7 Alfred Nobel 7marchand de la mort est mort” (“The merchant of death is
dead.”) Perhaps Alfred Nobel established the prizes to
avoid precisely the sort of posthumous reputation sug-
gested by this premature obituary. It is certain that the
actual awards he instituted reflect his lifelong interest in
the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology, and literature.
There is also abundant evidence that his friendship with
the prominent Austrian pacifist Bertha von Suttner
inspired him to establish the prize for peace.
Nobel himself, however, remains a figure of paradoxes
and contradictions: a brilliant, lonely man, part pessimist and
part idealist, who invented the powerful explosives used in
modern warfare but also established the world’s most
prestigious prizes for intellectual services rendered to
humanity.
John Wesley Hyatt
(b. Nov. 28, 1837, Starkey, N.Y., U.S.—d. May 10, 1920, Short Hills, N.J.)
J
ohn Wesley Hyatt, an American inventor and industri-
alist, discovered the process for making celluloid, the
first practical artificial plastic.
As a young man, Hyatt trained as a printer in Illinois
and then in Albany, N.Y. In 1863 he was attracted by a
reward of $10,000 offered by a New York billiards com-
pany to anyone who could invent a satisfactory substitute
for ivory billiard balls. Hyatt experimented with several
compositions, none of which produced a successful bil-
liard ball, but he was able to go into business with his
brothers making one of the mixtures—a composite of
wood pulp and shellac—into embossed checkers and
dominoes. Continuing his experiments, Hyatt found that
an attractive and practical plastic material could be made
by mixing nitrocellulose (a flammable nitrate of common
wood or cotton cellulose), camphor (a waxy resin obtained