal tender, and more, had proved to have devastating consequences. The situation in the big cities regarding supply of basic provisions in the winter of 1920–1 was just as critical as in the months before the February Revolution in 1917. Compared with 1913, industrial production had decreased by 82 per cent and production of grain by 40 per cent. The inhabitants of the cities were fleeing to the countryside in the hunt for basic necessities. Petrograd’s population decreased by 70 per cent, Moscow’s by 50 per cent. If the problems hitherto had mostly affected the towns, the villages now also began to feel the effects of the mismanagement. The agricultural regions of southern Russia were afflicted in the autumn of 1920 by a failed harvest that was exacerbated by the Bolsheviks’ agricultural policy, which meant that the peasants’

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‘surplus’ was confiscated. A peasant revolt broke out, the likes of which had not been seen since the eighteenth century. The harvest failure led to bread shortages in Moscow and Petrograd and other towns, which led to widespread workers’ protests. Just as in the winter of 1917, the protests began with demands for bread but gradually grew to include demands for political changes. The centre of opposition was the naval base of Kronstadt outside Petrograd, whose sailors had long been influenced by syndicalist and anarchistic ideas. The revolt was brutally suppressed and was followed by an equally merciless hunt for scapegoats and ‘internal enemies’, among others, and particularly in the oil industry. At the same time, the famine and the protests had major economic consequences. The party leadership was forced into an embarrassing political retreat. The arbitrary confiscation of grain – which deprived the peasants of their products and the townsfolk of their food – was replaced by a tax. In the face of an economic catastrophe with unpredictable political consequences, they had no choice. The ‘economic breathing space’ (in Lenin’s words) that the party now took had the desired effect. The unrest in the countryside ceased and the supply situation soon improved, not least thanks to the large-scale aid consignments of grain organized from abroad. Further reforms were not planned but followed out of economic necessity. When the peasants regained the right to trade their wares a market sprang up and with it a need for market relations in other areas too. Small-scale private and cooperative enterprise was allowed again and the rouble was re-introduced as legal tender. However, the large businesses remained in the hands of the state, like the banks, foreign trade and means of transport. This hybrid of socialism and capitalism was given the name New Economic Policy, abbreviated to NEP. The economy took off, but the reforms were directly contrary to socialist ideology, and the party leadership were apprehensive that the partial revival of capitalism would threaten the party’s monopolistic position. The economic liberalization therefore had to be complemented by a political tightening-up. The Cheka was given radically expanded powers and the number of concentration camps grew. In 1921 and 1922 what was left of bourgeois freedom in the country was crushed and 160 intellectuals with their families, among them the country’s leading philosophers, were deported to Germany. It is against the background of this development of state-sponsored terror that the trials of Tagantsev and the Nobel employees must be seen. In actual fact they were only two of the ten or so political trials staged during 1921 and 1922.

Nobel’s ‘engineer saboteurs’ In the abovementioned letter to Mrs Beliamin, written in September 1920, Emanuel predicted that during the winter or the spring of 1921 there would be a great

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change and ‘a brighter future’ was inevitable.40 He was right about the change – the introduction of the NEP – but not about the light that he thought he had glimpsed in the tunnel. The economic reforms did not include the oil industry, which remained under state control. Nor was there any question of concessions or restitution. Instead, the trial of 1922 formed a model for the authorities’ way of dealing with so-called ‘bourgeois specialists’, i.e. engineers and technicians with roots in the old society who were now working within the Soviet structures. They could be accused at any time of counter-revolutionary activity, ‘economic sabotage’ and the like. ‘Engineer saboteurs’ was a frequently employed concept. Whenever a business was doing badly the problems were blamed on these specialists, whose guilt was a given beforehand and never needed to be proven; the presumption of innocence had been replaced by a presumption of guilt. In the years 1929–30, during the first years of the first five-year plan, a number of bourgeois specialists were arrested, accused of industrial sabotage. The most extensive trial was that conducted in the autumn of 1930 of the so-called Industry Party, which was said to have been run from theRussian Trade, Industry and Finance Union ‘in Paris. The goal was allegedly an intervention in the Soviet Union. In a letter from Stalin to the head of the security police Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, Torgprom, directed by Nobel and other oil magnates in exile, was said to be “the most powerful of all socio-economic groups in the USSR and among the emigres, the most powerful both in terms of capital and in terms of connections with the French and British governments”.41 The charges in the legal proceedings against the Industry Party were fabricated; there was no such party. At this point, moreover, Torgprom had lost any importance it had and there was no prospect of any intervention in the Soviet Union. Equally fabricated were the charges levelled at the same time against the delegates to what was said to be a ‘counter-revolutionary spy and sabotage organization within USSR’s oil industry’. Seventy-seven engineers were arrested, of whom twenty-two were former Nobel employees. The verdicts were pronounced in March 1931 without court proceedings: twenty-nine were sentenced to execution by firingsquad, thirty-five to ten years in a camp and nine to five years in a camp. In all but seven cases, the death sentences were commuted to ten years’ hard labour. One of those who had his death sentence changed to hard labour was the machine engineer Alexander Belonozhkin, one of Branobel’s most trusted employees and a member of the board in the last years before the revolution. The fabricated charges were a way of camouflaging the poorly performing economy, which was a result of incompetence and political direction in combination with the demands of the first five-year plan for forced industrial development. In the oil industry the blame was laid on those who had worked in the large oil companies before the revolution. The main target was Branobel’s employees as being the most skilled and most experienced naphtha engineers. The Bolsheviks’

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model for combating ‘enemies within’, sketched out in 1921–2, was polished to perfection around 1930. The Nobel oil saga in Russia was now definitely over. The Soviet Union had begun to build up a planned economy without participation of private business, and the name Nobel was deleted from the history of oil in Russia. To the extent that it was mentioned at all it was as a term of abuse and as a symbol of the capitalist exploitation of the Russian worker, often with a note of xenophobia (although the company was Russian from the beginning and Emanuel was a Russian subject). In a book from 1980 the Nobels’ achievements were summarized as follows: ‘Branobel’ was the leading capitalist predator in the Russian oil business. The degree of monopoly that they achieved brought its bosses large profits through an unprecedentedly refined exploitation of the workers. The Great Socialist October Revolution, the first in the world to free working people from the oppression of capitalism, was the funeral march for the exploiters, among them Branobel. All the means of production passed for ever into the safe hands of their rightful owners and creators, our country’s working people, who with every passing year demonstrate more and more successes in the building of Communism on a grand scale.42 This picture of the Nobel family’s achievements in Russia obviously differs somewhat from the one that the author of this book has regarded it as justified to convey.

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16 POSTSCRIPT

The ‘house on the quay’, the home in Petrograd, was lost for ever but was not immediately taken over for use by the new authorities. In the first years after the revolution Emanuel’s housekeeper, Anastasia Karelina, lived there with some other faithful retainers in the otherwise empty house. In May 1920, however, she was ordered by the factory management of the ‘Former Ludvig Nobel Machine Factory’ to move out as the property was to be taken over by an institution. A few months later she left for Finland and Kirjola. ‘In my heart of hearts I was convinced that you would successfully cross the border and that God would show himself merciful and save you, as once fortunately happened to all of us,’ Emanuel wrote to her.1 In September Miss Karelina obtained a Swedish visa at the embassy in Helsinki and moved to Stockholm, where she was treated as a member of the family and given a generous annual pension paid out of Emanuel’s own pocket.2 Edla, who had spent the years since the outbreak of war at Kirjola, moved in 1918 to Stockholm where she lived with her daughter, Ingrid. Her experiences in Russia and the loss of her home in Petrograd had naturally left their mark, but, her daughter Marta recalled, she was ‘her old self in most respects, soothed by fine clothes and a good table and full of concerns for her beloved estate in Finland where she had tried to keep up the good old traditions’.3 Edla spent the following summers at Kirjola, which however, because of the family’s worsened financial situation, could not be maintained in the same palatial condition as in former years. Edla Nobel died in Stockholm in October 1921, aged seventy-three, after spending a last summer at Kirjola. In a long and admiring obituary notice in the Stockholm daily Svenska Dagbladet Sven Hedin declared that, despite having been forced to see her world collapse into ruin, she remained ‘majestically strong, equally in prosperity and adversity’: ‘She never complained, she never spoke hard or heated words about the violence that, like a devastating storm, descended on Ludvig Nobel’s work.’ Edla’s stoical equanimity in the face of the hardships she lived through and the material losses were also referenced in an unsigned obituary in Stockholms Dagblad: ‘A characteristic of hers was the unfailing calm and courage

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FIGURE 16.1 Edla, the matriarch of the family.

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she displayed during the trying revolutionary years. It is unlikely that anyone heard a complaint pass her lips and she bore the loss of her home in St Petersburg with total self-restraint.’4 When Edla married Ludvig and had to take over responsibility for his children with Mina Ahlsell, she was only twenty-two. Then she had twelve children of her own, seven of whom lived to adulthood. When Ludvig died in 1888, she was left alone with ten children at the age of forty. There were only eleven years between her and the new head of the family, which could have led to problems; but Emanuel loved his step-mother, whom he always called ‘mamma’. With her wisdom and authority Edla gradually became the family’s natural focus and rock, just like Andriette before her. The Nobel family’s high-profile men were privileged, over two generations, to be surrounded by outstanding women. Whether the family would have become what it did without Andriette at Immanuel’s side and Edla at Ludvig’s and Emanuel’s is not an unjustified question.

The 1920s During the first two years after his flight from Russia, Emanuel was based in Paris, from where he made innumerable business trips to London, Antwerp, Berlin, Stockholm and other cities, often accompanied by Gösta. Now that the war was over, he was also able to renew his old habit of visiting health resorts and he made annual visits to Professor Dapper’s sanatorium at Bad Kissingen and then for a two-week ‘after cure’ in the Golf Hotel at Oberhof in Thuringia. During his short stays in Sweden, he would put up at the Saltsjöbaden Hotel, owned by the Wallenberg family. Emanuel and Marcus Wallenberg were old acquaintances, the bank had shares in Branobel and in 1903, moreover, it had loaned 2 million reichsmark to the company.5 The twenty-second of June 1919 was Emanuel’s sixtieth birthday. It was celebrated in the midnight sun at the North Cape, to where he had invited a number of his younger relatives together with Wilhelm Hagelin’s sons, Boris and Volodya. While Emil and Gösta stayed on in France for good, Emanuel chose to move home to Sweden the following year. His first address was 42 Birger Jarlsgatan, where he rented a little three-room apartment facing the backyard in the same building where Marta and Georg Oleinikov lived. In the autumn of 1923, Emanuel moved with them to a large flat at 4A Södra Blasieholmen, where he had at his disposal three rooms. In May 1922 he regained his Swedish citizenship. Over the years Emanuel had travelled a great deal, but apart from stays in health resorts in Germany it had always been on business trips. Now, having transferred most of the responsibility for Branobel to Gösta, he could allow himself to explore the world. In 1925 he was in Egypt. In his passport there is also a visa for Palestine, but he seems not to have gone there. In the spring of 1927, he travelled to southern

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FIGURE 16.2 Emanuel in Bad Kissingen in the mid-1920s with Fredrik Lidvall (right) and Gustav Schernickow.

Italy, where among other places he visited Sicily (Palermo and Taormina), Sorrento and Capri. For travelling companions he had two ladies: his private secretary Varvara Vladimirovna (surname unknown, later married to a von Ebeling) and Antoinette (Antonina Alexandrovna) von Jerzykowicz (of whom more below). The following winter he took a trip to India and Ceylon with the same ladies for company. This time he also invited his twenty-seven-year-old nephew Leif (the son of Mina Nobel and Hans Olsen), ‘for assistance would probably be needed from time to time during the almost four-month-long journey’.6 Emanuel had an incredibly wide net of contacts all over Europe, mostly in financial and business circles but also among Russian emigres, who in Berlin and Paris alone could be counted in the hundreds of thousands. Among his acquaintances was the dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna, born Princess Dagmar of Denmark, who had visited Baku with her husband Alexander III in 1888. After the revolution she settled in Copenhagen and Emanuel occasionally sent her black caviar, something that, according to her secretary, ‘always gave great pleasure to Her Majesty’.7 If Emanuel’s sixtieth birthday had been celebrated en famille at the North Cape, his seventieth birthday in 1929 was much more grandiose, reminiscent of his magnificent fiftieth birthday celebration. The party was held at the Golf Hotel in Oberhof in the presence of sixty relatives and friends. Among those sending congratulations were King Gustaf V, Prince Carl, the Swedish government, Knut Wallenberg, Archbishop Nathan Söderblom, Hugo Standertskjöld, Gustaf Mannerheim, Henry Deterding, former Russian finance minister Kokovtsov, the

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Nobel Foundation, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Karolinska Institute, Disconto-Gesellschaft in Berlin and Torgprom in Paris. Also, several Nobel prizewinners, among them the German and French foreign ministers Gustav Stresemann and Aristide Briand (who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926) and the physicists Max Planck and Albert Einstein, sent their greetings.8 One of the guests was Wilhelm Hagelin, which was particularly pleasing to Emanuel. Hagelin was his closest friend and confidant; they had known each other for half a century. ‘Accept my heartfelt thanks that you too, dearest friend, were here on the spot,’ Emanuel wrote after the celebration: ‘It was a sound inspiration on my part when I thought it might be nice if you, my nearest, would gather here within the walls of this hotel, on its remote height, and I hope that the outcome has been satisfactory.’ He had his hands full, he told Hagelin, answering all the greetings. He had dealt with kings, emperors and princes and about a hundred others as well, but in order to cope with all the rest he had been forced to print thank you cards in four languages.9 At the age of seventy Emanuel was a man feted far and wide, the bearer not only of a proud name but duly recognized officially. In addition to his many Russian honours and titles he had over the years added several Swedish ones. In 1910 he became an honorary doctor of medicine of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, in the following year a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 1926 ‘first honorary member’ of the Academy of Engineering Science (where, moreover, K.W. Hagelin had been named an honorary member in 1923).

Bunin’s Nobel Prize It was Emanuel who ensured that Alfred’s will was respected, and he was a regular guest at the Nobel ceremonies even during the Russian years. He had no formal connection with the Nobel Foundation or the prize committees, but when in the 1920s the Foundation was threatened with taxation, he was involved in the discussion. On at least one occasion he acted, if only passively, to influence the choice of a prize-winner for literature. It concerned the Russian author Ivan Bunin, best known for the short stories ‘Mitya’s Love’ and ‘The Man from San Francisco’ and the autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev. In 1923 Bunin, who had settled in France after the Russian Revolution, had been put forward for a shared prize with Maxim Gorky and the poet Konstantin Balmont and in 1930 for a shared prize with the novelist Dmitri Merezhkovsky – all three of them writers who had emigrated from Soviet Russia. The first time that Bunin was put forward for a prize of his own was in 1931, and this is where Emanuel comes into the picture. ‘At Gukasov’s urging, I am making a fuss about Bunin,’ Emanuel wrote to Wilhelm Hagelin on 29 January 1931, two days before the deadline for proposals.10

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FIGURE 16.3 Marta’s invitation to Emanuel’s seventieth birthday party.

Four ‘Paris Russians’, the oil baron Abram Gukasov, Emanuel’s old acquaintance the former Russian finance minister Vladimir Kokovtsov, Nikolai Kulman, professor of Russian at the Sorbonne, and the lawyer and politician in the émigré ‘Cadet Party’ Vassili Maklakov, had suggested that Bunin should be awarded the Nobel Prize and Emanuel translated and forwarded their letter to the Nobel committee.11 Since Bunin’s candidature was also put forward by a number of respected professors, a Nobel prize for Bunin in 1931 did not look unlikely. Georg Oleinikov, who of course was aware of Emanuel’s intervention, had in any case no qualms about the business but wrote a letter to Bunin only a few weeks later hoping to be able to see him at a ‘Russian dinner’ in Stockholm in December. That Emanuel’s contribution was given great weight is shown by the fact that when on 6 December

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FIGURE 16.4 In connection with Emanuel’s seventieth birthday celebration in Oberhof a family portrait was taken which depicted two generations of the Nobel family. Emanuel’s sister Mina had died shortly before, so neither her husband Hans Olsen nor their children were present. Back row from left: Gotte Hain, Alice Hain (daughter of Carl Nobel), Andriette Tydén (daughter of Carl Nobel), Ludvig (son of Robert Nobel), Mimmi Högman (daughter of Carl Nobel), Luise Nobel (wife of Rolf Nobel), Norah Ahlqvist (daughter of Ingrid Ahlqvist), Minnie Nobel (wife of Lullu Nobel), Rolf Nobel, Dora Ahlqvist (married to Eric Ahlqvist, later to Nils Oleinikov), Ingrid Ahlqvist (daughter of Ingrid Ahlqvist), Georg Oleinikov, Gösta Nobel, Nils Oleinikov, Alfred Nobel (Freddy; son of Gösta Nobel), Eric Ahlqvist (son of Ingrid Ahlqvist), Emil Nobel. Front row from left: Valborg Nobel, Marta Nobel-Oleinikov, Emanuel, Ingrid Ahlqvist (née Nobel), Lullu Nobel, Nadine Nobel. The person in the photograph who, apart from the central figure, Emanuel, attracts the most interest is Nadine Nobel, who since 1928 had been married to Gösta (who divorced Zhenya). She had been born in 1885 as Nadezhda Massino into a Jewish family which had converted to Christianity, and aged twenty-two she had married Colonel Pyotr Zalessky, adjutant to Admiral Grigorovich, who several years later was appointed Russian Minister for the Navy. She moved, in other words, in the highest military and political circles of the capital. There, in 1912, she made the acquaintance of Sidney Reilly, the legendary adventurer, businessman and spy whom Ian Fleming’s James Bond is partly modelled on. Reilly, the genius with languages and Ace of Spies, as he was called, was a Russian Jew and was really called Shlomo Rosenblum but he claimed to be an Irishman. After three years as Reilly’s lover, Nadine divorced Zalessky, having been married to him for seven years, and in 1915 she forced Reilly to marry her; luckily, she was unaware that he was married already. At this point, Nadezhda, like Reilly, had changed her identity and claimed to be Swiss and to be called Nadine. During the First World War Reilly worked as a spy for Great Britain and in the autumn of 1918 he was the key player in a bungled attempt to bring down the Bolshevik regime. Nadine and Reilly divorced in 1920 – if we can talk of divorce when Reilly was a bigamist and the marriage was thus invalid. In 1925 Reilly was lured into a trap by the Soviet secret service and executed in Moscow. The marriage of Nadine and Gösta was later dissolved. She died in 1954.

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he suffered a stroke Oleinikov immediately informed Bunin. The news made the writer exclaim that ‘his whole life had been like this!’ and that he just knew that something was bound to happen this year to stop him getting the Nobel prize. Georgi assured him, however, that his ‘chances of success are just as great although of course that’s not the same thing’.12 The Nobel Prize for 1931 went not to Bunin but to the Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt, and in 1932 it was awarded to John Galsworthy. It is a known fact that not only Bunin but also other Russian émigré writers saw Emanuel, with his name and Russian background, as a sort of short-cut to the Nobel Prize, but that was a miscalculation. Apart from the purely literary considerations that lay behind the decision not to give Bunin the prize either in 1931 or in 1932 it is not impossible that it may have been Emanuel’s very intervention that handicapped the author. The Nobel Committee were wary of being accused of exerting undue pressure, especially from a member of the Nobel family who in his accompanying letter stated that the four Russians were his ‘old friends’ from St Petersburg. Moreover, according to the Committee, none of them except possibly Kulman was entitled to propose a candidate.13 Bunin got the Nobel Prize in 1933, but Emanuel did not live to see it, he had died as a result of the stroke. He would certainly have been delighted not only by the prize but also by the fact that during his stay in Stockholm, unlike other recipients, Bunin and his wife put up not at the Grand Hotel but in Emanuel’s old apartment, right beside the hotel. It was here that the planned ‘Russian dinner’ took place, with a two-year delay. Although it was not entered in the official programme two members of the Swedish Academy, Henrik Schück and Anders Österling, were among the forty guests. Almost half of the other guests were members of the Nobel family, and in his speech Gösta gave expression to ‘the joy that all of his family felt at the announcement that the prize was going to a Russian author’.14

Emanuel’s death Emanuel had a robust physique. According to his half-sister, Marta, he did not suffer from any of the chronic ailments of old age, and until the stroke felled him he lived the life he had always lived, without needing to abstain from the pleasures of the table and a comfortable life in general. Yet she noticed that ‘several years before his death’ he was showing signs of senility, something that Hans Olsen observed too: ‘For a long time Emanuel had been showing clear signs of increasing feebleness and confusion, therefore one was prepared for something happening, but nevertheless his collapse came as a shock to all of us.’15 The stroke led to the whole of his right side being paralyzed and he lost the power of speech. Even if he rallied somewhat towards autumn and was able to sit up in his wheelchair he never recovered and died on 31 May 1932, three weeks before his seventy-third birthday.

