Judas, the secret name of Nobel
At the time of his death aged 63, Alfred Nobel, held 355 patents and a commensurate fortune of 31 million SEK (roughly $265 million in today’s money). A fortune founded on a quotidian industry standard protocol for transporting hazardous materials; viz. nitroglycerin.
Nitroglycerin was synthesised in 1847 by Ascanio Sobrero, an Italian chemist from Turin. He was utterly horrified at his Frankenstein creation and considered it far, far, far too dangerous for use (“savage and ungovernable”) and viscerally loathed 2 generations of the Nobel family.
Hated them for turning it into an offering to mammon, and thus blackening poor Ascanio’s memory and soul with every precious, unique, irreplaceable candle against the darkness that would be extinguished by every bullet fired in burning rage, or cold hate, by 1s, and by millions, for time immemorial.
But, for alas and alack, Ascanio’s nitro had caught the avaricious eye of Emmanuel Nobel, the nonno of genocide, a struggling businessman, a member of the same ‘explosive’ tribe, thus enabling son, Alfie, who, in one apocryphal, appalling, dreadful instant, noticed, kieselguhr (1), a common packing material, soaked in nitro was utterly, stable!
Nitroglycerin is absurdly unstable in liquid form, where the slightest jolt, a temperature change, even a rough road. And, ‘the angel with the whiskers on is Paddy McGinty’s goat.’ (2); ‘that’s all’ she wrote.
During the 1860s, dozens of factories and ships blew up as early adopters attempted to transport and use nitro. Nobel’s own factory in Heleneborg blew up in 1864 killing five people including his younger brother Emil. The Swedish government banned him from rebuilding in Stockholm, so he moved shop to a barge on a lake, the precursor of ‘fishing’ with dynamite.
Kieselguhr, a light, abundant, inert, shock absorbing material, tested by the Edison principle of ‘10,000 things that don’t work’, became widely used as industrial packing and insulation through the mid 19th century, roughly 1840s-1860s.
Used over 2 decades, that’s 20 years, by 1,000s of workers; before Nobel made his genocidal, species ending discovery.
The bitter, bitter irony of the origins of this epochal, apocalyptic, Damascene revelation is that it was born of a quotidian solution to a familiar business problem; the transport and handling of hazardous substances;
Protocol 1 - always pack liquid nitro in kieselguhr lined containers;
Nobel, the Einstein of explosives, saw that, which not one of the thousands of users over 2 decades had even thought of;
Kieselguhr, a common packing material, when mixed with nitro made it a stable, portable, and potent explosive; Dynamite was born and patented in 1867
Armageddon chained, Thor tamed, and let loose the birth of stars amongst human flesh; the alchemy of flesh to gold, the envy of Midas;
In one fell swoop of the devil’s scythe, he solved 2 generations of business ills that had dogged and hounded the elder Nobel, and inspired his issue in the name of profit unconstrained.
Suddenly you could blast tunnels, mines, railways, canals without dying on the way to the job site. The Panama Canal, the impressive Alpine tunnels, the American transcontinental railroad expansion; all dynamite-enabled.
Then, Alfie, in the best traditions of product development, went further: blasting gelatin (1875), a more powerful and waterproof variant, and ballistite (1887), a smokeless propellant for military use.
And, with ballistite, Nobel rang a bell never to be unrung; echoing across history, geography and humanity…
Ballistite (1887) is a smokeless propellant that attracted the attention of and involvement with Bofors, and opened up the wonderful, and oh, so lucrative world of military hardware and genocide machines.
Where else are you going to get so much money it‘s still being given away in 6.2 million dollar chunks (6 prizes @ $1.035M) some 130 years after your unexaggerated death?
Nobel died on 10 December 1896 in San Remo, aged 63, having failed to live down his title of “The merchant of death”, awarded in 1888 by a French newspaper that mistook brother Ludwig Nobel’s death as Alfred’s and awarded him the very first Nobel accolade, true for ‘creating’ war, but, as we are learning, it’s all of a peace, or is it piece…
That title obituary is reportedly what prompted the Peace Prize.
The name Nobel…
..as a warning to others
A brilliant writer, Jorge Luis Borges wrote “Three Versions of Judas” (1944), a literary essay about a fictional theologian, complete with fake footnotes and fake academic citations, so authentic that readers have gone looking for Nils Runeberg in real life.
The fictional theologian is Nils Runeberg, a Swedish academic at Lund, plausibly modelled on Thomas De Quincey (3).
Runeberg’s final argument, his “monstrous conclusion”, is that God did not merely become human in Jesus. The true, complete sacrifice required God to become the most reviled human.
Not the redeemer on the cross but the betrayer in the garden.
God was Judas. The secret name.
Runeberg feared he had committed blasphemy by discovering and publishing it.
He died of a brain aneurysm in 1912.
God’s grace for revealing that…
The purpose of Judas’s life was to serve as a warning to others.
(1) Diatomaceous earth, kieselguhr is the same material, different names. DE is the modern term, kieselguhr the 19th century industrial usage. Fossilised silica shells of ancient algae, mined across Europe, standard packing and insulation material by the 1840s.
(2) “He swallowed a spark and exploded with a bang / So if you go to heaven, you can bet a dollar note / That the Angel with the whiskers on is Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” — Bert Lee & R.P. Weston. The goat, having consumed dynamite, matches, and paraffin, achieved a form of apotheosis. Nobel’s obituary writers were far less charitable.
(3) Thomas De Quincey, an English essayist, 1785-1859. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Borges cited him as a precursor to Runeberg’s rehabilitation of Judas. De Quincey wrote about Judas as a man who misunderstood Jesus’s intentions, acting from zeal rather than malice. The seed of Runeberg’s argument.