My father invented plywood

Who wouldn't give a million dollars to say " My father invented plywood " ?

That's part of the foundation behind the inventor Alfred Bernhard Nobel.

Not to be outdone perhaps or just because he was a genius more likely the son of Immanuel and Andriette goes on to invent dynamite and receives an early epithet as "Le marchant de la mort" or "The merchant of Death" from a French newspaper that mistakenly wrote up an obituary about Alfred Nobel. His brother Ludwig had indeed died in 1888.

Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden on October 21, 1833 and died of complication from a stroke in Italy on December 10, 1896.

His father was also the owner of a torpedo factory which he operated out of Saint Petersburg in Russia.

As an academic he started out as a protege of Professor Nikolay Nikolaevich Zinin. He followed up by travelling to the US where he furthered is knowledge of chemistry while working for John Ericsson the Swedish-American inventor.

By 1847 Alfred Nobel had thrown his energy towards explosives. In this same year  Ascanio Sobrero discovered nytroglycerine. This substance along with some sawdust likely from the plywood factory led to the invention of dynamite by Alfred while in Krummel, Germany. He received a patent for dynamite in 1867.

This was only one of 355 different patents that he was awarded.

Long story short, Nobels inventions made him filthy rich. Part of his fortune was a company called Bofors, a major armaments factory located in Sweden. This company was founded some years earlier but the Boofors legacy within the iron industry spanned back to no less than 1646. Nobel owned Bofors for a few year from 1894 to his death in 1896.

Today Nobel's name is associated with high achievement and creative people are honoured with the Nobel prize. Sometimes the prize is controversially awarded such as was the case with the recent judgement of awarding serving US President Obama with the Nobel Peace Award.

The money left behind in trust by Alfred Nobel is the foundation of the Nobel Prize and it was a last will and testament of the inventor of dynamite.

My father invented plywood. Le Marchand de la Mort est mort. Everything is a bit controversial in it's own way. As another US president once said while caught up in controversy, "It depends on the meaning of what is, is."