Imagine stumbling across a stack of papers in your summer home—only to find they once belonged to Alfred Nobel himself.
That’s exactly what happened in southern Sweden, where a couple uncovered a dozen of the inventor’s long-lost patents, missing for nearly 50 years.
Nobel, who invented dynamite in 1867 and later established the Nobel Prizes in his will, was no stranger to innovation.
He held hundreds of patents across multiple countries, most linked to new ways of producing and using nitroglycerin-based explosives.
“We got a call from an auction house about these documents,” said Hanna Stjärne, head of the Nobel Foundation.
“When we saw them, we knew immediately—they’re of great importance and must be preserved for future generations.”
Mystery Remains Unsolved
How the papers ended up tucked away in a holiday home remains a mystery.
But opening them was like stepping back in time, Stjärne added: “You could almost feel what life was like 150 years ago—how Nobel traveled, how he worked.”
Often dubbed “the richest vagabond in the world,” Nobel lived in countries from Russia to Italy.
Among the recovered treasures is an 1865 patent that Nobel Museum curator Ulf Larsson calls “rare and crucial.”
It marks the stage between his invention of the detonator and his breakthrough with dynamite.