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On 5 June a requiem mass was held for Emanuel in the Russian Orthodox church in Stockholm – a nod to his Russian background. The funeral took place in St Jakob’s church the following day in the presence of family and friends and an impressive number of representatives of official Sweden. Emanuel’s colleagues in Branobel and friends from St Petersburg (Wilhelm Hagelin, Hans Olsen, Anton Carlsund, Knut Littorin, Gustaf Eklundh, Knut Malm, Fredrik Lidvall, Oscar Kristoffersson, the Backlund family, the Bilderling family, Mrs Beliamina and many others) were either there in person or sent wreaths. Official Sweden was represented by the Nobel Foundation, the Swedish Academy, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Marcus Wallenberg, K.A. Wallenberg, mayor Carl Lindhagen, Helge Axelsson Johnson and more. Wreaths also came from Branobel’s Polish and Finnish companies, Standard Oil’s Walter Teagle, the Disconto-Gesellschaft in Berlin, the Dynamite Company Ltd in Cologne, the Nitroglycerine Company Ltd., AB Separator, the Swedish Society in St Petersburg (after 1917 based in Stockholm), the Society of Russian Swedes, ‘old Finnish officials’ and many more.16 ‘An uncommonly urbane, capable and helpful personality has left us in the shape of Emanuel Nobel,’ according to the obituary by Erik Vennberg, senior registrar of the College of Commerce, who the following year was commissioned by the Nobel Foundation to write ‘the major biographical monument to the Nobel family’.17 Vennberg also noted that Emanuel ‘died unmarried, and was like a father to his many siblings, whose upbringing and financial interests he looked after with great care’.18 That Emanuel in his lifetime assumed significant responsibility for the welfare of his siblings and half-siblings ought to have been clear from this book. He showed the same care in death, through the terms of his will. Emanuel’s personal estate consisted mainly of shares (the greater part of which was his holdings in the Nitroglycerine Company), bonds, cash and debts and was valued at 2,873,526 kronor, corresponding to around £6.7 million today. Among the property was – besides furniture and other goods – coins and medals of gold and silver, watches, jewellery, boxes, chains, beakers and Russian decorations. The many paintings included a portrait of Hjalmar Crusell, made by one of Russia’s finest painters Valentin Serov in 1909 (in connection with the thirtieth anniversary of the Naphtha Company, when Emanuel too was portrayed by the same artist), a portrait of Edla and a painting ‘by Anders Zorn’. Among ‘outgoing debts and amounts’ there were pension payments to a number of people, among them Vladimir Nazansky and Mikhail Yevlanov, who had helped Emanuel to flee from the Caucasus.19 The assets confiscated in Russia, including those in Branobel, were shown in a special supplement but were not assigned any value. The will was written in 1928 with a minor addition in 1930.20 Emanuel’s siblings and their children shared eight parts of the inheritance: the first went to his brother Carl’s three daughters, the other seven to Emanuel’s half-siblings Mina, Ingrid, Marta, Rolf, Emil, Lullu and Gösta. Of these, however, Mina and Ingrid had died in 1929, so that the legacy went to their children. If the property existing in Russia –

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real estate, personal property, shares – were to ‘return to its previous lawful owners’, then it would devolve with full rights of ownership to three of the brothers, Rolf, Emil and Gösta. Before the siblings’ portions of the inheritance were shared out, however, four other beneficiaries were to receive theirs. The first was his ‘faithful housekeeper’ Anastasia Karelina, who ‘as a token of gratitude for what she has done for me’ received 50,000 kronor and also in future her yearly pension of 8,000 kronor (around 240,000 kronor today, or £19,000). As she had died the year before, however, this item was invalid. The next beneficiary was given as Emanuel’s only surviving full sibling, Anna, who was granted a yearly pension of 15,000 kronor (about 450,000 kronor/£35,000 today) and a one-off sum of 100,000 (3 million kronor/£240,000). If both these legacies hardly came as a surprise for Emanuel’s siblings, the two remaining ones probably did. One Juri Jerzykowicz (wrongly spelt as Jerzykovicz in the will), a student at the Technical University in Zürich at Emanuel’s expense, would also in future have his education paid for, and his mother, Antoinette von Jerzykowicz, living at 19 Boulevard Suchet in Paris, inherited all of 350,000 kronor (10 million kronor/£800,00 today).21 This represented 12 per cent of the fortune left by Emanuel. As if Emanuel had foreseen that this share of the inheritance would be questioned, he underlined in his will that the sum should be paid out ‘at the same time as the other legacies’ and Wilhelm Hagelin was asked to see that it happened. The same applied ‘with respect also to Juri Jerzykowicz’s sick father’, where Hagelin was urged to ‘act according to the circumstances’. When Emanuel’s inheritance was distributed in February 1935 his lady friend was awarded, after deductions for inheritance tax and legal costs.22 That it was Hagelin who was asked to ensure that the payment of the legacy was taken care of as it should be no coincidence. He was based at various times in Paris, where Antoinette von Jerzykowicz lived, and knew about the nature of Emanuel’s relationship with her. An indication that she was aware of the legacy is a letter of 1929 in which Emanuel tells Hagelin that she ‘returned this evening [to Oberhof] from a stay in Dapper’s Sanatorium and will let me know about the tax question’.23 A reasonable interpretation is that the ‘tax question’ had to do with the taxation of her future inheritance. The same letter also mentions the payment of a debt of 150,000 francs (a good 600,000 kronor/£47,000 today) for the house she lived in (or that she possibly owned) on the Boulevard Suchet. Who was the woman who was Emanuel’s main heir? Antoinette von Jerzykowicz was Russian and identical with the Antonina Alexandrovna who accompanied him on his travels to Italy and India and kept him company during his health cures in South Germany. In the letters she appears under the initials A.A., but no further information is given about her identity. Her surname shows that she had married into the Polish noble family of Jerzykowicz. The fact that she was Emanuel’s companion on his trips is witness in any case that there was a special relationship between them.

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A glimpse is given of her in Leif Nobel’s diary from the India trip, where she is portrayed as ‘a real devil of a woman, sour and lazy’, but that does not say much.24 More information can be gleaned from Leif ’s father Hans Olsen, in whose memoirs Antoinette de Jerzykowicz’s presence in Emanuel’s life is seen as a result of Emanuel’s ‘unmistakable signs of increasing senility’.25 According to Hans Olsen, Antonina Alexandrovna was thus an adventuress, but when did she enter Emanuel’s life? Late. They met in 1917–18, during Emanuel’s stay in the Caucasus. According to Georgi Oleinikoff, Antoinette de Jerzykowicz was a woman who ‘knew her own value’. She ‘lived in a big way, spent a lot, and obviously got on his nerves, so when after his stroke he was asked whether he wanted to see her, he answered – no, the hell not’.26 As an example of how Emanuel was exploited by her, Olsen cites the expensive jewellery from the Parisian jewellery firm Boucheron that he gave her and that Emil and Gösta were forced to pay for after his stroke. ‘This was just one of the many inconveniences that this person caused the Nobel family,’ declared Hans Olsen, who helped to sort out the business.27

An assessment of Emanuel’s achievements The large inheritance that Antoinette de Jerzykowicz, her son and to some extent also his father were allotted in Emanuel’s will bears witness to his generosity and consideration for other people – qualities that are testified to by many. When Rudolf Diesel died and his family lost their wealth, Emanuel took steps to finance his son Eugen’s education, precisely as he had done for Juri Jerzykowicz. His generosity also expressed itself in more concrete gifts. At great dinners and at Christmas the guests could look forward to finding a little present under the cover, most often by the master jeweller Carl Fabergé. Sister Maja Huss, mentioned earlier, received for example a silver spoon by Fabergé during her first year in the Nobel household. Nobel was Fabergé’s single best customer and the head designer Franz Birbaum recalled that Emanuel ‘was so generous with presents that you would have thought that it was his main occupation and source of pleasure’.28 His generosity was not confined to his family and closest circle. It is commonly known that Emanuel always had pieces of jewellery in his pockets with which to grace women who pleased him. Emanuel had what in Russian is called a shirokaya natura – i.e. an expansive and generous disposition. This expressed itself not only privately but in everything he did. Alongside his position as head of the family and ‘boss’ for his employees he was a giant in the business and financial world. This aspect of his personality is reflected in the extravagant banquets associated with the anniversaries of Branobel and the machine factory and the magnificent volumes that were published in

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connection with them. In the ‘house on the quay’ the table was always set for twelve people and in the garage were a dozen cars with chauffeurs ready to serve his guests. A typical example of his shirokaya natura is that for the lunch that Alfred gave for king Oscar II at Björkborn in September 1895 he supplied no fewer than thirty kilos of black caviar from St Petersburg for His Majesty and the other guests, including himself and Hjalmar Nobel.29 It might be said that it is not hard to be generous when one is a billionaire, but generosity is not in the first place a question of means but of disposition. Emanuel’s open-handedness was, along with everything else, an expression of his ‘kindness to his fellow men’ – the expression comes from a characterization of Ludvig but can equally well apply to Emanuel, who in many respects resembled his father.30 He did not possess Ludvig’s technical genius, but had on the other hand inherited his sense of responsibility and his consideration for his family and others. Emanuel also shared his father’s stoical attitude to life. Experience had taught the Nobels that happiness and success can easily mutate into their opposites, and Emanuel reacted to life’s ups and downs just like his father, with impressive equanimity. So much for Emanuel’s personal qualities. How should we judge his professional contributions? He was handed responsibility for the family’s companies at a young age and without having any formal educational qualifications. His ability and character traits were also questioned to begin with, both by members of the family and others. Any misgivings, however, failed to materialize. Emanuel was no inventor, like his father and uncles, or his grandfather. The technical management of the businesses was therefore left to individuals like Wilhelm Hagelin and Anton Carlsund who were knowledgeable about engineering and enterprising. Nor did he head up the commercial side – Hans Olsen, Knut Littorin and others took care of that. Emanuel’s strength lay in the realm of finance. He handled external contacts, with authorities, banks and other institutions, both in Russia and beyond. He had, as we saw, excellent relationships with Russian government circles and the Russian ‘military-industrial complex’, as well as with Russian banks. The latter is shown, for example, by the fact that in 1917 the banks owned at least half of the shares in the Naphtha Company. Another instance of the trust that Emanuel enjoyed in financial circles is that for thirty years he was a member of the Russian State Bank’s bank rate committee. His links with the Disconto-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Branobel’s biggest foreign bank contact and lender, as well as with the Enskilda Banken in Stockholm were also exceptionally good. All this ensured that the liquidity problems that beset the Naphtha Company during Ludvig’s last years never recurred. At the same time as Emanuel was not the driving force in technical questions, he had, as the Swedish historian Heckscher put it, ‘a certain intuitive ability to judge the value of others’ technical suggestions and an inherited breadth of understanding and interest when it came to support experimentation and practical

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application of the new’.31 Examples of this were the founding of Alfa-Nobel and, not least, the diesel company with the resultant development of the diesel engine and its adaptation for powering ships.

After Emanuel Emanuel left six living siblings: his full sister Anna and his half-siblings Marta, Rolf, Emil, Lullu and Gösta. Three years later, in the course of just one month, Anna and Lullu died, the former after many years of heart problems. Lullu, after his flight to Sweden, had become involved in a number of business ventures, among them Svenska Nobel-Diesel Ltd, which in 1918 took over the weighing machine factory Stathmos. It was there that the engines were manufactured and one of them was installed in Zoroaster 2. However, diesel engine manufacture on such a small scale proved not to be profitable and in 1925 Nobel-Diesel closed down. Thereafter, Lullu set to work on the manufacture of stainless steel in Norway, but that enterprise too came to nothing.32 Ever since their flight Emil and Gösta had been based in France where they had busied themselves with different business ventures, mainly with a connection to the oil industry. In 1926, Emil bought a ramshackle property at Longueil near Dieppe where he had a manor-house built in Norman style. He died in 1951 and Gösta, who was permanently based in Paris, died in 1955.

FIGURE 16.5 Emil, Marta, Gösta and Rolf on Gösta’s sixtieth birthday which was celebrated at the Royal in Stockholm on 17 October 1946

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Apart from their ‘blood relations’, the Nobel family included two other individuals who made a major contribution to the development of the Naphtha Company: Wilhelm Hagelin and Hans Olsen. The latter, who in 1924 moved with his family to Stockholm, outlived his wife Mina by twenty-two years and died in 1951, at the age of ninety-two. He portrayed his varied life in a manuscript of over 700 pages, preserved in the Nobel Museum and entitled Livserindringer (Memoirs). Wilhelm Hagelin also left memoirs of his time in Russia. They were published in 1935 with the title Från filare till storindustriell i Naftabolaget Bröderna Nobels tjänst (From filer to large-scale industrialist in the service of the Nobel brothers). (The text is in parts heavily edited and therefore in this book I have availed myself of Hagelin’s manuscript, which is kept in the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology.) Hagelin’s remarkable career ‘from filer to large-scale industrialist’ deserves its own account. Apart from Ludvig and Robert no other individual played such a decisive role in the technical development of the Naphtha Company as he did. Emanuel was the first to acknowledge this. In a letter of 1925, he summed up his friend’s achievement as follows: You took the lead in understanding how to educate people for our great works, beginning with Balakhani, the distillation and sewage treatment works, as well as our sea and river transports, and in accordance with your plans the Volga in Astrakhan has been supplied with new cisterns, which were the first step in securing the regular operation of the large barges, not to mention the dieselpowered vessels on the Caspian Sea, and on the rivers to Danzig and Warsaw. I will never forget the journey we made together from St Petersburg to Kronstadt, when you first set out your plans as a whole and I then had the far simpler task of finding the means. But returning to the question of the naphtha land, no one apart from yourself has ever busied himself with this major task, nor been able to fulfil or carry out all the preparatory work and calculations that have always been carried out by you, and you have been the only one taking decisions, not only for Baku, but also for Grozny, and all the test drillings most of all for Emba.33 In the 1920s Hagelin was also involved in the Naphtha Company’s efforts to safeguard their assets. Together with Emanuel he was also part owner of Cryptograph Ltd, where his son Boris, who was an engineer and during the war had worked on submarine diesels in the machine factory, was working as a designer of encrypting machines. The reason for this venture was that, when conditions in Russia returned to normal one day, it was hoped that secure lines of communication could be set up between the Nobel offices and their new partner Standard Oil. The encryption machine became an international success and was used by the American army during the Second World War; but as we saw, no secret lines of

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communication between the Nobel offices came into use.34 Wilhelm Hagelin died in Stockholm in 1955, aged ninety-five. The only siblings who were resident in Sweden after the deaths of Anna and Lullu were Marta and Rolf. Not much is known about Rolf ’s activities apart from the fact that he ran a small workshop for the manufacture of, among other things, valves for water-pipes. However, it did not do well and was sold in 1938. Rolf died in 1947. With one exception, none of Ludvig’s children reached an advanced age, neither those who were born in his marriage with Mina nor the children by Edla. We recall Alfred’s words: ‘The Nobel and Ahlsell families are actually wretched races, fated to have a short existence.’35 Emanuel would have been seventy-three a few weeks after his death. Ingrid got to fifty, Mina fifty-six, Lullu sixty-one, Rolf sixty-five, Emil sixty-six, Gössta and Anna sixty-nine. The exception was Marta, who after Edla’s death took over the role of mater familias and after Emanuel’s death became the head of the family. The family gathered round her in Stockholm and most of all at Kirjola, where she and Georgi moved permanently in 1934. However, they had only a few years together in their summer palace. In the winter of 1937, Georg fell through the ice on the way out to his beloved island and died, seventy-three years old. During the 1930s, Kirjola was a popular centre for the family’s younger members, who enjoyed spending the summer there, but two years after Georgi’s death the Kirjola saga was over. On 29 November 1939, Marta was forced to leave the property, which had been requisitioned by the Finnish armed forces. The following day the Soviet Union attacked Finland. When in February 1940 the Soviet forces pushed in from the south the Finnish army blew up the property to stop it serving as a base for the enemy. Before this, most things of value had been buried in the frozen ground or sent to Sweden. After the end of the Winter War the buried objects were found, transported to Sweden and shared out in 1945 between the heirs. Marta recalled: ‘There were both antique furniture, paintings, silver, ornamental and table porcelain, Edla Nobel’s renowned fine linen and damask table-linen with large, hand-embroidered monograms and much more besides.’36 In the autumn of 1940, Marta moved back to Stockholm. The work on the biography of her father, which had been entrusted to Erik Vennberg, had stopped after his death in 1937. The person who shouldered the responsibility was Marta, ‘who herself enjoyed dilettante family and archive research and had plenty of time’.37 The aim was to throw light on the Nobel family’s epoch-making contributions to Russian industry, which was not mentioned in the Soviet Union and was being forgotten in Sweden, where the Nobel name had become wholly associated with the Nobel prize and its creator. The result was the 700-page book Ludvig Nobel och hans verk: En släkts och en storindustris historia (Ludvig Nobel and his Work: the history of a family and an

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industrial enterprise), published in 1952 in a limited edition (a few copies only) meant for the family. The Royal Library and the Swedish Academy also received a copy each, which however was not to be loaned out until twenty-five years later. The book is a fluently rich work, a mixture of family and industrial history, characterized by precision, humour, and a healthy distance from the subject – even if the author does not conceal her admiration for her father. As can be seen from the many references to it, Ludvig Nobel och hans verk has been of inestimable help in the writing of this book, not least as regards family history and other personal details. With the book about her father and his achievements, Marta performed an invaluable service for her family. During the last years of her life she was to write herself in – or, rather, to be written in against her will – to the family history because of a decision with historic consequences. In 1968, the National Bank of Sweden was to celebrate its 300th anniversary and in connection with this a research foundation was set up. The measure was controversial as it was not the role of the National Bank to finance research. Even more controversial was the idea of Per Åsbrink, the head of the Bank, to flavour the anniversary with the founding of a National Bank-financed ‘Nobel Prize’ in economics. No such prize is named in Alfred’s will, and so the Nobel Foundation had to be persuaded. This was done, despite certain objections. One speculation is that the foundation may have been exposed to subtle threats about loss of tax privileges if they opposed the idea. However, one prerequisite was that the Nobel family too should grant their permission. Three members of the family were asked but had their doubts. It was then decided to approach Marta, the head of the family, chair of the Nobel Family Society and the only one still alive who had met Alfred. When on 10 May, five days before the anniversary, Marta was visited by the director of the foundation, Nils Ståhle and its chairman Ulf von Euler, the matter was presented to her in such a way that she understood it was already decided and that there was no point in turning it down. She therefore gave her written permission but insisted that the award should be kept separate from the other prizes and called Prize for economic science in memory of Alfred Nobel. On the day of the bank’s anniversary, 15 May, therefore, a triumphant Per Åsbrink was able to announce the founding of a new ‘Nobel Prize’. We cannot talk of approval by the family as a whole,’ declared Peter Nobel, grandson of Hans Olsen and Mina Nobel. Other family members did not get to know about it until much later. The prize was more or less the result of a coup and, according to Peter Nobel,‘a unique example of successful trademark infringement’.38 Ever since its inauguration the prize has come in for severe criticism, both because it lacks support from Alfred Nobel’s will and because Alfred in general was sceptical of economists. Moreover, it is doubtful whether political economy, in contrast to medicine, chemistry and physics, can be regarded as a science. Despite the criticism the prize has been awarded since 1969 and what the sceptics – not

358

THE NOBEL FAMILY

FIGURE 16.6 In a letter to her family Marta Nobel-Oleinikov described the last days of Kirjola: ‘On 17th December the estate suffered the first air raid: a low-level attack on Kirjola by three fighter planes with machine guns. . . . Then the staff moved from the corps-delogi (principal block) to the schoolhouse and Ylämäki and further away to Ämäsuumäki. Only five officers and about thirty soldiers stayed behind in the corps-de-logi whose cellar under the tower was reinforced to serve as an air-raid shelter day and night. As did my ice cellar. At Kirjola farm the authorities bought or requisitioned fodder and food, coke, wood, naphtha, petrol, motor and other vehicles, tools, horses and other farm-animals. The rest were evacuated with the agreement of the authorities to different places in the country. . . . On 16/2 Kirjola was abandoned by the remaining military stationed there. The following day, Saturday the 17th, all the wooden buildings were burnt including the kiln and the henhouse by a group of Finnish sappers led by a second-lieutenant. . . . Four charges were laid under the corps-de-logi. The house was completely destroyed, the tower collapsed and fell right out into the bay. Fire raged in the ruins . . . On the morning of Sunday 18th February the whole stretch of coast from Makslahti to Kaislahti was in the hands of the Russians and by the 20th they had occupied Revonsaari.’

least the Nobel family – feared has come to pass, namely that the prize ‘in Alfred Nobel’s memory’ has over the years come to be seen as a genuine Nobel prize. Marta was eighty-seven, hard of hearing but in full possession of her senses, when she felt herself obliged to sign the document that opened the way for the controversial prize. She died in January 1973, at the age of ninety-one. Her death brought an end to the Nobel family’s Russian history, whose first chapter had been written by her grandfather 145 years earlier.

POSTSCRIPT

359

FIGURE 16.7 The staircase where once Ludvig’s portrait had hung (see page 282).

360

THE NOBEL FAMILY

17 P.P.S.

During the perestroika of the 1980s the view of private enterprise in the Soviet Union gradually became more positive, which among other things meant that the Nobel family’s contributions to Russian industry came to be fundamentally reappraised. In October 1991, a monument to Alfred was erected on the quay in St Petersburg when Immanuel’s mechanical workshop had been situated, and after the fall of Communism and the introduction of a market economy Ludvig and Emanuel came to be hailed as emphatically as they had previously been condemned. In 1993, a plaque to Marta was put up on the hospital clinic she had financed. Three years later many members of the Nobel Family Society paid a visit to St Petersburg, where they were received at the highest political level. They were then able to visit the family graves and the ‘house on the quay’, which had become almost a ruin. Later, members of the family also visited Baku. If the Nobels were blamed for being exploiters during the Soviet era they are seen nowadays as exemplary entrepreneurs, as ‘good capitalists’. Seminars and conferences about the family’s history are held in Russia, Sweden and Azerbaijan, essays are written and books published about Branobel and the machine shop in St Petersburg. In Baku the managing director’s house in the Villa Petrolea has been renovated with private capital and converted into an ‘oil club’, and the broad motorway that runs through the capital was given the name Nobel Prospekt (in 2021 it was renamed 8 November Prospekt to commemorate the Azerbaijani victory over Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh). In 2013, a bust of Ludvig was raised on the Nobel boulevard in the city of Rybinsk, where Branobel had big depots. The prize in Ludvig Nobel’s memory from 1889 has been re-introduced, although with a completely different orientation than the original – the recipients are now ‘outstanding personalities’ and since 2005 over fifty prizes have been awarded. That one of the recipients is Vladimir Putin says something about the status of the prize. In today’s Russia, Nobel is a name with enormous radiance. This is of course positive. Yet it is not always employed to noble ends. The Nobel Foundation and the Nobel Family Society, who according to the statutes have the duty of

361

‘safeguarding the reputation of the Nobel name’, are therefore forced sometimes to intervene to prevent it being misused. First pariah, then hero . . . a leitmotif in Russia’s fateful history! Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky – all exiled in Soviet times, all now have a statue in Russian cities. To the same elite company belong the Nobel family, whose ‘dissidence’ was not literary nor political but derived from the fact that they were private manufacturers. With the fall of Soviet Communism, the circle was closed.

362

THE NOBEL FAMILY

FAMILY TREE 1757–1839

1770–1823

Immanuel Nobel 1801–1872

Robert 1829–1896

Andriette Nobel 1803–1889

Ludvig 1831–1888

g.m. Pauline Lenngrén 1840–1918

Hjalmar 1863–1956

Ingeborg 1866–1939

Ludvig 1868–1946

Alfred 1833–1896

Emil 1843–1864

g.m. (1) Wilhelmina Ahlsell 1832–1869

Thyra 1873–1896

Emanuel 1859–1932

Carl 1862–1893

Anna 1866–1935

Emil 1885–1951

Gösta 1886–1955

g.m. (2) Edla Collin 1848–1921

Mina Ludvig (“Lullu”) (”Lullu”) Ingrid 1873–1929 1874–1935 1879–1929

Marta 1881–1973

Rolf 1882–1947

The family tree does not include members who died as young children. Earlier generations of the family, whose lineage goes back to the seventeenth century, are also omitted.

363

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Aftonbladet (19.4.1894) 9.6 Author’s archive 2.4, 8.3, 9.3, 13.5 Centrum för näringslivshistoria (Centre for Business History), Stockholm 4.2, 4.4, 6.2, 7.8, 9.4, 12.2, 12.3, colour plate 8 Charles Marvin, The Petroleum Industry of Southern Russia (1884) 6.1, 7.7 Finlands Nationalgalleri (Finnish National Gallery) 1.3 Fyren (1916:49–51) 11.3 Henrik Schück/Ragnar Sohlman, Alfred Nobel och hans släkt (1926) colour plates 5–6. Illustrerad Tidning (1864:38) 3.3 Imperial War Museum, London 15.1 Leif Nobel’s archive 13.3 (b), 16.4 Marta Nobel-Oleinikoff, Ludvig Nobel and his Work (1952) 2.3, 11.2, 11.4, 13.2, 13.3 (a, d), 13.4, 13.6 Museiverket i Helsingfors (The Finnish Heritage Agency) 12.7 Tekniska Museet (Museum of Technology), Stockholm 5.2, 5.4, 5.7, 6.4, 7.3, 7.4, 9.8 National Archive of Azerbaijan 5.8, 7.1 National Archive of Georgia 5.3, 5.5 Nobel Family Archive 4.3, 12.5, 13.3 (c), 14.1, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 16.5 Nobel Foundation 2.5, 3.7, 8.4, 10.2, 10.5 Peter Oleinikoff ’s archive 12.4, 12.6, 16.6, 16.7 Public domain 1.2, 2.2, 4.6, 7.6 Regional Archive at Lund, colour plates 1, 3, 4 Robert Nobel’s (jr) archive 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.4, 3.6, 4.1, 9.1, 9.2, 9.5, 9.7, 9.9, 10.1, 10.3, 10.4 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 5.6 Sjöhistoriska Museet (National Maritime Museum), Stockholm 6.3 Smyth, Ædes Hartwellianæ, or Notices of the Mansion of Hartwell (1851) 1.1 Stockholms Stadsmuseum (Stockholm City Museum) 3.1, 3.5, 5.1 Svenska Litteratursällskapet i Finland (The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland) 4.5 Swedish National Archive 7.2, 7.5, colour plate 2 Thomas Tydén’s archive 8.1, 8.2, 11.1, 12.1, 13.1, colour plate 7 Ulf Danielsson’s archive 8.5 Åbo museicentral (Turku Museum Centre) 2.1

364

NOTES

Abbreviations Names

FRA

Finska riksarkivet (Finnish National Archive)

LH

Landsarkivet i Härnösand (Regional Archive at Härnösand)

AA

Adolf Ahlsell

AL

Alarik Liedbeck

AN

Alfred Nobel

AT

Alfred Törnqvist

CN

Carl Nobel

LL NA Landsarkivet i Lund, Nobelska arkivet (Regional Archive at Lund, the Nobel files)

ED

Erik Delin

NM

EN

Emanuel Nobel

HN

Hjalmar Nobel

IL

Ivar Lagerwall

NS RN Nobelstiftelsen, Robert Nobels arkiv (Nobel Foundation, Robert Nobel’s archive)

IN

Immanuel Nobel

NSF

KWH

Karl Wilhelm Hagelin

Nobels släktförenings arkiv (Nobel Family Archive, kept in the Nobel Museum)

LA

Ludvig Ahlsell

RGIA

LN

Ludvig Nobel

PB

Pjotr Bilderling

Rossiskij Gosudarstvennyj Istoričeskij Archiv (Russian State Historical Archive)

PL

Pauline Lenngrén

RA

PN

Pauline Nobel

Riksarkivet (Swedish National Archive)

RN

Robert Nobel

SH

Sofie Hess

TF

Torbern Fegræus

RA AN Riksarkivet, Alfred Nobel’s archive SEHF

Centrum för Näringslivshistoria (Centre for Business History), Stockholm

Stiftelsen för ekonomisk historisk forskning inom bank och företagande (The Foundation for Economic History Research within Banking and Enterprise)

SS

Central’nyj Gosudarstvennyj Istoričeskij Archiv (Central State Historical Archive)

Standertskjöldska släktarkivet (Standertskjöld Family Archive), Helsingfors

SSA

Stockholms stadsarkiv (Stockholm Municipal Archive)

Archives CfN

CGIA

Nobelmuseet (Nobel Museum)

365

VALA Landsarkivet i Vadstena (Regional Archive at Vadstena)

MNO

Marta Nobel-Oleinikoff: Ludvig Nobel och hans verk (Ludvig Nobel and his Work)

Printed sources

NDA

Nya Dagligt Allehanda

AB

Aftonbladet

PIT

Post och Inrikes Tidningar

BLF

Biografiskt lexikon för Finland

SBL

Svenskt biografiskt lexikon

SD

Stockholms Dagblad

DN

Dagens Nyheter

SvD

Svenska Dagbladet

The notes refer mainly to unprinted material, not to sources of general historical and economic facts, production numbers, etc. Such are referred to only in cases where the context so requires.

1 Immanuel 1

Schück, p. 50.

2

Biographical facts about Immanuel Nobel the elders’ life can be found in an article by Lars-Gösta Wiman, ‘Immanuel Nobel – lasarettskirurg i Gävle”, http://www. gavledraget.com/10000-historia/14000-gamla-gavleslakter/immanuel-nobel-lasarett

3

‘Immanuel Nobel’, Svalan 1872:38, 20 September. The obituary is not signed but may be attributed to the wroter Josefina Wettergrund (pseudonym Lea), the publisher of the weekly, who knew the Nobel family well.

4

D.B., ‘Immanuel Nobel’, AB 17.9.1872.

5

Uddholm, p. 23.

6

‘Immanuel Nobel’, Svalan 1872:38, 20 September.

7

The spelling of the family name varied during these years between Nobell and Nobel.

8

Sjömanshuset i Gävle archive. Matriklar 1809–17. LH. That Immanuel was said to be born in 1800 and not in 1801 was probably a conscious error to make him older.

9

Wecko-Tidning från Gefle 1815:21, 17 June, p. 3. In his autobiographical notes, Immanuel states that he went to sea already in 1814, not yet thirteen, but that must be a slip of memory; the documentation shows otherwise.

10 The account of Immanuel’s time at sea 1815–18 is based on his autobiographical notes,

kept in LL NA A:9. If not stated otherwise, the quotations are from that source. 11 The Naval Chronicle, 1812, vol. 27, p. 111. 12 Another possibility is that Immanuel indeed made an earlier trip to the Mediterranean,

however, there is no trace of such a trip (see footnote 9). 13 Ismaïl Gibraltar did indeed travel to Sweden to buy canon and war ships. The aim was to

fight pirates in the Red Sea but no acquisitions seem to have been made. According to a contemporary, however, during his long stay in the country (1817–18), he ‘had a great success among the ladies because of his bandit-patriarchal [sic] looks’ (Arne, p. 268). 14 Krook, p. 227. 15 ‘Immanuel Nobel’, Svalan 1872:38, 20 September.

366

NOTES

16 About Immanuel’s time at the Academy of Fine Arts see his autobiographical notes

and Schück, pp. 49–51. 17 For Fredrik Blom see Roth. 18 MNO, p. 42. 19 Ibid, p. 43. 20 SSA. Gamla ritningssamlingen; MNO, p. 44. 21 Schück, p. 53. 22 Ibid.; Thuresson, p. 1. 23 RA. Kommerskollegium. Acta privatorum 1800–90:1836. EXVIIdb:439; Millqvist

1984:6, p. 64. 24 Strandh, p. 15. 25 Andriette was baptized Andrietta but was called and always used the French form of

the name. 26 About Immanuel at Långholmen see Sundström, p. 94ff. 27 At an inspection in 1868 the city architect found that Immanuel had fulfilled his

undertaking in a generally satisfactory way (Sundström, p. 103). The exterior of the house erected at Knapersta, however, has little to do with the building on Immanuel’s drawing but is much simpler; it is still standing today. 28 SD 2.1.1833. 29 RA. S:t Katarina svenska församling i S:t Petersburg, In- och utflyttningsböcker

1847–59. 30 Schück, p. 54. 31 Sjöman 2001, p. 47. 32 MNO, p. 47. 33 Carlscronas Weckoblad 29.1.1834; Stockholms-Posten 2.3.1833. 34 The account of the history of rubber production in Sweden is based on Millqvist 1988,

p. 109–26, and on his articles 1984:6 and 1984:9. 35 RA. Kommerskollegium. Huvudarkivet. Patentansökningar 1835. EXVII EA:1. 36 Ibid. 37 Quot. from AB 4.5.1835. 38 RA. Kommerskollegium. Huvudserien. Acta privatorum 1800–90: 1835. EXVII db:432.

Quot. from Sjöman 2001, p. 307. 39 PIT 2.5.1835. 40 RA. Kommerskollegium. Register. Koncept. Huvudserien 1835 Jan.–June.

B II A:100. 41 RA. Kommerskollegium. Acta privatorum 1800–90:1836. EXVIIdb:439; Millqvist

1984:6, p. 63. 42 Tengelin, p. 8. 43 RA. Skrivelser från Kommerskollegium till Kungl. Maj:t, vol. 484. 44 ‘Om fabrikater af kautscha’, Åbo Tidningar 11.4.1838. 45 Strandh, p. 18.

NOTES

367

46 Utdrag ur protocollet, hållet inför Öfwer Ståthållare Embetets Cancellie den 30

November 1837. RA AN E1:4. 47 For Fahnehjelm’s takeover of the rubber factory see RA. Kommerskollegium. Acta

privatorum 1800–90:1837. EXVIIdb:443. The diving-suit was patented in 1839. ‘Anton Ludvig Fahnehjelm’, SBL; Hafström, pp. 460, 462. 48 Immanuel Nobel’s autobiographical notes. LL NA A:9. If not indicated otherwise, the

following quotations come from this source. 49 FRA. Generalguvernörskansliet. Passdokument. Generalguvernörskansliet Ff 73. 50 For von Haartman’s biography see BLF. 51 Mechaničeskij zavod . . ., p. 2. 52 Arskaja, pp. 17–21.

2 Immanuel Nobel & Sons 1

As in the previous chapter, Immanuel’s biographical comments come from his autobiographical notes in LL NA A:9.

2

FRA. Generalguvernörskansliet. Passdokument. Generalguvernörskansliet Ff 46.

3

Åbo Landskapsarkiv/Riksarkivet, Åbo och Björneborgs länsstyrelse, Länskansliets arkiv. Pass journal för Afgångne Resande 1838–1840, Bc:14.

4

For Munck see BLF.

5

For Finnish officers in the Russian military see Engman, Klinge and Jalonen.

6

A copy of the division of the estate from 31.3.1840 is preserved in NSF. Brev och vykort:2.

7

PIT 12.3.1844.

8

Ekström stayed in Russia after the delivery of the vase and died there many years later. When in 1881 he lost money in a company in Novgorod and asked Robert and Ludvig to pay their father’s debt to him of 1,000 roubles they reimbursed him with 400. Whether Alfred, who, according to Ekström, ‘has no family and owns the biggest fortune’ paid the remaining 600 roubles is not known (E. Ekström to AN 19/31.10.1881. RA AN EI:3).

9

LL NA A:9, sheet 1–2 (‘Listing of Im. Nobel’s activities regarding his inventions and the execution of his most important orders 1839–1855’ [in Russian]); sheet 252B.

10 For von Schantz see for example Klinge, pp. 49–50. 11 LL NA A:1, sheet 11. 12 For Immanuel’s mine experiments and his relations with the Mine Committee see

D’jakonov. 13 LL NA A:1, sheet 14. 14 Borgå Tidning 29.4.1843; Helsingfors Morgonblad 1.5.1843 and PIT 8.5.1843; SD

21.10.1846; Helsingfors Tidningar 16.1.1847; Pikoff, pp. 126–7. 15 LL NA A:1, sheet 28–30. 16 The information that Immanuel demonstrated his mines to the Emperor (Strandh, p.

19) is not correct. There was such a recommendation from the Mine Committee (A1:18b), but Nicholas chose to send his son and brother instead. The mistake

368

NOTES

probably harks back to the Swedish translation of an official letter of 29 August 1842, listing the names of the people to be present at the experiment, the Emperor among them (A1:19A). However, the translation is not correct. The Russian original mentions only the successor to the throne and Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich (A1:25A). 17 LL NA A:1, sheet 59. (Not 3,000 roubles as indicated in Strandh, p. 19.) 18 NDA 30.11.1842. 19 LL NA A:1, sheet 42B. 20 Ibid., sheet 44–9; A:9, sheet 3B. 21 Carlberg, p. 55. 22 Immanuel’s stay at Åbo is not documented but is evident from the fact that Andriette

gave birth to their fifth child, the son Emil, at the end of October of that same year. 23 Åbo Underrättelser 1843:48, 21 June. 24 IN to Mr Svedberg 25.12.1841. RA AN E1:4. 25 Glazovskij. 26 ‘Mašinostroenie’, Enciklopedičeskij slovar’ Brokgauzа i Efronа, b. XVIIIa, Petersburg

1890. 27 Ogaryov is sometimes mistaken for his namesake, the famous poet Nikolaj Ogaryov,

born in 1813. See for example Carlberg, p. 56. 28 LL NA A:1, sheet 248–249; A:9, sheet 1B. 29 Makovskaja/Goregljad/Lomakin, pp. 260–77. 30 Meškunov, 2010, doc. 5. 31 Aver’janova, p. 32. 32 Meškunov, 2010, doc. 2. 33 The account of the wheel production is based on Strandh, pp. 20–1. 34 IN to Ludvig Ahlsell 11.3.1848. RA AN E1:4. 35 The latter was owned by Prince Maximilian of Leuchtenberg, brother of the Swedish

Queen Josefina and grandson of Empress Joséphine of France. After his marriage to one of the daughters of Nicholas I he lived in Russia. About the import of Finnish workers to St Petersburg see Engman, pp. 152–4. 36 About the Standertskjöld family see Lönnqvist, passim. 37 IN to LA 11.3.1848. RA AN E1:4. 38 IN to LA 29.1.1850. RA AN E1:4. 39 LN to LA 22.12.1848. RA AN EI:4. 40 Poljakov/Zelenin/Nozdračev, p. 25. Ogaryovs cast-iron works were sold in the 1860’s

to Nikolai Putilov who developed it into one of Russia’s biggest. See https://polymus. ru/ru/museum/pros/research/enterprises/141474/. 41 IN to LA 13.9.1848. RA AN E1:4. 42 Schück, p. 101. 43 MNO, p. 59. 44 Cronquist 1897, p. 44. 45 Sjöman 2001, p. 57.

NOTES

369

46 ‘I am sure you know how difficult it is for me to write and therefore I ask Lotten to

help answer your letter,’ Andriette confided to her future daughter-in-law (Andriette to PL 1.11.1861. LL NA Later addition). 47 IN to hr Svedberg 25.12.1841. RA AN E1:4. 48 MNO, p. 62. 49 Ar’janova, p. 24. During the blockade of Leningrad in 1942 the house was demolished

and used as firewood. Another house on the same quay, No. 24, at the corner of the present Pinsky Alley, was long thought to be the house where the Nobel brothers grew up. According to a building register it was owned by the Nobel family as late as in 1891 (Tabel’ domov goroda S.-Peterburga, s priloženiem plana goroda S.-Peterburga, 2nd ed., Petersburg 1891, column 570). 50 RA. Överståthållarämbetet för uppbördsärenden, SE/SSA/0031/06/G 1 BA/G 1 BA

för skilda år. 51 Bergengren, p. 10; Sjöman 2001, p. 60. 52 MNO, p. 59 53 Ibid., p. 58. 54 Sjöman 2001, pp. 58–9. 55 According to the ‘Listing of Im. Nobel’s activities . . . 1839–1855’ the offer was made in

1843 (LL NA A:9, sheet 2). 56 MNO, p. 127. 57 I write about this extensively in my book Vi och dom, Stockholm 2017; Italian edition:

L’idea russa, Milano 2022. 58 Santesson, pp. 96–7; Cronquist 1897, p. 45. 59 MNO, p. 75. 60 RN to PL 14 and 20.1.1860. LL NA Later addition. 61 LN to RN 24.1.1870. NS, vol. 3. 62 MNO, p. 75. 63 RN to PL 23.4.1860. LL NA Later addition. 64 1 IN to LA 13.9.1848. RA AN E1:4. 65 About these questions see Engman, p. 247ff. 66 RA. S:t Katarina församling. Flyttbetyg, p. 242. 67 ‘Listing of Im. Nobel’s activities . . . 1839–1855’ (LL NA A:9, sheet 2B, 4). 68 Meškunov 2010, doc. 6. 69 Ibid., doc. 7. 70 LL NA A:1, sheet 4. 71 Immanuel patented his iron furniture but forgot to include Sweden. 72 Finlands Allmänna Tidning 17 and 20.1.1851. ‘The Samson Quay’ owns its name to the

sixth century saint, Samson, whose remembrance day is on 27 June, the day of the Battle of Poltava (1709). The church erected in his honour by Peter the Great is in the vicinity. 73 Schück, p. 60. 74 PIT 6.4.1853.

370

NOTES

75

LL NA A:9, sheet 87.

76

LL NA A:1, sheet 75–6.

77

Ibid., sheet 100B.

78

D’jakonov, p. 12.

79

Ibid., p. 12.

80

LL NA A:1, sheet 21–4.

81

Quot. from D’jakonov, p. 13.

82

LN NA A:1, sheet 67.

83

Ibid., sheet 147b.

84

Meškunov 2010, doc. 8.

85

Schück, p. 70.

86

About the technological development in the marine during these years see Lindsjö, pp. 100–2.

87

MNO, p. 65.

88

Mechaničeskij zavod . . ., p. 3.

89

Meškunov 2010, doc. 12.

90

LL NA A:9, sheet 284–86.

91

IN to LA 6.1.1856. RA AN E1:4.

92

IN to LA 7.4.1857. RA AN E1:4.

93

Meškunov 2010, doc. 15.

94

IN to LA 7.4.1857. RA AN E1:4.

95

IN LL NA A:9, sheet 5B–6 (‘Listing of Im. Nobel’s activities regarding his inventions and the execution of his most important orders 1839–1855’ [in Russian]), 157–78.

96

Meškunov 2010, doc. 17 and18.

97

LN to LA 10/22.2.1855; IN to LA 23.9.1855. RA AN EI:4.

98

AN to LA 6.11.1856. RA AN EI:4.

99

S:t Katarina svenska församling i S:t Petersburg, Födelseböcker, SE/RA/2416/C/53 (1846–59). About Gustaf Crusell see Nordisk familjebok, 2nd ed., 1906.

100 IN to LA 6.11.1858. RA AN EI:4.

3 Immanuel and Andriette 1

MNO, p. 79.

2

Until 1918, the Julian calendar was used in Russia. It was twelve days ahead of the Western (Gregorian) in the nineteenth century, and thirteen days in the twentieth. In this book both dates are often given.

3

FRA. Generalguvernörskansliet. Passdokument. Generalguvernörskansliet Ff 73; Åbo Underrättelser 15.7.1859; Åbo Tidningar 30.9.1859.

4

RA. S:t Katarina svenska församling i S:t Petersburg, In- och utflyttningsböcker 1847–1859.

5

IN to LA 3.10.1856. RA AN E1:4.

NOTES

371

6

The first preserved letter from Johannisdal is Andriette to Pauline Lenngrén and dated 1.11.1859. LL NA Later addition.

7

‘Lotten’ Ahlsell to PL 7.12.1860. LL NA Later addition.

8

Strandh claims that Immanuel spent close to a year in Åbo but gives no source (Strandh, p. 35).

9

RN to PN 5.11. and 28.12.1862. LL NA Later addition.

10 RN to PL 14.3.1860. LL NA Later addition. 11 RN to PN 20.2.1863. LL NA Later addition. 12 AN to RN 1.6.[1863]. NS RN:1. 13 The documentation of ‘The lawsuit against the Crown’ quoted here and henceforth is

preserved in LL NA A:9. 14 LL NA A:9, sheet 66. 15 Ibid., sheet 86B, 105. 16 Ibid., sheet 101–2. 17 Ibid., sheet 100. 18 AN to RN 11/23.5 and 18/30.5.[1857]. NS RN:1. 19 LL NA A:9, sheet 98B. 20 Ibid., sheet 92B–93B. 21 Ibid., sheet 85B. 22 LN to RN 25.10.1861. NS RN:3. 23 LN to RN 17.11.1861. NS RN:3. 24 LL NA A:9, sheet 87. 25 LN to RN 20.12.1861. NS RN:3. 26 LN to RN 8.3.1862. NS RN:3. 27 AN to RN 12/24.6.1862. NS RN:1. 28 ‘Canto I’. Nobel, p. 85. 29 Schück, p. 298. 30 IN to AN 3.7.1863. RA AN E1:4. 31 Carlberg, p. 587 and footnote 259. 32 RN to PL undated [1859]. LL NA Later addition. 33 RN to PL 27.9.1859. LL NA Later addition. 34 FRA. Generalguvernörskansliet. Passdokument. Generalguvernörskansliet Ff 73. 35 RN to PL 23.10.1859. NS RN:2. 36 LN to RN 25.10.1861. NS RN:3 37 RN to PL 2.11.1860. LL NA Later addition. 38 RN to PN 25.11.1862. LL NA Later addition. 39 AN to RN 11/23.4.1862 and 1/13.4.1862. NS RN:1. 40 RN to PN 30.10.1862. LL NA. Later addition. 41 RN to PN 15.3.1863. LL NA. Later addition. 42 MNO, p. 104.

372

NOTES

43 RN to PN 5 and 7.11.1862. LL NA. Later addition. 44 RA. Kommerskollegium. Huvudarkivet. Patentansökningar 1863. E XVII EA:32; PIT

23.6.1863. 45 RN to PN 28.6/9.7.1863. LL NA Later addition. 46 Black, pp. 29, 242. 47 Schück, pp. 80–1. 48 LN to RN 16.2.1864. NS RN:3. 49 PIT 12.1.1861. 50 NDA 20.1.1863. 51 PIT 9.7.1862. 52 Ibid., 16.7.1862. 53 LL NA A:1, sheet 80–85. The report also mentions that Mr Nobel had invented an

attack mine which is moored to a smaller vessel (see above, p. 48): ‘A mine thus used, must be one of the most frightful weapons against a warship, since the only way to avoid destruction is to flee.’ The report was in AB 23.4.1863 under the headline ‘The underwater mines of Engineer Nobel’. 54 See letter from general staff officer (and future chief of the general staff ) Hugo Raab to

IN 1.12.1862. LL NA A:8. 55 RN to PN c. 1.3.1863. LL NA Later addition. 56 SD 11.3.1863; LL NA A:1, sheet 124–7. Fransén, p. 5. 57 AB 24.4.1863. 58 AB 23.4.1863. 59 RN to PN ca 1.3.1863. LL NA Later addition. 60 SD 9.5.1863. 61 Schück, p. 279. 62 Strandh, p. 39; Carlshamns Allehanda 2.11.1863; AB 18.11.1863. 63 RA. Kommerskollegium. Huvudarkivet. Patentansökningar 1864. E XVII EA:33. 64 Bergengren, p. 23. 65 NDA 23 and 24.11.1863. 66 LN to RN 24.2.1865. NS RN 3. 67 RA. Kommerskollegium. Huvudarkivet. Patentansökningar 1863. E XVII EA:32. 68 Ibid. 69 AB 24.4.1864. 70 Fransén, pp. 5–6. 71 AB 24.4.1863. 72 AN to LN 18.3.1896 (293). RA AN B1:10. 73 NDA 2.5.1864; SD, AB 3.5.1864. 74 AB 12.5.1864. 75 Fransén, p. 5. 76 Andriette N. to AN 16.1.1866. RA AN EI:4.

NOTES

373

77

PIT 3.9.1864.

78

SD 6.9.1864.

79

AB 11.10.1864.

80

NDA and PIT 21.11.1865.

81

AN to RN 24.1.1865. NS RN:1.

82

LN to RN 22.1.1865. NS RN:3.

83

MNO, p. 85.

84

AN to RN 19.12.1864. NS RN:1. The letter was first published by me in SvD 17.2 2019 and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2.12.2019

85

MNO, p. 295.

86

‘Publičnye doma v Rossii’. http://www.stepandstep.ru/catalog/your-tape/151486/ publichnye-doma-v-carskoy-rossii.ht.

87

RN to PL 4/16.12.1859. NS RN:2.

88

PN to RN 8.10.1871. NS RN:2.

89

Bergengren, p. 199.

90

The role of syphilis in Alfred Nobel’s life is strangely enough whisked away by his biographer Ingrid Carlberg, despite the fact that the information about the disease comes from Nobel himself.

91

Andriette N. to AN 18.11.1883. RA AN EI:4.

92

AN to Berta von Suttner. Quot. from Sjöman 1995, p. 55.

93

AB 7.9.1864. Alfred’s letter to the editor was answered in NDA (21.9.1864) with arguments so amateurish that he had no problem dismissing them (AB 24.9.1864).

94

Schück, pp. 111–12.

95

Strandh, p. 50. The account of the development of the Nitroglycerine Company is based on Strandh, p. 49ff., and Andrén.

96

IN to AN 23.2.1866. RA AN EI:4.

97

LN to RN 18/30.1.1866. NS RN:3.

98

Schück, p. 113; Strandh, p. 61.

99

AN to RN 9.3.1868. NS RN:1.

100 AN to AA undated [April 1890]. RA AN EI:4. 101 Andriette N. to AN 5.7.1865. RA AN EI:4. The letter is mistakenly dated 1856. 102 LN to RN 18.9.1865. NS RN:3. 103 Andriette N. to AN 27.4.1865. RA AN EI:4. 104 Andriette N. to AN 6.1.1866. RA AN EI:4. 105 SD 8.5.1866. 106 Schück, p. 73. 107 For the fear of being buried alive see Bondeson. 108 AN to HN. Telegram 11.8.1896. NSF. Brev och vykort:4. 109 SD 17.9.1872. 110 LN to RN 2.4.1867. NS RN:3.

374

NOTES

111 LL NA A:9, sheet 182–207. 112 AN to RN 27.11.1867. NS RN:1. 113 Several articles from Teknisk Tidskrift are pasted into Immanuel’s book with press

cuttings kept in LL NA. 114 LL NA A:9, sheet 155–6. 115 AN to RN 23.11.1868. NS RN:1. 116 AN to RN 10.12.1870. LL NA B:1. 117 IN to AN 31.8, 23.9 and 12.12.1863. RA AN EI:4. 118 For black diamonds see Strandh, p. 82. 119 IN to J.W. Smitt 17.9.1870; IN to AN 21.2.1871. RA AN EI:4. 120 LL NA A:9, sheet 154. 121 IN to AN 31.8.1871. RA AN EI:4. 122 AN to RN 6.4.1872. LL NA B:1. 123 AN to AL 26.9.1872. RA AN Ö II:5; NDA 12.8.1872. 124 AB 17.9.1872. 125 Schück, p. 77. 126 Ibid., p. 78. 127 Ibid., p. 77. 128 MNO, p. 92. 129 The Wettergrund and Nobel families were neighbours and knew each other well.

After Immanuel’s death Lea wrote a long obituary, and when her daughter Valborg married Robert’s son Ludvig in 1895 the families became related. 130 MNO, pp. 87–8. 131 PN to RN 1.5.1872. LL NA B:1. 132 LN to AN 8.8.1883. AN RA EI:4. 133 MNO, p. 93. 134 LN to RN 19.2.1867. NS RN:3. 135 LN to AN 30.7/11.8.1877. RA AN EI:3. 136 A.W[erner].C[ronquist] 1897. 137 EN to AN 4.10.1878. RA AN FIV:17. 138 DN 9.12.1889. 139 Schück, p. 78. 140 See for example RN to AN 14.7.1890. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91.

4 Ludvig 1

Snessorev, p. 14.

2

MNO, p. 97.

3

Žurnal dlja akcionerov 1859:129 (2 July) and 147 (5 November).

4

https://bibliofond.ru/view.aspx?id=728031

NOTES

375

5

LN to AN 1/16.10.1882. RA AN EI:3.

6

LN to RN 27.9.1862. NS RN:3.

7

Mrs Isherwood to AN. RA AN Ö II:6.

8

LN to RN 1/13.10.1862. NS RN:3.

9

Matvejčuk/Fuks, p. 90.

10 LN to RN 26.10.1863. NS RN:3. 11 Ibid. 12 LN to RN 24.11.1863. NS RN:3. 13 LN to RN 13.3.1864. NS RN:3. 14 LN to RN 18.9.1864. NS RN:3. 15 LN to RN 12/24.1865. NS RN:3. 16 LN to RN 10.1.1871. LL NA B:1. 17 Wollert 1924, p. 136. 18 LN to RN 1/13.1.1866. NS RN:3. 19 LN to RN 16.1.1866 and LN to RN 17.3.1866. NS RN:3. 20 Sereda/Poljakova, p. 316. According to another source Ludvig’s factory converted

100,000 rifles, which can be explained by the fact that the order was gradually expanded (see for example Snessorev, p. 16.) 21 LN to RN 5/17.8.1867. NS RN:3. 22 ‘Svenskar som varit anställda i L. Nobels tjenst (1862–1887)’ [Swedes employed by

L. Nobel 1862–1887]. A list compiled by Carl Nobel for A. Werner Cronquist 18/30.3.1887. RA AN EI:4. 23 Mechaničeskij zavod . . ., p. 38. 24 Semencov, p. 282. 25 LN to RN 24.3/5.4.1870. LL NA B:1. 26 For Ludvig Nobel’s activities in The Russian Technological Society see for example

Tripolitov. 27 Zapiski Russkogo Techničeskogo Obščestva, 1867, vyp. II. 28 ‘Mašinostroenie’, Enciklopedičeskij slovar’ Brokgauzа i Efronа, b. XVIIIa, Petersburg

1890. 29 Tripolitov, p. 11. 30 LN to RN 25.9.1863. NS RN:3. 31 Hildegard Nyberg to RN and PN. Quot. from MNO, p. 126. 32 MNO, p. 107. 33 Ex. RN to LN. 15.1.1882. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 34 Ibid., p. 107. 35 Ibid., pp. 106–7. 36 Ibid., p. 107. 37 LN to RN 11/23.10.1869. NS RN:3. 38 LN to RN 4.11.1869. NS RN:3.

376

NOTES

39 MNO, p. 108; RN to A.F. Sundgren 15/24.1.1868. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–73. 40 Matvejčuk/Fuks, pp. 25–6. 41 LN to RN 25.4/7.5.1870; AN to RN 15.5.1870. LL NA B:1. Alfred made a short visit to

St Petersburg in 1871, but Ludvig was then abroad (AN to RN 18.10.1871; 13.2.1872. LL NA B:1). 42 MNO, p. 108. 43 PN to RN 4.9.1870. LL NA B:1. 44 Ibid. 45 Sjöman 1995, p. 55. 46 MNO, p. 78. 47 LN to RN 14/26.1.1870. NS RN:3. 48 LN to RN 23.12.1870. LL NA B:1. 49 LN to RN 10.1.1871. LL NA B:1. 50 LN to RN 11.3.1871. LL NA B:1. 51 LN to RN 22.3.1871. LL NA B:1. 52 LN to RN 19.4.1871. LL NA B:1. 53 RN to J.W. Smitt 24.2/8.3.1871. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 54 LN to RN 21.8/2.9.1871. LL NA B:2. 55 Vokrug sveta. Enciklopedija. http://www.vokrugsveta.ru/encyclopedia/index.php?title

=Нобель%2C_Людвиг 56 Bil’derling, p. 30ff. 57 Ibid., p. 31. 58 RN to LN 15.4.1871. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 59 RN to LN 20.11.1871. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 60 Ibid. 61 PN to RN 5.1.1872. LL NA B:1. 62 RN to AL 29.9/11.10.1871 and 1.1.1872/20.12.1871. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 63 PN to RN 31.10.1871. LL NA B:1. 64 PN to RN 23.11.1871. LL NA B:1. 65 RN to LN 25.6.1872. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 66 Bil’derling, pp. 31–2. 67 LN to RN 19.4.1871. LL NA B:1. 68 LN to RN 15/27.3.1867. NS RN:3. 69 LN to RN 28.1.1871. LL NA B:1. 70 Bil’derling, p. 35. 71 Snessorev, p. 18. 72 Kragh, p. 38. 73 Bil’derling, p. 36. 74 Zapiski Imperatorskago Techničeskago Obščestva, Petersburg 1875, vyp. 1, pp. 62–3

(Melua 1, p. 187–8).

NOTES

377

75 Quot. from Baryšnikov 2000, p. 118. 76 LN to C.A. Standertskjöld 26.5.1878. SS. 77 About Hugo Standertskjöld see Lönnqvist, passim, and Klinge, p. 56ff.

5 Robert 1

MNO, p. 108.

2

RN to L. Bolin 30.10.1872; RN to G. Eliasson 12/24.9.1873. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74.

3

RN to A. Liedbeck, 20.12. 1871/1.1.1872. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74.

4

LN to RN 15/27.3.1873. LL RN B:2.

5

LN to RN 29/17.1873. LL RN B:2.

6

RN to J.W. Smitt 27.12.1872. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74.

7

LN to RN 17/29.1.1873. LL NA B:2.

8

RN to A. Lundgren 25.1.1873. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74.

9

RN to LN 15/27.3.1873. LL NA B:2.

10 RN to LN September 1873. Åsbrink, p. 28. 11 RN to A. Lundgren 21.2/5.3.1873. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 12 RN to LN 29.4.1873. LL RN B:2. 13 The account of the history of oil is based primarily based on Strandh; Tridcat’ let

dejatel’nosti. . .; Black; Vassilou; Marvin. 14 RN to LN 29.4.1873. LL NA B:2. 15 LN to RN 16.2.1864. NS RN:3. 16 RN to PN 8.2.1874. LL NA Later addition. 17 RN to LN 1.2.1874. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 18 RN to G.W. Svenson 22/10.9.1873; RN to AN 28/16.9.1873. LL NA. Letter-book

1867–74. 19 RN to LN 14.12.1873. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 20 RN to hr Ahlgrén 25/13.12.1873. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 21 K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs, p. 63; Wollert 1924, p. 149 22 For Motala engineering works see Almqvist 1983, pp. 7–36. 23 ‘De Bur Lev Martynovič – kupec 1-j gil’dii, upravljajuščij “Kaspisjkogo obščestva” ’, Our

Baku.com. 24 Azerbaijan’s National Archive, Baku, archive 798:2:2588. 25 RN to AN 25.3/6.4.1874. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 26 RN to LN 30.11/12.12. 1873. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 27 RN to hr Ahlgrén 25/13.12.1873. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 28 RN to G.W. Svenson 22/10.9 and 6/18.11.1873. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 29 RN to LN 25.1.1874. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 30 RN to hr Ahlgrén 25/13.12.1873. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74.

378

NOTES

31 RN to LN 25.1.1874. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 32 RN to LN 28.11.1873; 30.11/12.12.1873; 14.12.1873. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 33 RN to L. De Boer 16.5.1874. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 34 RN to AN 2.6.1874. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 35 RN to G.W. Svenson 24.4./6.5.1874. LL NA. Letter-book 1867–74. 36 RN to LN 9/21.11.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 37 Marvin 1884, p. 158. 38 K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs, p. 65. 39 Marvin 1884, pp. 195–6. 40 Ibid., pp. 195–6. 41 RN to PN 27.2/11.3.1874. LL NA Later addition. 42 RN to LN 29.4.1873. LL B:2; RN to AN 31.12.1874/12.1.1875. LL NA. Letter-book

1874–9. 43 RN to L. De Boer 22.9.1874. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 44 RN to LN 27–28.2.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 45 RN to LN 31.3.1875; 27–28.2.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 46 RN to AN 27.4/9.5.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 47 RN to LN 6.7.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 48 RN to LN 14/26.4.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 49 RN to LN 7/19.4.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 50 RN to LN 24.1.1876. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 51 RN to LN 14/26.4 and 27–28.2.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 52 N. Lomakin to F. Bakulin 3.3.1876. Pis’ma N.I. Lomakina konsulu F.A. Bakulinu (O

sredne-aziatskich delach), Petersburg 1914. Quot. from: http://www.vostlit.info/Texts/ Dokumenty/M.Asien/XIX/1860-1880/Lomakin/text.htm. 53 RN to LN 9/21.11.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 54 Tolf, p. 69. 55 RN to LN 3/15.8.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 56 RN to LN 9.7.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9.

6 Robert and Ludvig 1

RN to LN 9.7.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9.

2

RN to LN 20.12.1877. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9.

3

LN to AN 31.12.1875. RA AN EI:3.

4

LN to AN 19/31.10.1875. RA AN EI:3.

5

RN to LN 9/21.11.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9.

6

RN to Carl Adlersparre [?] 29.4/3.5.1876. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9.

7

Ismailova, p. 11.

8

RN to LN 30.6.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9.

NOTES

379

9

Matvejčuk/Fuks, pp. 71–2.

10 ‘Vzgljad na bakinskuju neftjanuju promyšlennost’ i ee buduščnost’, Zapiski Russkogo

Techničeskogo Obščestva 1877, vyp. 4, pp. 311–27. 11 Ismailova, p. 13. 12 About these see Borggren. 13 RN to AN 8/20.3.1876. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 14 RN to AN 17/29.4.1876. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 15 LN to AN 20.5.1876. RA AN EI:3. 16 LN to AN 3.9.1876. RA AN EI:3. 17 LN to AN 1/13.9.1876. RA AN EI:3. 18 LN to AN 17/29.9.1876. RA AN EI:3. 19 LN to AN 29.11.1876. RA AN EI:3. 20 RN to LN 4.9.1876. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 21 RN to EN 7.11.1876. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 22 RN to S. Dahlgren 22.2.1877. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 23 LN to AN 9/21.6.1876. RA AN EI:3. 24 EN to AN 8.1.1895. RA AN EI:2. 25 For pipe laying in Baku see O. Bulanova, ‘Kak v Baku pojavilsja pervyj v Rossiiskoj

imperii nefteprovod i pervyj v mire mazutoprovod’, http://azerhistory.com. 26 For Bari see ‘Bari Aleksandr Venjaminovič’, mmsk.ru, and other internet sources. 27 RN to LN 27.10.1877. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–91. 28 LN to AN 9.6.1878. RA, EI:3. Other (secondary) sources state that there were six drill

masters. 29 RN to LN 1/13.4.1879. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 30 RN to LN 29.3.1878. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 31 LN to AN 23.6.1878. RA AN EI:3. 32 Almqvist 1975, pp. 28–9. 33 RN to LN 7.2.1876. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 34 RN to LN 24.1.1876. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 35 Ibid. 36 MNO, pp. 174–5, 286. 37 Ibid., p. 287. 38 LN to AN 15.10.1878. RA, AN EI:3. MNO, pp. 287–8. Robert was confronted with

the same problem during the prospecting on the island of Cheleken. According to a government ruling of 1870, foreign nationals were not allowed to work mineral deposits on the western shore of the Caspian. At the advice of general Lomakin, Robert therefore founded, ‘for the sake of appearances’, a company together with a Russian engineer, Rutkovsky – an agreement that another document was supposed to annul! Lomakin hoped that the authorities in Tiflis would be liberal enough to turn a blind eye to the fact that Robert was a Swedish national, but they were not. He therefore decided to make ‘the unparalleled sacrifice’ to renounce his Swedish

380

NOTES

nationality and apply to become a Finnish subject. However, nothing came of this. (RN to LN 24.12.1875, 24.1.1876. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9.) 39 LN to AN 15.5.1878. RA AN EI:3. 40 Ibid.; LN to AN 20.3.1878. RA AN EI:3. 41 LN to AN 15.5.1878. RA AN EI:3. 42 LN to AN undated summer 1878. RA AN EI:3. 43 LN to AN 24.8.1878. RA AN EI:3. 44 LN to AN undated summer 1878. RA AN EI:3. 45 RGIA, f. 20, op. 4, d. 3287, l. 1–2 verso. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., l. 16–16 verso. 48 AN to SH, end of September 1878. RA AN Ö I:1. 49 AN to SH, 25.9.1878. RA AN Ö I:1. 50 LN to AN 25.4.1879. RA AN EI:3. 51 RN to LN 5.4.1879. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 52 According to Tolf (p. 98) Nobel had his first gusher in 1881. 53 RN to LN 10/22.4.1879. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 54 RN to LN 5/17.4.1879. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 55 RGIA, f. 20, op. 4, d. 3287, l. 56–7. 56 Ibid., l. 65–66 verso. The decision and the articles of association were published in

Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossijskoj Imperii, to LIV, 1879–18 February 1880. No. 59648. 57 LN to AN 24.6.1879. RA AN EI:3. 58 According to another source he stayed with Nobel and ran a parallel business until he

died of smallpox in 1890; he was buried in the Armenian cemetery in Baku (Borggren). 59 For Törnqvist see his archive in Tekniska Museet (Museum of Technology) Stockholm,

as well as Borggren and Strandh, p. 196ff. 60 RN to LN 2/14.11.1878. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 61 RN to LN 3/15.11.1878. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 62 RN to AT 11/23.2.1879. A. Törnqvist’s archive EI:1:21. 63 RN to LN 5/17.4.1879. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 64 RN to EN 14.5.1880. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 65 LN to AN 15/27.11.1881. RA AN EI:3. 66 K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs, p. 106. 67 Ibid., p. 4. 68 Ibid., p. 67. 69 Ibid., p. 67. 70 RGIA, f. 20, op. 4, d. 3287, l. 68–68 verso; LN to AN 30.7 and 2/14.8.1879. RA AN EI:3. 71 LN to AN 21.9/3.10.1880. RA AN EI:3. 72 RN to A.F. Sundgren 4/16.3.1881. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91.

NOTES

381

73 LN to AN 3/15.12.1879. RA AN EI:3. 74 LN to AN 25.4.1879. RA AN EI:3. 75 LN to AN 12.8.1880. RA AN EI:3. 76 AN to LN 15.7.79. RA AN BI:1. 77 RN to EN 14.5.1880. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 78 RN to AN [maj] 1880. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 79 RN to LN 9.5.1876. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. 80 AN to EN 9.4.1894. CGIA 1258-2-225, l. 296. 81 AN to LN 15.7.79. RA AN BI:1.

7 The Nobel Brothers 1

K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs, pp. 97–8.

2

LN to AN 2/14.10.1880. RA AN EI:3.

3

Ibid.

4

MNO, p. 375.

5

RN to AN May 1880. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91.

6

AN to LN 3.3.1881. RA AN BI:2:2; LN to AN 18/30.3.1881. RA AN EI:3.

7

RN to PN 23.11.1880. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91.

8

RN to PN undated telegram. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91.

9

RN to A. Sundgren 4/16.3.1881. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91.

10 AN to LN 3.3.1881. RA AN BI 2:2. 11 RN to LN 21.10.1881. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 12 SSA. Överståthållarämbetet för uppbördsärenden 1881. Rote 9, registreringsnummer

277. 13 RN to LN 6.2.1882. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. (The letter is mistakenly dated

1881.) 14 RN to LN 15.1.1882. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 15 LN to AN 10/22.2.1882. RA AN EI:3. 16 RN to AN 16.3.1882. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 17 RN to LN 21.3.1882. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 18 AN to SH 8.7.1882. RA AN Ö I:2; RN to AT 26.6, 12.11. 12.12, 23.12.1882. A.

Törnqvist’s archive EI:1.21. 19 MNO, p. 289. 20 RN to AT 10.6.1883. A. Törnqvist’s archive EI:1.21. 21 RN to LN 19.11, 10/22.12.1883, 16.2.1884. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 22 RN to LN 12/24.11.1883. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 23 SD 5.2.1884. 24 RN to LN 29.4.1884; RN to Münzing 3.5.1884. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 25 RN to AT 4.6.84. A. Törnqvist’s archive EI:1.21.

382

NOTES

26 LN to AN 12/24.5.1884. RA AN EI:3. 27 Tolf, p. 61. 28 KWH to AT 25.2.1882. A. Törnqvist’s archive EI.1:10. 29 LN to AN 18.6.1882. RA AN EI:3. 30 LN to AT 27.4.1882. A. Törnqvist’s archive EI.1:19. 31 LN to AN 27.4.1882. RA AN EI:3. 32 LN to AN 17/29.4.1882. RA AN EI:3. 33 A. Awelin to AT 26.2–6.12. 1882. A. Törnqvist’s archive EI.1:14. In the inventory the

letter, which according to the dating was written in the course of nine months, is mistakenly attributed to another person, Gustaf Niklander. 34 Törnudd, pp. 77–9. 35 Tridcat’ let dejatel’nosti . . ., p. 302. 36 LN to Anna N. 21.10.1884. Rolf Nobel’s archive. 37 Törnudd, pp. 80–1. 38 LN to AN 28.3./9.4.1882. RA AN EI:3. 39 AN to LN 30.3.1883. RA AN BI:3. 40 Ibid. 41 AN to LN 6.2.1883. RA AN BI:3. 42 LN to AN 30.12.1877. RA AN EI:3. 43 AN to RN 2.4.1883. RA AN BI:3. 44 AN to LN 30.3.1883. RA AN BI:3. 45 AN to RN 2.4.1883. RA AN BI:3. 46 Ibid. 47 Bergengren, p. 83. 48 LN to AN 16.3.1883. RA AN EI:3. 49 LN to AN 15/27.5.1883. RA AN EI:3. 50 AN to LN 20.5.1883. RA AN EI:3. 51 RN to AT 2.10.1883. A. Törnqvist’s archive EI:21. 52 Andriette N. to AN 18.11.1883. RA AN EI:4. 53 AN to RN 27.11.1883. RA AN BI 3:2. 54 AN to SH [November 1883]. Sjöman 1995, p. 146 (where the letter is mistakenly dated

end of February 1882). 55 AN to LN 3[?].12.1883. RA AN BI 3:2. 56 AN to LN 10.12.1883. RA AN BI 3:2. 57 RN to AN 12.12.1883. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 58 AN to RN 13.10.1886. Åsbrink, p. 124. 59 LN to AN 11.12.1883. RA AN EI:3. 60 Ivar Lagerwall, Öfversigt af förordningar rörande Sveriges handel och öfriga

stadsnäringar under Karl X Gustaf och Karl XI:s förmyndare 1654–1672, Uppsala 1869. 61 Lagerwall, pp. 357–8.

NOTES

383

62 AN to LN 12.5.1884. RA AN BI 3:2. 63 AN to SH 26.6.1884. Sjöman 1995, p. 171. 64 RN to LN 9.7.1875. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–9. For the railway line Baku–Batum

see http://zaurmargiev.sitecity.ru/stext_0504191755.phtml. 65 Ukazatel’ dejstvujuščich v Imperii akcionernych predprijatij i torgovych domov, tom 1,

Petersburg 1905, pp. 900–1. 66 AN to LN 21.5.1884. RA AN BI 3:2. 67 LN to AN 19.4.1884. RA AN EI:3. 68 AN to LN 23.5.1884. RA AN BI 3:2. 69 Ibid. 70 The account of the negotiations with the Rothschilds are based mainly on Ivar

Lagerwall’s detailed reports to Alfred (RA AN FIV:18). See also Tolf, p. 88ff. 71 LN to AN 7/19.3.1885. RA AN EI:3. 72 AN to LN 21.5 1883 and 23.5.1883. RA AN BI 3:2. 73 LN to AN 2/14.9.1886. RA AN EI:3. 74 MNO, p. 316. 75 AN to LN 7.10.1886. RA AN BI 6:1. 76 LN to AN 1/13.9.1886. RA AN EI:3. 77 AN to RN 13.10.1886. RA AN BI 6:1. 78 LN to RN 8/20.8.1886. NSF. Brev och vykort:4. 79 AN to LN 13.11.1886. RA AN BI:6. 80 LN to AN 2/14.9.1886. RA AN EI:3. 81 LN to AN 6/18.11.1886. RA AN EI:3. 82 MNO, pp. 316–17. 83 LN to RN 1.6.1887. LL NA Later addition.

8 The End of an Epoch 1

MNO, pp. 120, 163.

2

LN to AN 10.2.1885. AN RA EI:3.

3

HN to RN 14/26.10.1885. NS RN:4.

4

RA. S:t Katarina församling. Kyrkobyggnadskommittén 1862–1865. K 5B:288. The fact that Ludvig was present at all but a few of the Committee’s 140 meetings tells us a lot about his sense of duty and capacity for work.

5

See for example Kirikov, pp. 160–7.

6

MNO, pp. 168, 170.

7

Ibid., p. 138.

8

Ibid., pp. 641–2.

9

For the work and activities of the Nordic societies in Petersburg see Jangfeldt 1996 and Jangfeldt 1998, p. 209ff.

384

NOTES

10 About the taylors and the jewellers see Jangfeldt 1998, pp. 126–44. 11 MNO, p. 344. Seealso Bil’derling, p. 34. 12 Nobel-Oleinikoff 1948. 13 MNO, p. 654. 14 LN to A.M. Nordenskiöld 22.11.1875. Nordenskiölds arkiv. KVA. 15 ‘Friherre Nordenskiölds vistelse i Petersburg’, SD 20.1.1881. 16 LN to A. Nordenskiöld 29.8.1881. Nordenskiölds arkiv. KVA. 17 LN to A. Nordenskiöld 30.1/11.2.1882; EN to A. Nordenskiöld 20.4/2.5.1882. Ibid. 18 LN to A. Nordenskiöld 30.1/11.2.1882. Ibid. 19 Karlberg (Aulanko) is today a health spa and a popular recreation area. 20 MNO, p. 602. 21 Edla N. to Anna N. 4.3.1888. Rolf Nobel’s archive. 22 CN to Anna N. 19.3.1888. Rolf Nobel’s archive. 23 RN to AN 27.3.1888. RA AN EI:4. 24 RN to AN 12.4.1888. RA AN EI:4. 25 Edla N. to AN 20.4.1888. RA AN EI:4. 26 PIT 14.4.1888. 27 Fant, p. 265; Carlberg, plate 2. 28 AN to EN 26.4.1888. RA AN BI 6:2. 29 Edla N. to AN 20.4.1888. RA AN EI:4. 30 AN to IL 26.3.1889. RA AN BI:7. 31 ‘Ludvig Nobels begrafning (Brefkort till Stockholms Dagblad)’, SD 4.5.1888. The

account of the funeral service and the burial broadly coincides with the reports in the Russian newspapers Novoe vremja, Peterburgskaja gazeta och Peterburgskij listok. 32 MNO, p. 328. 33 EN to AN 14.4.1888. RA AN EI:2. 34 MNO, p. 332. 35 Bil’derling, p. 34. 36 Lagerwall, pp. 363–4. 37 RA. Ryska utredningskommissionen, Vol. 19 (Edla Nobel). 38 MNO, pp. 252–3. 39 AN to IL 11.6.1888. RA AN BI:6:2. 40 EN to AN 3.5.1888. RA AN EI:2. 41 AN to EN 1.5.1888 and följande brev. RA AN BI:6:2. 42 Lagerwall 1911, p. 357. 43 ‘Spisok vladel’cev paev i akcionerov Tovariščestva neftjanogo proizvodstva Brat’ev

Nobel’ 1 janvarja 1888 g.’. RA AN FIV:23. 44 EN to AN 27.4./9.5.1888. RA AN EI:2. 45 LN to AN 3.6.1886. RA AN EI:3.

NOTES

385

46 Baryšnikov, Manuscript. 47 LN to RN 1.6.1887. LL NA Later addition.

9 The Third Generation 1

CGIA, f. 306, op. 1, d. 134.

2

For Emanuel’s early life see MNO, p. 126ff.

3

LN to AN 155.1878. RA AN EI:3.

4

Törnudd, p. 82.

5

MNO, pp. 251, 324.

6

Ibid., p. 284.

7

IL to AN 11/23.9.1888. RA AN FIV:19.

8

NDA 29.11.1888.

9

SD 9.11.1888.

10 NDA 3.11.1888. 11 The account of the imperial visit is based mainly on the yearbook Kavkazskij kalendar’

na 1889 god, appendix, pp. 61–71. 12 NDA 29.11.1888. 13 CN to AN 23.11/5.12.1888. RA AN EI:1. 14 SD 2.11.1888. 15 CN to AN 15/27.10.1888. RA AN EI:1. 16 K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs. 17 Andriette N. to Anna N. 20.11.1888. Rolf Nobel’s archive. See also Andriette N. to AN

12.11.1888. RA AN EI:4. 18 AN to EN 19.5.1888. RA AN BI:6:2. 19 AN to EN 2.6.1888. RA AN BI:6:2. 20 AN to EN 10.6.1888. RA AN BI:6:2. 21 AN to IL 9.10. 1888. RA AN BI:6:2. 22 AN to IL 16.10. 1888. RA AN BI:6:2. 23 RN to IL 16.1.1889. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 24 EN to AN 5.8.1888. RA AN EI:2. 25 PB to AN 15/27.11.1888. RA AN FIV:18. 26 EN to AN 20.12.1891. RA AN EI:2. 27 EN to AN 20.6.1895. RA AN EI:2. 28 EN to AN 20.12.1891. RA AN EI:2. 29 AN to IL 15.6.1887. RA AN BI:6:2. 30 IL to AN 22.3.1889. RA AN FIV:19. 31 EN to AN 27.10.1893; EN to AN 4.2.1889. RA AN EI:2. 32 EN to AN 20.12.1891. RA AN EI:2.

386

NOTES

33 IL to AN 18.12.1891. RA AN FIV:20. 34 RN to IL 16.1.1889. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 35 RN to AN 31.8.1893. LL NA. Letter-book 1892–4. 36 IL to AN 18.12.1891. RA AN FIV:120. 37 IL to AN 22.3.1889. RA AN FIV:19. 38 EN to AN 4.2.1889. RA AN EI:2. 39 IL to AN 20.7.1889. RA AN FIV:19. 40 Alfred’s intention was to found his own company for the production of gunpowder in

Russa but he abandoned the thought and the business was left to the Russian Gunpowder Manufacture and Sales Company at Schlüsselburg on the Ladoga. The company, under German management, was active until the outbreak of the First World War (MNO, p. 577). 41 AN to EN 9.4.1890. RA AN BI:7. 42 EN to AN 17.12.1890. RA AN EI:2. 43 The account of Carl Nobel’s biography is based on this correspondence and on MNO,

pp. 128, 343, 355, 514, 547–50. 44 CGIA, f. 306, op. 1, d. 104, 134, l. 102/verso. 45 RN to LN 15.1.82. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 46 EN to AN 14/26.6.1886. RA AN EI:2. 47 Borggren, pp. 104–5. 48 Mechaničeskij zavod . . ., p. 39. 49 The information about the immediate cause of death comes from a letter from TF to

C.L. Fegræus 17/29.12.1893. Britt af Klinteberg’s/Gunnar Werner’s archive. 50 EN to AN 28.2/11.3.1896. RA AN EI:2. 51 MNO, p. 558. 52 Ibid., p. 486. Much of the information about Hjalmar Crusell’s life is drawn from

MNO, pp. 128, 486–8, 599. 53 RN to LN 3/15.2.1879. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–80. 54 RN to LN 10/22.4.1879; 27.4.1879. LL NA. Letter-book 1874–80. 55 EN to Edla N. 14.7.1917. SFN. Brev och vykort:3. 56 RN to LN 13.10.1885. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 57 HN to RN 14/26.10.1885. NS RN:4. 58 RN to LN 13.10.1885. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 59 LN to AN 3.6.1886. RA AN EI:3. 60 RN to EN 3.3.1890. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 61 RN to CN 14.12.1890. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 62 Ibid. 63 RN to EN 11.2.1891. LL NA. Letter-book 1880–91. 64 HN to RN 6/18.7.1887. NS. 65 AN to RN 2.8.1890. RA AN EI:2.

NOTES

387

66 EN to AN 30.3 and 19.12.1892. RA AN EI:2. 67 AN to RN 2.8.1890. RA AN EI:2. 68 AN to HN 23.6.1892. RA AN BI:8. 69 Carlberg, p. 450.

10 Emanuel 1

Edla N. to AN 30.11.1893. RA AN EI:4.

2

AN to EN 21.12.1893. RA AN BI:8.

3

EN to AN 3/15.1.1894. RA AN EI:2.

4

EN to AN 8.8.1893. RA AN EI:2.

5

EN to AN 1.5.1891. RA AN EI:2.

6

EN to AN 10.6.1892. RA AN EI:2.

7

TF to A. Fegræus 30/11.7.1892. CfN.

8

EN to AN 15.5.1892. RA AN EI:2.

9

EN to AN 12.1.1893. RA AN EI:2.

10 EN to AN 22.12.1892. RA AN EI:2. 11 EN to AN 29.5.1893. RA AN EI:2. 12 Ibid. 13 AN to IL 23.8.1893. RA AN EI:2. 14 EN to AN 10.3.1895; 21.3.1895. RA AN EI:2. 15 EN to AN [?].3.1895; 16.3.1895. RA AN EI:2. 16 EN to AN 21.3.1895 (telegram). RA AN EI:2. 17 EN to AN 21.3.1895 (letter). RA AN EI:2. 18 ‘Preliminary agreement’. RA AN EI:2. 19 AN to EN 5.4.1892. RA AN BI:8. 20 RN to AN 28.8.1892. LL NA. Letter-book 1892. 21 RN to AN 10.9.1892. LL NA. Letter-book 1892. 22 AN to EN 10.10.1892. RA AN BI:8. 23 AN to EN 15.10.1892. RA AN BI:8. 24 RN to AN 31.8.1893. LL NA. Letter-book 1892–4. 25 RN to AN 11.4.1894. LL NA. Letter-book 1892–4. 26 RN to AN 8.11.1894. LL NA. Letter-book 1892–4. 27 The account of Hans Olsen’s biography is mainly from his typewritten manuscript

‘Livserindringer’ [Reminiscences from my Life]. 28 EN to AN 11/25.8.1895. RA AN EI:2. 29 AN to HN 11.8.1896. Telegram. NSF. Brev och vykort:4. 30 AB 17.8.1896. 31 AB and DN 17.8.1896.

388

NOTES

32 DN 22.12.1896. 33 AB and SvD 30.12.1896. 34 Sohlman, p. 40. 35 The account of the legal turnabouts surrounding the testament are, if not indicated

otherwise, based on Sohlman. 36 Those interested in the details are referred to Sohlman and Carlberg. 37 Sohlman, p. 92. 38 DN 6.2.1897. 39 LN to AN 3.6.1886. RA AN EI:3. 40 Robert Nobels bouppteckning. VALA/01562. F IIIa:7:1025. 41 Separat bouppteckning i SSA. Stockholms rådhusrätt. 1896 års bouppteckningar,

Vol. 5. 42 Sohlman, pp. 114–15. 43 EN to HN 21.2/3.3.1897. LL NA Later addition. 44 MNO, p. 380. 45 Sohlman, p. 133. 46 Baryšnikov 2013, p. 149. 47 Sohlman, p. 134. 48 EN to HN 7/19.6.1898 LL NA Later addition. 49 Sohlman, p. 134. 50 Ericson.

11 The Age of Greatness 1

Hans Olsen, ‘Livserindringer’, p. 111.

2

K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs, p. 70.

3

Ibid., p. 136.

4

For more information see Tolf, pp. 136–49.

5

For the development of the Russian financial sector during these years see Kragh, p. 40ff.

6

The account of the separators and the founding of Alfa-Nobel is based on Fritz; MNO, p. 514ff.; and Baryšnikov 2000, p. 119.

7

The account of Carlsund’s biography and the development of the diesel engine is based mainly on his type-written memoirs, Kort självbiografi, which are kept at Tekniska Museet (Museum of Technology), Stockholm. The quotations are from this text.

8

Tolf, p. 169.

9

Ibid., pp. 171–2; Strandh, p. 220.

10 Gulišambarov, p. 20. 11 K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs, pp. 311–12. 12 Ibid., p. 313.

NOTES

389

13 TF to C.L. Fegraeus 14/27.1.1905. CfN. 14 Ostrovskij, pp. 504, 526–7. 15 Charlamov, p. 141. 16 MNO, p. 416. 17 TF to C.L. Fegræus 11/24.2.1905. CfN. 18 Pipes, p. 21. 19 The account of the economic reality in Russia around 1900 is based mainly on

Ul’janova, pp. 5–13. 20 The account of the association’s activities are based on Ul’janova and Višnjakov-

Višneveckij, p. 29ff. 21 Matvejčuk/Fuks, p. 319. 22 MNO, p. 352.

12 Welfare and Charity 1

MNO, 281–2, 411.

2

K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs.

3

About the Nobel town in Petersburg see Mechaničeskij zavod . . . and MNO, p. 534ff.

4

Krämer.

5

For the holiday camp and the ‘Milk Drop’ see MNO, pp. 541–4.

6

Tridcat’ let dejatel’nosti . . ., pp. 303–4. For the Nobel town in Tsaritsyn see Zotkina.

7

MNO, p. 410.

8

Agrell, pp. 84–5.

9

Olsen, p. 166.

10 Nobel-Oleinikoff 1948. 11 EN to AN 14/26.3.1896. RA AN EI:2. 12 The account of studies and subsequent activities is based on Meškunov 2010b, pp.

66–94. 13 Gösta Nobel, middagstal 7.12.1951. Peter Nobel’s archive. 14 Peterburgskaja gazeta 25.9.1912. Quot. from Meškunov 2010b. 15 The information about Oleinikov’s political activities comes from Meškunov 2010b

and Ostrovskij, p. 505. 16 Metričeskaja kniga za 1905 god [Vigselbok för 1905] (http://forum.vgd.ru/file.php?fid

=307559&key=1283293667). 17 Meškunov 2010b. See also the article ‘Nybyggnad för kirurgiska kliniken vid kvinnliga

medicinska institutet i S:t Petersburg’, Teknikern, Helsingfors 1912: 803, pp. 365–76. Reproduced in Melua 7. 18 MNO, p. 653. 19 Agrell, pp. 63, 66–7.

390

NOTES

20 Hedin 1950, p. 56. 21 EN to Selma Lagerlöf 23.1/5.2. 1912. Handskriftsavdelningen. KB. 22 This and the following quotes from Selma Lagerlöf come from her book of memoirs,

Från skilda tider, II, Stockholm 1945, p. 47ff. 23 Sydsvenska Dagbladet 6.3.1912. 24 Nobel-Oleinikoff 1948. 25 Kirjola’s history is told by MNO (p. 603ff.) and Kolari. 26 TF to C.L. Fegræus 28.7/9.8.1895. CfN. 27 Agrell, p. 39. 28 Nobel-Oleinikoff 1948. 29 Agrell, p. 41. Oleinikov later wrote an article about the flora at ‘Georgi’s Island’, Georgsö

(Oleinikoff 1935). 30 MNO, p. 608.

13 Political Unrest, Economic Growth and War 1

Tolf, p. 164.

2

Ibid., pp. 173–4.

3

The account of the formation of the company is based on Baryšnikov 2009, pp. 119–22; Baryšnikov 2013, pp. 117–36; and MNO, p. 529ff.

4

The account of the company is based on Baryšnikov 2013, p. 125ff.

5

Släkten Nobel . . ., p. 25.

6

MNO, p. 527.

7

Baryšnikov 2009, p. 123.

8

Kragh, p. 52.

9

If not stated otherwise, the accounts of the brothers’ biographies are based on MNO, pp. 550–72.

10 Olsen, p. 629. 11 MNO, p. 564. 12 Information provided by Carl Lundberg’s relative Claes Lundberg. 13 MNO, p. 315. 14 EN to KWH 18.3.1925. Hagelin’s archive. 15 TF to A. Fegræus 26.10/8.11.1905. CfN. 16 TF to C.L. Fegræus 7/20.11.1905. Ibid. 17 EN to KWH 16.8.1906. Hagelin’s archive. 18 Åberg,’Tjugo år i Ryssland’. 19 Quot. from Åsbrink, p. 220. 20 RN to LN 4/16.4.1878 (350). Letter-book 1874–9. 21 K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs, p. 347. 22 Ibid., p. 347.

NOTES

391

23 Hans Olsen, ‘Tale holdt til mine børn paa Kirjola Søndag den 15. August 1909’.

Manuscript. Peter Nobel’s archive. 24 See Kragh, p. 48ff. 25 Tolf, p. 183. 26 Ibid., pp. 184–5. 27 Ibid. p. 190. 28 Baryšnikov 2008, p. 152. 29 Tolf, p. 192. Similar figures were shown for 1916; see Gibb/Knowlton 1956, p. 329. 30 Baryšnikov 2008, p. 152. 31 EN to MW 13.8.1914. SEHF. Marcus Wallenberg d.ä. Ankommande brev. FI:59. 32 K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs, pp. 367–8. 33 Släkten Nobel . . ., p. 20; MNO, pp. 445–6. 34 MNO, p. 446. 35 ED to Svea Delin 28.7/10.8, 30.9/13.10 and 13/26.10.1914. Mona Wahlgren’s

archive. 36 Baryšnikov 2000, p. 119. 37 Kragh, p. 68. 38 Baryšnikov 2000, pp. 122–3. 39 Igolkin. 40 MNO, pp. 453–4; Tolf, pp. 192–3. 41 Baryšnikov 2009, p. 56. 42 EN to KWH 5/17.1.1916. K.W. Hagelin’s archive.

14 Anno 1917 1

EN to Edla N. 1/14.1.1917. NSF. Brev och vykort:3.

2

LN to RN 1.6.1887. LL NA Later addition.

3

Jangfeldt 2014, p. 96.

4

A. Herlitz to his wife 5/18.3.1917. Quot. from Jangfeldt 1998, pp. 301–2.

5

Jangfeldt 1998, p. 284 (Lidvall 1937).

6

K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs, pp. 373–9.

7

Ibid., pp. 383, 397 and 398.

8

EN to Edla N. 30.6/13.7 and 26.8.1917. NSF. Brev och vykort:3.

9

EN to Edla N. 14.7.1917. NSF. Brev och vykort:3.

10 A. Herlitz to his wife 31.10/13.11.1917. Jangfeldt 1998, p. 302. 11 Exemption warrant 22.8.1917. NSF. Brev och vykort:2. 12 MNO, p. 463. 13 EN to Edla N. 7.6.1918. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. 14 ED to Svea Delin 12/25.10.1918. Mona Wahlgren’s archive. 15 EN to Edla N. 27.10.1917. NSF. Brev och vykort:3.

392

NOTES

16 EN to Edla N. 18.1.1918 and 5/28.6.1918. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. 17 Ragnar Werner to KWH, quoted in a letter from Hagelin to Lullu Nobel and Hans

Olsen 17.2.1918. K.W. Hagelin’s archive F:4 F:2. 18 EN to Edla N. 18.1.1918. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. 19 ED to Svea Delin 1/14.12.1918. Mona Wahlgren’s archive. 20 EN to Edla N. 18.1.1918. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. 21 EN to Edla N. 27.10.1917. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. 22 EN to Edla N. 18.1.1918. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. 23 EN to Edla N. 27.10.1917. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. 24 I. Gukovskij to EN 12.4.1918. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. 25 R. Werner to KWH, quoted in a letter from Hagelin to Lullu Nobel and Hans Olsen

17.2.1918. Hagelin’s archive F:4 F:2. 26 K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs, p. 392. 27 Kšesinskaja, pp. 198–9. 28 Ibid., p. 196; Kokovtsov, pp. 432–3. Kokovtsov mistakenly states that the tax was five

million roubles. 29 NSF. Övriga dolument:5. 30 EN to Edla N. 17.6.1918. NSF. Brev och vykort:3; Kokovtsov, p. 426; K.W. Hagelin’s

memoirs, p. 392. 31 Kokovtsov, p. 435. 32 About the nationalization see for example Evdošenko, pp. 339–342 and Kostorničenko. 33 A. Lessner to KWH 3.1.1935. Hagelin’s archive F:4 F:2. This letter forms the basis of

the account of Lessner’s hardships in 1917–1920 in Bäckmann 1935, where it is redacted and abridged. 34 ED to Svea Delin 4.10.1918. Mona Wahlgren’s archive. 35 The information that the departure took place in August is not correct (MNO, p. 459). 36 MNO, p. 459. The nature of Emanuel’s disease is not stated. 37 The account of Emanuel’s flight is based on Bäckman (p. 306ff.) and on quoted

documents. 38 The receipts of taxes paid as well as the letters from the People’s Bank in Pyatigorsk

and Emanuel’s colleagues in the finance committee of 15 and 16.10.1918, respectively, are kept in NSF. Övriga dokument:5. 39 Letter of thanks from P. Glazenap to EN 13.10.1918. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. 40 The documents are kept in NSF. Övriga dokument:5. 41 Bäckmann, p. 309. 42 Oudendyk, p. 305. The account of the brothers’ flight is based on Bäckmann,

pp. 310–12, MNO, pp. 460–2 and on information in the Swedish press (‘Rykte att två bröder Nobel häktats’, DN 4.12.18; ‘Bolsjevikerna som hämnare’, SvD 4.12.18; ‘Bröderna Nobel hade flytt ur Ryssland’, SvD 27.12.18). 43 The foreign ministry was informed that they had been released on December 3 (DN

and SvD 4.12.18). 44 SvD 27.12.18; Bäckmann, p. 312.

NOTES

393

45 For an account of how the Nobels celebrated Christmas see MNO, pp. 639–40. 46 Edla N. to A. Karelina 28.3.1919. NSF. Brev och vykort:2.

15 Post festum 1

‘Bröderna Nobel hade flytt ur Ryssland’, SvD 27.12.18.

2

K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs, p. 391ff.

3

Åberg, ‘Tjugo år i Ryssland’.

4

A. Lessner to KWH 3.1.1935. K.W. Hagelin’s archive.

5

Maxwell.

6

K.W. Hagelin’s memoirs, p. 395.

7

Ibid., p. 391.

8

A. Lessner to KWH 3.1.1935. K.W. Hagelin’s archive.

9

MNO, p. 457.

10 ‘Dekret o nacionalizacii neftjanoj promyšlennosti’ 27.5.1920. Dekrety Azrevkoma

(1920–1921). Sbornik dokumentov, Baku 1988, pp. 44–5. 11 Åberg. 12 Ibid. 13 A. Lessner to KWH 3.1.1935. K.W. Hagelin’s archive. 14 Kostorničenko, p. 99. 15 Baryšnikov 2009, p. 121. 16 ‘Spisok vladel’cev paev i akcij Tovariščestva neftjanogo proizvodstva Br. Nobel’ 13-go

maja 1917 g.’ CfN. Nils Oleinikoff ’s papers. 17 The account of the economy of the Naphtha company after 1920 is based on board

reports from 1936, i.a., ‘Berättelse över förvaltningen av Nafta-Produktions-Bolaget Bröderna Nobels utanför Ryssland befintliga tillgångar för tiden efter Bolagets nationalisering i Ryssland samt över pågående eller möjliga rättegångar’ (Report about the management of the assets of the Nobel Brothers’ Naphtha-producing company outside Russia at the time after the nationalization of the Company in Russia as well as ongoing or future legal proceedings). SEHF. Investor F9:161. 18 Board report 1936. SEHF. Investor F9:161. 19 Branobel: Balance account 31/12 1969. CfN (Nils Oleinikoff ’s papers). 20 ‘Spisok vladel’cev paev i akcij Tovariščestva neftjanogo proizvodstva Br. Nobel’ 13-go

maja 1917 g.’ CfN (Nils Oleinikoffs papers), 21 Emanuel Nobels estate inventory, appendix B: ‘Förteckning över ryska tillgångar’ (List

of Russian assets). SSA. Stockholms Rådhusrätt. Bouppteckningsavdelningen 1925–47. EI:429. 22 RA. Ryska utredningskommissionen, vol. 19 (Edla) and 31 (others). 23 If not stated otherwise, the account of the negotiations between Branobel and

Standard Oil, as well as of Front uni, is based mainly on Gibb/Knowlton, p. 323ff. 24 MNO, p. 470. 25 Gibb/Knowlton, p. 333.

394

NOTES

26 MNO, pp. 471–2. 27 EN to Edla N. 20.7.1920. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. 28 EN to Zinaida Beliamina 27.9.1920. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. 29 Åberg. 30 ‘Svedenija o licach, polučajuščix žalovan’e ili posobie. Stokgol’m v nojabre 1939 goda’.

NSF. Övriga dokument:2. 31 The account on pp. 336ff. is based mainly on Evdošenko, p. 343ff. 32 Ipat’ev, p. 288. 33 EN to KWH 17.8.1921. K.W. Hagelin’s archive. 34 Evdošenko, p. 350. 35 Izvestija 25–28.7.1922. 36 DN 9.8.1922. See also for example Göteborgs Dagblad 11.8.1922. 37 EN to KWH 9.9.1922. K.W. Hagelin’s archive. 38 Lista över understödstagare. NSF. Övriga dokument:4. 39 John Tuneld to EN 5.10.1922. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. (For John Tuneld’s heroic

efforts to help the Swedes in Petrograd after the revolution see Jangfeldt 1998, p. 311ff.) 40 EN to Zinaida Beliamina 27.9.1920. NSF. Brev och vykort:3. 41 J. Stalin to V. Menzhinsky 2.10.1930 (I.V. Stalin, Sočinenija, to 17, Tver’ 2004, p. 376). 42 D’jakonova, p. 145.

16 Postscript 1

EN to A. Karelina 7.9.1920. NSF. Brev och vykort:3.

2

After having escaped Russia, Anastasia Karelina lived in Sweden. She died in 1931 and is buried in Stockholm.

3

MNO, p. 464.

4

SvD 25.10.1921; SD 24.10.1921.

5

SEHF. Kreditdossier nr 371: Naftaproduktionsbolaget Bröderna Nobel.

6

EN to KWH 5.1.1928. K.W. Hagelin’s archive.

7

S. Dolgoruky to EN 12.4.1928. NSF. Brev och vykort:3.

8

Rigaescher Rundschau 1.7.1929.

9

EN to KWH 6.7.1929. K.W. Hagelin’s archive.

10 EN to KWH 29.1.1931. K.W. Hagelin’s archive. 11 ‘Förslag till Nobel-pris 1931’. The archive of the Swedish Academy. 12 Marčenko, p. 330. 13 Nobelpriset i litteratur 2001, II, p. 159. 14 Marčenko, p. 395. 15 MNO, p. 479; Olsen, pp. 560–1. 16 SvD 7.6.1932. 17 Ibid., 7.12.1933, DN 8.12.1933.

NOTES

395

18 Ibid., 2.6.1932. 19 Michail Yevlanov (who spelt his name Evlanoff in the West) had an odd career after

his flight from Russia. After having spent some time in Paris, he moved to the USA where he claimed to be a Russian prince of Tartar blood. However, no such noble family is mentioned in Russian sources. In 1942 he married Florence Nightingale Graham, the founder of the cosmetic firm Elizabeth Arden. She was then sixty-four and eighteen years older than her husband, who insisted on being called Prince. The stormy marriage ended in divorce slightly more than a year later. In 1953 Evlanoff published the book Nobel – Prize Donor: Inventor of Dynamite, Advocate of Peace. The account of Alfred’s life is not bad, although it is to a great extent based on Schück’s book from 1926. The book is dedicated ‘To my darling Mother and Emmanuel Nobel, who were the guiding stars in my life’, and a long chapter is devoted to Emanuel, with whom ‘we risked our lives in the Caucasus’. Emanuel is depicted as a good, generous, energetic and inquisitive person, but the chapter also contains some strange assertions, for example that Evlanoff had known Emanuel ‘intimately’ and that he was ‘a close friend’. When could they have developed this friendship? They met evidently for the first time in connection Emanuel’s stay in Kislovodsk and they then lived in different parts of the world. The age difference was also enormous, thrity-seven years – Evlanoff was born in 1896. Other assertions in the book also raise doubts about the veracity of Evlanoff ’s testimony. So, for example, he states that the stocky and rather short Emanuel was ‘very tall and broad-shouldered’. Evlanoff ’s adulatory portrait of Emanuel can no doubt be ascribed to the same account that made him call himself a Russian prince. He died in an old people’s home in New York in 1972. 20 SSA. Stockholms Rådhusrätt. Bouppteckningsavdelningen 1925–47. EI:429. 21 Juri (Georg) Jerzykowicz was born in 1905 on an estate in Poland (which was then a

part of the Russian empire). In 1925, he entered the Technological college in Zürich. However, he left the college in 1930 without having finished his studies (Technische Hochschule, Zürich. Archiv. EZ-REK1/1/19992: Jerzykowicz, Georg.) After that he became a Bachelor of arts in Paris and moved to the USA, where in 1934 he defended his doctor’s thesis, ‘A Study of Some Decomposition Products of Certain Phenoxazine Dyes of the Capri-blue Group’. A few years later he became an American citizen and worked as a chemical engineer (The American University, Washington, D.C. Twentieth Commencement Exercises; 1940 U.S. Federal Population Census. www.archives.com.) The only thing that is known about the father is the initial of his Christian name: W. 22 ‘Arvskifte efter Doktor Emanuel Nobel förrättat den 18 februari 1935’. NSF. Övriga

dokument:4. 23 EN to KWH 6.7.1929. 24 ‘En resa till Indien. Leif Nobel’s dagbok från en resa med Emanuel Nobel vintern 1928’.

Peter Nobel’s archive. 25 Olsen, pp. 535. 26 Vera Bunina’s diary, 29 September 1931. Leeds Russian Archive/MS 1067/403. 27 Olsen, pp. 567. 28 Franz Birbaum’s diaries. Quot. from Surlov.blogspot.com. 29 TF to C.L. Fegræus 19/31.8.1895. CfN; PIT 21.9.1895. 30 MNO, p. 355.

396

NOTES

31 Heckscher, p. 300. 32 Tolf, p. 226ff. 33 EN to KWH 18.3.1925. K.W. Hagelin’s archive. 34 Tolf, pp. 228–9; Widman/Wik, p. 16. 35 Sjöman 1995, p. 55. 36 MNO, p. 606. The fifty-seven-page-long inventory of the personal property moved to

Stockholm is kept in NSF. Övriga dokument:1. 37 Ibid., p. 12. 38 Peter Nobel, ‘Gökungen i Nobelprisens bo’ 11.10.2010. SvT Nyheters debattsida, svt.se.

For a detailed account of the establishment of the prize see Offer/Söderberg and Emanuel Sidea, ‘Riksbankens okända kupp – instiftade pris mot Nobels vilja’, Veckans affärer 10.12 2010.

NOTES

397

398

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For the conversion of currencies I have used the calculations at historicalstatistics.org, based on inflation and on payment for workhours. Prof. Magnus Henrekson at The Research Institute for Industrial Economics suggests another method: to compare the size of a fortune to the average annual wage of an industrial worker. So, for example, the size of Alfred Nobel’s estate corresponded to the annual wages of 55,000 Swedish workers in 1896. This corresponds to £2,2 billion in today’s values, i.e., considerably more than the amount stated on p. 243. Since in this book we are dealing with various epochs and various currencies, however, the results of the conversions are doomed to be approximative.

Selected literature Agrell, Ingrid (ed.), 1985. Nobels i S:t Petersburg: Ett svenskt kulturcentrum. Brevskildring 1908–1909 [s.l.]. Almqvist, Harald, 1975. ‘Ludvig Nobel och världens första oljeångare’, Unda Maris 1973–1974, Kungsbacka. Almqvist, Harald, 1983. ‘Lindholmen-Motala’, Unda Maris 1975–1982, Göteborg. Andrén, Erik, 1964. Nitroglycerin Aktiebolaget 1864–1964 [s.l.] Arne, T.J., 1950. ‘Skeppshandeln som torkade in’, Svensk Tidskrift. Arskaja, L.P., 1994. Nobeli – priemnye deti Rossii, Moskva. Åsbrink, Brita, 2001. Ludvig Nobel: ‘Petroleum har en lysande framtid!’ En historia om eldfängd olja och revolution i Baku, Stockholm. Aver’janova, A.E., 2016. ‘Akt po rezul’tatam . . .ėkspertizy vyjavlennogo ob”ekta kul’turnogo nasledija ’Žiloj dom . . . Petrogradskaja naberežnaja, 24” ’, [Petersburg]. A.W[erner].C[ronquist], 1897. ‘Nobel’arnes mor’, Idun 1897: 6. Bäckmann, Ida, 1935. Från filare till storindustriell. I naftabolaget Bröderna Nobels tjänst. Ett utdrag ur generalkonsul K.W. Hagelins memoarer, Stockholm. Baryšnikov, M.N., 1998. Delovoj mir Rossii: Istoriko-biografičeskij spravočnik, Petersburg. Baryšnikov, M.N., 2000. ‘Iz istorii akcionernogo obščestva mašinostroitel’nogo zavoda “Ljudvig Nobel” ’, Terra Economicus, 7:2. Baryšnikov, M.N., 2008. ‘Kompanija Nobelej: balans interesov i ėffektivnost’ funkcionirovanija’, Rossijskij žurnal menedžmenta 2008:2. Baryšnikov, M.N., 2009. ‘Obščestvennaja dejatel’nost’ Nobelej v Rossii’, Universum: Vestnik Gercenovskogo universiteta 2009:11.

399

Baryšnikov, M.N., 2013. ‘Noblessner: formirovanie finansovo-promyšlennoj gruppy v Peterburge v načale XX veka’, Rossijskij žurnal menedžmenta, 2013:4. Baryšnikov, M.N., 2013b. ‘Oformlenie Nobelevskogo koncerna v Rossii v načale XX veka’, Terra Economicus, 2013, 11:4. Baryšnikov, M.N., 2014. Nobeli v Rossijskoj imperii: sem’ja, biznes, obščestvennye iniciativy, Petersburg. Bergengren, Erik, 1962. Alfred Nobel: The man and his work, London etc. Bil’derling, P.A., 1889. ‘Dejatel’nost’ Ljudviga Ėmmanuiloviča Nobelja, kak učastnika pri vypolnenii na Iževskom oružejnom zavode pravitel’stvennych zakazov’, in Pamjati Ljudviga Ėmmanuiloviča Nobelja, s. 29–37. Black, Brian C., 2012. Crude Reality: Petroleum in world history, Lanham/Boulder/New York etc. Bondeson, Jan, 2001. Buried Alive: The terrifying history of our most primal fear, New York. Carlberg, Ingrid, 2019 Nobel: Den gåtfulle Alfred, hans värld och hans pris, Stockholm Charlamov, M., 1939. ‘Vseobščaja stačka bakinskich rabočich v 1904 g.’, Istoričeskij žurnal 1939:12. Cone, Andrew and Walter R. Johns, 1870. Petrolia: A brief history of the Pennsylvania petroleum region, New York. Cronquist, A. Werner, 1894. ‘Nobelarne’, Ord och Bild 1894:2, pp. 67–81. Cronquist, A. Werner, 1897. ‘Nobelar’nes moder’, Idun 1897:6, pp. 43–44. Published under the initials A.W.C. Cronquist, A. Werner, 1912. Alfred Nobel: Några ord om hans lefnad och lifsgärning, Stockholm. Cylov, N., 1862. Opisanie ulic S.-Peterburga i familii domovladel’cev k 1863 godu, Petersburg. D’jakonova, I.A., 1980. Nobelevskaja korporacija v Rossii, Moskva. D’jakonov, Ju. P., 2009. ‘Emmanuil Nobel – pioner pirotechničeskich podvodnych min v Rossii’, Petersburg Rossijskij gosudarstvennyj archiv voenno-morskogo flota. rgavmf.ru. Prazdnovanie dvadcatipjatiletija Tovariščestva Neftjanogo Proizvodstva Brat’ev Nobel’ 1894–1904, Petersburg 1904. Džabbarov, Farchad, 2015. ‘Faktor bakinskoj nefti v voenno-političeskich sobytijach na Kavkaze letom 1918 goda’, Černoe zoloto Azerbajdžana 4 (75). Engman, Max, 2002. Lejonet och dubbelörnen: Finlands imperiella decennier 1830–1890, Stockholm. Ericson, Bengt, 2018. Patriarken på Mälsåker – om en självrådig slottsherre, flärd och fåfänglighet, Väddö. Evdošenko, Ju.V., 2013. ‘Delo neftjanikov-’vreditelej’ 1929–1930 gg. i sud’by nobelevskich služaščich v SSSR: K voprosu o genezise “ėkonomičeskoj kontrrevoljucii” ’, Ėkonomičeskaja istorija: Ežegodnik 2013, s. 331–89. Fant, Kenne, 1995. Alfred Bernhard Nobel, Stockholm. Fransén, Carl Gustav, 2003. Svenska sjöminor under 200 år: En historisk sammanfattning, Stockholm. Fritz, Martin, 2003. ‘Svensk industriell företagarverksamhet i S:t Petersburg kring sekelskiftet 1900’. Dædalus (71). Gibb, George S. and Evelyn H. Knowlton, 1956. History of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey): The resurgent years 1911–1927, New York. Gulišambarov, Stepan, 1888. ‘Dejatel’nost’ Ljudviga Ėmmanuiloviča Nobelja na Kavkaze’, Zap. Kavkaz. Otd-nija Rus. Techn. O-va 1887/1888, t. 18, vyp. 7, s. 3–26. Hafström, Georg, 1961. ‘A.L. Fahnehjelm och skeppet Wasa’, Tidskrift i sjöväsendet 1961:6. Hedin, Sven, 1950. Stormän och kungar, Stockholm.

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INDEX

Numbers in italics refer to picture captions. Åberg, Uno 321, 325 Adlersparre, family 131, 229 Ahlberg, Brita Cajsa (Catharina), see Nobel, Brita Cajsa Ahlgrén, P.E. 68 Ahlqvist, Dora 349 Ahlqvist, Eric 349 Ahlqvist, Ingrid née Nobel 288, 316, 349 Ahlqvist, Ingrid junior 349 Ahlqvist, Norah 349 Ahlqvist, Walter 288 Ahlsell, Adolf 84, 166 Ahlsell, Andriette, see Nobel, Andriette Ahlsell, Charlotta (Lotten), see Henne, Charlotta Ahlsell, Charlotte 53, 56 Ahlsell, Ludvig 28, 39–40, 42, 50–2, 54 Ahlsell, Wilhelmina (Mina), see Nobel, Wilhelmina Alexander I 35 Alexander II 27, 32, 50, 60, 104, 156, 157, 183, 196, 255, 276 Alexander III 180, 214, 215, 217, 218, 232, 255, 276, 346 Alexandra Fyodorovna, Russian Empress 214 Alfa-Nobel 256–7, 290–1, 293, 300, 302, 317, 326, 355 Alfthan, distiller 169 Almqvist, Sven 150 Anderson, Frithiof 299 Andersson, Carl Fredric 191, 193–4, 195, 207, 298 Andersson, Sven 193

André, Alexander 294 Andrée, S.A. 224 Anglo-Persian 314, 331; see also British Petroleum Company Aron, Jules 183–4, 238, 252 Åsbrink, Per 358 ASEA 259, 278 Asping, Charlotte, see Ahlsell, Charlotte Åström, Johan Olof 4 Åström, Magdalena 5 Aurora, lamp and paraffin shop 66, 124 Awelin, August 143, 170 Axling, drill master 127, 139, 143 Bäck, Fredrik M. 10 Backlund, Elsa 277, 351 Backlund, Helge 277, 351 Backlund, Hjalmar 277, 351 Backlund, Oscar 197, 265, 267, 277, 351 Baird, Carr & MacPherson 35 Baird, Charles 34 Baird, Francis 34–5, 44–5, 38 Bakunit 161 Balmont, Konstantin 347 Baltic Works 288 Banque de France 175 Baranovsky, Stepan 102–3 Baranovsky, Vladimir 101–3, 102 Barbé, Alexandre 252 Bari (Bary), Alexander 149–50, 158, 295 Bari, Sytenko & Co 149 Baryatinsky, Prince 181 Batum’s Oil Industry and Trading Company, see BNITO

405

Bechterew, Vladimir 276 Beliamin, Mikhail junior 255, 303, 314, 335 Beliamin, Mikhail senior 155–7, 184, 213–14, 218–20, 222–3, 238–9, 242 Beliamina, Zinaida 351 Belonozhkin, Alexander 340 Bengtsson, Olof 150, 160, 151 Berdan, Hiram S. 111 Berg, Alexander 46 Berg, Harald 102, 200 Berger, Louis 180, 219 Berzelius, Jacob 18–19, 60 Bessler, Waechter & Co 240, 252, 293 Bilderling, Alexander 156, 351 Bilderling, Pyotr 111–13, 112, 113, 115–17, 153–4, 156–7, 206, 214–15, 218–19, 351 Birbaum, Franz 353 Birmingham Small Arms Company 111 Blom, Fredrik 10–13, 250 Blomberg, Fritz 156 BNITO (Batum’s Oil Industry- and Trading Company) 184–5, 251, 297–9 Bodisko (de Bodisco), Alexander 20 Bofors foundry 232, 247, 249 Bolin, court jeweller 197, 278 Bolin, Leonard 119 Botkin, Yevgenii 275 Böttcher, Adrian 307, 336 BP, see British Petroleum Boucheron, jewellery firm 353 Brändström, Edvard 204, 280 Briand, Aristide 347 British Petroleum Company (BP) 252, 314 Brodsky, Joseph 362 Brunel, Marc 36 Bubnov, Ivan 290 Bulgarin, Faddey 43 Bunge, Andrei 181, 185 Bunin, Ivan 347–8, 350 Burmeister, W.N. 56, 73, 75–6 Busch, Adolphus 258 Cajander, Henrik 24 Carl XIV Johan, Swedish king 10, 22, 29 Carl, Prince 346 Carle, Johannes 101 Carlsund, Anton junior 257–8, 257, 351, 354

406

INDEX

Carlsund, Anton senior 258 Carlsund, Otto 258 Caspian and Black Sea Oil Industry and Trading Company, see Societé Commerciale et Industrielle de Naphte Caspienne et de la Mer Noire Caucasus & Mercury 52, 126, 150, 160 Cedercreutz, Johan Axel 26 Charles XII, Swedish king 49 Charles XV, Swedish king 60 Chernyshov, Alexander 22, 50 Clyde Tube Works, Glasgow 149 Collin, Edla, see Nobel, Edla Collin, Hildegard, see Nyberg, Hildegard Collin, Lilly, see Mellgren, Lilly Colt factory 111 Crédit Lyonnais 175 Crusell, Anna 54, 191, 227, 307 Crusell, Emil Malcolm 54 Crusell, Gustaf 54 Crusell, Hjalmar 54, 151, 173, 191, 201–2, 207, 214, 227–9, 228, 255, 270, 307, 351 Crusell, Sigrid 229 Dahlgren, Gunnar 295 Dahlgrén, Samuel 144, 148 Damberg, Gustaf Mikael 196 Daudet, Alphonse 177 De Boer, Bruno 124–6, 138 De Boer (Company) 126, 138–9, 143 De Boer, Leon (Lev) 124–8, 130–1, 137–8 de Laval, Gustaf 226, 255 de Lesseps, Fernand 168 de Rothschild, Alphonse 181, 183 de Rothschild, Lionel 183 de Rothschild, Nathan Meyer 183 Delin, Erik 335 Deterding, Henri 299, 334, 346 Deutsch-Amerikanische Petroleum Gesellschaft 252 Deutsche Bank 297 Dickson, Oscar 198 Diesel, Eugen 353 Diesel, Rudolf 257–8, 353 Dietz, Robert Edwin 66 Disconto-Gesellschaft 180, 251, 347, 351, 354 Dolgoruky, Grand Duke 275

Due, Ambassador 198, 204 Dynamit Aktien Gesellschaft 188 Dynamite Company Ltd (Cologne) 351 Einstein, Albert 347 Eklundh, Gustaf 295, 351 Elde, Betty 3, 18, 65, 69, 81 Elde, Per 18 Ephrussi, Maurice 183 EPU (European Petroleum Union) 297–8, 328 Ericsson, John 45, 48 European Petroleum Union, see EPU Evlanoff, Mikhail, see Yevlanov, Mikhail Fabergé, jewellery firm 197, 293, 353 Fahnehjelm, Anton Ludvig 20, 67–8, 71 Fegræus, Torbern 234, 260, 262, 280, 294, 299 Fleming, Johan Claes 25 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 300 Frasch, Herman 140 French Dynamite Syndicate (Syndicat des fabriques de Dynamite) 144 G.A. Lessner Ltd 98, 289 Gadolin, Axel 104 Galindo, Eberhard 200 Galsworthy, John 350 Garmsen, Vassili, see Harmszen, Wicher Gascoigne, Carl 34 Gatling, Richard 103 George III 7 Georgi, Grand Duke 215 Gibb, George S. 333 Gibraltar, Ismaïl 7–8 Glazenap, Pyotr 315 Golubyev, engineer 60 Good, Charles 252 Goodyear, Charles 28 Gorky, Maxim 337, 347 Gorlov, Alexander 111 Greyson, Karl 36 Grimm, David 207 Gukasov, Abram 300, 347–8 Gukovsky, Isidor 310 Gulf Oil 328 Gulishambarov, Stepan 260 Gunnius, Karl 111

Gustaf III, Swedish king 49 Gustaf V, Swedish king 346 Guchkov, Alexander 264, 302, 306 Günzburg (Ginzburg), Horatius 175, 180 Hagelin, Boris 345, 356 Hagelin, Karl Wilhelm 160–2, 161, 347 Hagelin, Wilhelm 165, 169, 254–5, 258, 260–1, 268, 294–6, 300–1, 303, 306–7, 324, 326, 335, 338, 347, 351–2, 354, 356–7 Haglund, worker 162 Hain, Alice 349 Hain, Gottfrid (Gotte) 349 Harmszen, Mrs 338 Harmszen, Wicher 336–8 Heckscher, Eli 354 Hedin, Sven 279, 343 Hellerström, draughtsman 169 Henne, Charlotta (Lotten) 55, 62, 162 Herlitz, Albin 306, 308 Herodotus 123 Hertzman, C.E. 73 Hess, Sofie 79, 178, 219, 245 Högman, Mary 330, 349 Holmstrand, Captain 5, 8 Hughes, Christopher 19–20 Hülphers, Ernst August 102 Huss, Maja 272–3, 278, 281–2, 353 Hvass, Leonard 245–6 Indo-Persian Trading Corporation 328 Isherwood, workshop 35, 98–9, 103, 105, 191 Isherwood, John 98, 103, 105 Izhevsk iron works 101, 111–13, 114, 116–17, 119, 153, 157, 190–1, 205 Jacobi, Moritz Hermann 29–30, 38, 40, 46 Jernfält, master boatswain 6–7, 9–10 Jersey Standard (Standard Oil of New Jersey) 330–2 Jerzykowicz, Juri 352–3, 396 Johansson, Pehr Christian 196–7 Johns, Walter R. 144 Johnson, Johnny 259 Johnson, Mary (Minnie), see Nobel, Mary Julin, Erik 23 Julin, John 23, 55

INDEX

407

Kajanus, Herman 194–5, 204, 277 Kajanus, Robert 194 Karelina, Anastasia 307, 343, 352 Karl I, Prince of Württemberg 31 Karlfeldt, Erik Axel 350 Kauffman, Herman 200 Kerensky, Alexander 306 Khalafi Company 127 Kingelin, Abraham 23 Kshesinskaya, Matilda 309, 312, 315 Kleinmikhel, Pyotr 29, 35 Klingenstierna, E.G. 68 Knowlton, Evelyn H. 333 Kokorev, Vassili 123, 143 Kokovtsov, Vladimir 267, 309, 312–13, 346, 348 Konstantin Nikolayevich, Grand Duke 45, 58, 68, 347 Kozen, Pyotr 31–2 Krasin, Leonid 333–4 Kristoferson, Albin 335 Kristoferson, Oscar 335 Krnka, Sylvestr 101 Kulman, Nikolai 348, 350 Lagerlöf, Selma 279–80 Lagerwall, Ivar 180, 184, 187, 189, 203, 206–7, 214, 220–3, 239 Lambert, Axel 169, 228 Lamm, Leopold 16 Lamm, Pierre 16 Landzert, Mary, see Sjögren, Mary Landzert, Theodor 204, 226 Langlet, Filip 249 Lenin, Vladimir Uljanov 261, 276, 311, 313, 336 Lenngrén, Carl 29, 62–2, 64 Lenngrén, Eva 62 Lenngrén, Pauline, see Nobel, Pauline Lessner, Artur 289, 294–5, 301–2, 307, 309, 313–14, 323–6, 335 Lessner, Gustav 289 Lessner, Mrs 314 Lessner’s machine shop 98 Leuchtenberg, Maximilian, Prince 143 Lianozov, oil producer 300 Libby, William H. 238 Lidvall, Fredrik 270, 280, 298, 317, 346, 351 Liedbeck, Alarik 106, 119, 144, 159, 245

408

INDEX

Lilljeqvist, Rudolf 243 Lindal, Anna, see Crusell, Anna Lindhagen, Carl 351 Littorin, Knut 251–2, 254, 294, 351, 354 Lloyd George, David 333 Lomakin, Nikolai 139–40 Łukasiewicz, Ignacy 66 Lundberg, Carl 293 Lundberg, Oscar 317 Lvov, Georgi, Prince 306 Macintosh, Charles 16 Maklakov, Vassili 348 Malm, Knut 291, 301, 335, 351 Mannerheim, August 22, 27 Mannerheim, Eva Wilhelmina (Minette), see von Haartman, Eva Wilhelmina Mannerheim, Gustaf 306, 346 Mantashev, Alexander 237, 300 Marco Polo 124 Maria Fyodorovna, Empress 214 Maria Pavlovna, Grand Duchess 309 Marvin, Charles 134, 136 Marx, Karl 149 Massino, Nadine (Nadezhda), see Nobel, Nadine Mazut Company 236, 299 Mellgren, Lilly 106, 272 Mellgren, Sigrid, see Crusell, Sigrid Mellgren, Theodor 103, 106 Meltzer, Roman 270–1 Mendeleev, Dmitri 129, 143, 267 Menshikov, Alexander 22, 26, 30 Menzhinsky, Vyacheslav 340 Merezhkovsky, Dmitri 347 Messman, Berndt 3, 5 Messman, Bernhard 4 Messman, Magdalena, see Åström, Magdalena Mikhail Nikolayevich, Grand Duke 142, 145, 149, 156, 181 Mikhail Pavlovich, Grand Duke 30–3, 35–6, 58 Milyutin, Dmitri 99 Mirzoev, Ivan 122–3, 127, 300 Motala engineering works 32, 119, 126, 150, 175, 224, 258, 267, 293 Munck, Johan Reinhold 25–6, 29 Möllersten, J.C. 14–15

Nachmann, laywer 206, 248 Naphtha-Produktions-Gesellschaft Gebrüder Nobel 328 Napier, Charles 46, 48, 68 Nazansky, Vladimir 315, 351 Nellis, Charles 214–15, 218, 277, 289 NEP (New Economic Policy) 339–40 Neva Works 288 Nicholas I 22, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 45, 50, 59, 60, 126, 142, 155, 206, 368–9 Nicholas II 215, 262–4, 271, 275, 294, 305, 306, 308, 309 368, 369 Nitroglycerine Company Ltd 80–4, 87, 89, 106–8, 121, 130, 144, 157, 243, 351 Napoleon, Emperor 5, 7 Nobel (Olsen), Alf 296 Nobel (Olsen), Edla junior 296 Nobel (Olsen), Leif 296 Nobel, Alec 292 Nobel, Alexander (Ludvig’s son) 291 Nobel, Alfred (Freddy) 349 Nobel, Alice, see Hain, Alice Nobel, Andriette née Ahlsell 14, 33, 40–1, 43, 52, 54–92, 155, 177, 218, 229, 273, 345 Nobel, Andriette, see Tydén, Andriette Nobel, Anna Charlotta 3 Nobel, Anna née Rosell 3 Nobel, Anna Sofie née Posse 232 Nobel, Anna, see Sjögren, Anna Nobel, Betty (Immanuel’s daughter) 40 Nobel, Betty (Immanuel’s sister), see Elde, Betty Nobel, Brita Cajsa (Catharina) 3, 5 Nobel, Carl 98, 106, 166, 173, 191, 201–2, 207, 211, 212, 217, 224–6, 225, 233, 240, 255, 257–8, 290 Nobel, Carl (Rolf ’s son) 293 Nobel, Charlotta Wilhelmina (Ludvig’s daughter) 105 Nobel, Edla 106, 108, 109, 110, 113, 155, 167, 191, 201–2, 206–7, 220, 228, 233, 239, 242, 273, 278–80, 288, 290, 293, 307–10, 316, 318, 329–330, 343, 344, 345, 351, 357 Nobel, Edla Ludovica 291

Nobel, Emil (Ludvig’s son) 191, 256, 278, 282, 287, 288, 291, 292, 293, 307–9, 316–18, 318, 326, 329–30, 336, 345, 349, 351–3, 355, 355, 357 Nobel, Emil Oscar 40, 50, 52, 55–7, 56, 62, 72–4, 80 Nobel, Eugenie (Zhenya) 301, 314–15 Nobel, Gunnar 301 Nobel, Gösta 191, 275, 278, 288, 289, 291, 292, 293–4, 301, 307–9, 314, 316–18, 318, 321, 324–7, 329–32, 334–7, 345, 349, 350–3, 355, 355 Nobel, Helge 293 Nobel, Henrietta (Immanuel’s daughter) 14, 25, 40 Nobel, Hjalmar 66, 108, 131, 166, 214, 229–32, 230, 242–3, 245, 247–50, 249, 354 Nobel, Immanuel senior 3–4 Nobel, Ingeborg, see Ridderstolpe, Ingeborg Nobel, Ingrid, see Ahlqvist, Ingrid Nobel, Lorna 292 Nobel, Ludvig (Robert’s son) 108, 166, 243, 245, 247–50, 249, 329, 349 Nobel, Ludvig (Lullu) 191, 201, 270, 277, 287, 288, 290–3, 292, 309, 316, 318, 329–30, 349, 351, 355, 357 Nobel, Ludvig Hjalmar (Bubik) 293 Nobel, Luise 293, 316, 330, 349 Nobel, Manuel 292 Nobel, Marie-Louise 293 Nobel, Mary, see Högman, Mary Nobel, Mary née Landzert, see Sjögren, Mary Nobel, Mary (Minnie) 288, 292, 316, 349 Nobel, Wilhelmina (Mina), née Ahlsell (Ludvig’s first wife) 53–5, 53, 105–6, 204, 229, 345, 357 Nobel, Wilhelmina (Mina), see Olsen, Wilhelmina Nobel, Nadine (Nadezhda) 349 Nobel, Nina 301, 315 Nobel, Olof 3 Nobel, Pauline 56, 62–5, 63, 79, 91, 108, 113–14, 131, 155, 165–66, 242–3, 248, 249 Nobel, Peter 358 Nobel, Peter (Ludvig’s son) 291

INDEX

409

Nobel, Rolf 191, 278, 287, 288, 291, 292, 293, 308, 316, 318, 330, 349, 351–2, 355, 355, 357 Nobel, Rolf (Immanuel’s son) 40, 50 Nobel, Svea 291 Nobel, Thyra 166, 243, 245, 249 Nobel, Valborg 243, 349 Nobel, Victor 293 Nobel’s Explosives Company 188 Nobel-Diesel, see Svenska Nobel-Diesel Nobel-Dynamite Trust Company 188, 249 Nobel-Oleinikoff, Marta 39, 76, 164–5, 197, 200, 273, 276–7, 288, 345, 349, 359 Nobel-Standard 328, 331 Noblessner 289–90, 300, 302, 317, 326 Nordenskiöld, Adolf Erik 198, 200 Nordenström, Nicolai 196–7, 278 Nordström, Hans 258 Norsk Hydro 296 Northern Steamboat Company 63 Nyberg, Alfred 106–7 Nyberg, Hildegard 106 Nyrén, Magnus 196–7 Nyström, Gustaf 277, 280 Öberg, Carl 157, 166 Obolensky, Dmitri 58 Ogaryov, Nikolai Alexandrovich 35–6, 39, 44, 154 Olander, Valborg 279 Oleinikoff, Georg (Oleinikov, Georgi) 273, 276–7, 276, 288, 345, 348, 349, 350, 353 Oleinikoff, Marta, see Nobel-Oleinikoff, Marta Oleinikoff, Nils 349 Olga, Princess of Württemberg 31 Olsen, Hans 240–2, 241, 251–2, 254–5, 273, 288, 294–6, 299–300, 346, 350–1, 353–4, 356, 358 Olsen, Wilhelmina (Mina) 167, 191, 201, 245, 251, 270, 288, 296, 318, 318, 329, 346, 349, 351, 356, 358 Oscar II, Swedish king 19–20, 25, 31, 68, 198, 248, 293, 354 Österling, Anders 350 Ovchinnikov, court jeweller 215, 217 Oxenstierna, Gustaf Gabriel Bengtsson 86

410

INDEX

Palander af Vega, Louis 198 Palashkovsky, Sergei 181, 185 Pelouze, Théophile-Jules 61 Petterson, Sixtus 224 Pipes, Richard 262 Planck, Max 347 Plehve, Vyacheslav 261 Pliny 123 Plotnikov, Mikhail 289–90 Plutarch 123 Poe, Edgar Allan 86 Polnobel 328, 331 Posse, Anna Sofie, see Nobel, Anna Sofie Pototski, Lev 22 Prokofiev, Sergei 309 Pushkin, Alexander 267 Putilov, Nikolai 49 Putin, Vladimir 361 Qvarnström, Carl 160–1 Ramsay, Anders Edvard 27, 35, 44 Ramstedt, Carl Otto 31, 71 Reilly, Sidney (Shlomo Rosenblum) 349 Reitern (von Reutern), Mikhail 58 Reuterskiöld, Alexander 70 RGO (Russian General Oil Corporation) 300 Ridderstolpe, Carl 243, 248, 250 Ridderstolpe, Ingeborg 108, 166, 243, 245, 248–9, 249, 250 Rockefeller, John D. 237, 332 Rosell, Anna, see Nobel, Anna Rosenblum, Shlomo, see Reilly, Sidney Rothschild, the bank 180–1, 183–5, 190, 220, 233, 236–8, 251–2, 183–5, 190, 296–9 Royal Dutch/Royal Dutch Shell 299, 331–4 Russian General Oil Corporation, see RGO Russische Diesel Motor Co 258 Russian-Asiatic Bank 300 Sakharov, Andrei 362 Sadler, Everett J. 331–2 SAIC (Societé d’Armement, d’Industrie et de Commerce) 252, 297, 328 San Galli, Franz 45 Santesson, Benedikt Lars 41

Scharlin, Johan 23, 24, 25, 33, 55 Scharlin, Selma 40, 106, 166 Schernickow, Gustav 346 Schilder, Karl 29–31 Schwartz, Gustaf Magnus 16–17 Schweizerische Lokomotivenfabrik 226 Schück, Henrik 89–90, 350 Separator 226, 256, 351 Serebrovsky, Alexander 326 Serov, Valentin 351 Sestroretsk, arms factory 101 Seymour, Michael 48 Shell, 295, 299, 332; see also Royal Dutch Shell Shortland, John 6, 7 Shuttleworth, Digby 323 Sibiryakov, Alexander 198 Simonovich, Anna 338 Shestov, Lev 306 Sjögren, Anna 106, 167, 173, 177, 191, 201, 207, 215, 217, 228, 232, 239, 245, 247, 316 Sjögren, Hjalmar 215, 226, 232, 239, 245, 247–8, 250, 288, 316 Sjögren, Mary 226, 245, 247 Sjögren, Märta 232 Sjögren, Åke 226, 245, 247–8, 250 SKF (Svenska kullagerfabriken) 278 Smith, Francis 48 Smitt, Johan Wilhelm 64–5, 81–2, 88, 106, 110, 120 Snessoryev, Nikolai 116 Sobrero, Ascanio 61 Societé d’Armement, d’Industrie et de Commerce, see SAIC Société Commerciale et Industrielle de Naphte Caspienne et de la Mer Noire 183 Sohlman, August 69, 243 Sohlman, Hulda 81 Sohlmann, Ragnar 69, 243, 244–5, 244, 247, 249 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 362 St Etienne, arms factory 121 St Petersburg’s Discount Bank 288–90 Stalin, Joseph 261, 313, 340 Standard Oil 181, 184–5, 189–90, 233, 236–8, 242, 252, 254, 259, 297–8, 328, 330, 332, 356

Standertskjöld, Carl August 38, 98, 101, 103, 112–13, 112, 145, 153, 191 Standertskjöld, Hugo, 114, 118, 190, 200, 346 Standertskjöld, Mauritz 113–14 Steaua-Romana 297–8 Stepanov, Alexei 205 Sterky, Gustaf 204 Stolypin, Pyotr 297 Strehlenert, R.V. 245–6 Stresemann, Gustav 347 Sundgren, Albert 66, 156 Svedberg, mechanic 33, 36 Svedman, Captain 5, 7–8 Svenska Nobel-Diesel 355 Svenson, Göthe W. 130, 164 Svensson, draughtsman 169 Syndicat des fabriques de Dynamite, see French Dynamite Syndicate Taberger, Johann Gottfried 86 Tagantsev, Vladimir 336–7, 339 Teagle, Walter 332, 351 Tegelsten, Carl 29 Théel, Erland 157–6 Tiedemann, Mrs 228 Tiedemann, Otto 228 Tikhvinsky, Mikhail 336 Tillander, Alexander 196 Tolf, Robert W. 299 Tolstoy, Lev 77, 282 Torgprom (Russian Trade, Industry and Finance Union) 337, 340, 347 Totleben, Eduard 212 Trapp, Yuli 60 Treumann, Carl 228 Treumann, O. 228 Tula, arms factory 101, 111–14 Tuneld, John 338 Tydén, Andriette 330, 349 Törnqvist, Alfred 158–60, 165, 167, 169–70, 296 Törnudd, Gustaf 160, 169–74, 213 Ulyanov, Alexander 276 Unge, Emanuel 18 Uritsky, Moisey 311, 317

INDEX

411

van Suchtelen, Peter 20, 22 Varvara Vladimirovna, see von Ebeling, Varvara Vladimirovna Vassilevich, Karl, see Hagelin, Karl Wilhelm Vennberg, Erik 351, 357 Vesnenko, worker 162 Vladimir Alexandrovich, Grand Duke 193 Vogel, Doctor 251–2 von Dapper, Carl 301, 345, 352 von Ebeling, Varvara Vladimirovna 346 von Euler, Ulf 358 von Haartman, Anna Charlotta, see von Kothen, Anna Charlotta von Haartman, Eva Wilhelmina (Minette) 22 von Haartman, Gabriel Erik 21 von Haartman, Lars Gabriel 20–2, 21, 23, 25, 27, 35, 198 von Haartman, Rafael 52 von Jerzykowicz, Antoinette (Antonina Alexandrovna) 346, 352–3 von Kothen, Anna Charlotta 26 von Kothen, Casimir 26 von Kothen, Gustaf (Gösta) 26–7, 197 von Kothen, Gustaf senior 26 von Kothen, Mauritz 26 von Schantz, Eberhard (Ivan) 30 von Siemens, Werner 29 Vorovsky, Vatslav 317 Vyshnegradsky, Ivan 234

412

INDEX

Wåhlstedt, Jonas 112 Wahlström, Sophia 33 Wallenberg, K.A. 346, 351 Wallenberg, Marcus 258, 267, 301, 345, 351 Wannebo, Kristian 325, 335 Werner, Ragnar 310, 327, 335 Wessén, Birger 315 Westfeldt, Otto Didrik 18 Westvall, Martin 143, 161 Wettergrund, Josefina (Lea) 90, 243 Wettergrund, Valborg, see Nobel, Valborg Weylandt, Reinhold 13 White, Captain 7 Wilkins, Ellis & Butts 35 Winkler, Karl 293 Winkler, Luise, see Nobel, Luise Witte, Sergei 234, 236, 256, 259, 263, 267, 309 Wunderlich, Bruno 156–7, 251 Yakovleva, Varvara 317 Yevlanov (Evlanoff ), Mikhail 310, 315, 351, 396 Zabelsky, Ivan 156–7 Zalessky, Pyotr 349 Zandt, Gustaf Fredrik 194 Zhukov, Vladimir 149 Zinin, Nikolai 60–1 Zorn, Anders 351

413

414

Immanuel’s drawing of the frontage of the house on Långholmen island.

Immanuel’s rubber machine, ‘a simple and quite ingenious solution’, according to a historian of technology. Here, the production of rubber bands is being shown.

In the 1860s Immanuel painted a number of watercolours related to mine-manufacture. This one shows how the mines were laid out.

A watercolour by Immanuel showing how a vessel with a Turkish flag (hardly a coincidence!) is blown up by an underwater mine. The two men watching the successful experiment are Immanuel himself and, presumably, Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich.

These photos of Immanuel and Andriette were taken in 1853, during the glory days of the mechanical workshop.

Emanuel in his study in the ‘house on the quay’ around 1909. The watercolour was the work of the Swedish artist Elsa Backlund, who did portraits of several members of the Swedish colony in St Petersburg.

A cancelled Branobel share for 5,000 roubles belonging to Emanuel.