Ikigai Daily
WonderCoincidence1,546 of 1,961

When Alfred Nobel's brother died in 1888, a French paper is said to have mistaken it for Alfred's death and called him a merchant of death who grew rich finding new ways to kill. He is said to have read it, and rewritten his will.

Alfred Nobel (1833–1896)

HistoryBiography

Why it matters

The idea in context

Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and owned armaments works, so the charge would have stung. The famous version of events is worth holding loosely: no original copy of the obituary has ever been found, and the Nobel Foundation notes he had been thinking about prizes for decades and was influenced by his friendship with the peace campaigner Bertha von Suttner. What is certain is the will he signed in 1895, leaving almost his whole fortune to reward those who had conferred the greatest benefit on humankind.

Türkçe

Aynı kart, başka bir dilde.

1888'de Alfred Nobel'in kardeşi ölünce, bir Fransız gazetesinin bunu Alfred'in ölümü sanıp onu, öldürmenin yeni yollarını bularak zenginleşen bir ölüm tüccarı diye andığı söylenir. Bunu okuduğu ve vasiyetini yeniden yazdığı anlatılır.
Alfred Nobel (1833-1896)

Nobel dinamiti icat etti, 355 patenti vardı ve silah fabrikaları işletiyordu; dolayısıyla suçlama can yakmış olmalı. Olayların ünlü sürümünü gevşek tutmakta yarar var: Ölüm ilanının özgün bir nüshası hiç bulunamadı ve Nobel Vakfı, onun ödülleri onlarca yıldır düşündüğünü ve barış savunucusu Bertha von Suttner ile dostluğundan etkilendiğini belirtiyor. Kesin olan, 1895'te imzaladığı ve servetinin neredeyse tamamını insanlığa en büyük yararı sağlayanları ödüllendirmeye bırakan vasiyettir.

Source trail

Read beyond the card.

Background reading: Alfred NobelAttribution and context are revised when stronger evidence appears. Corrections are welcome through the editorial page.
Open in the iPhone appEditorial method

Related cards

These cards share a subject or mode with the one above. The route is editorial, not personalised.

Q1549
WonderHistory

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on a business trip in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Burned and half-deaf, he travelled home the next day — to Nagasaki, arriving in time for the second bomb.

An engineer for Mitsubishi, Yamaguchi was three kilometres from the Hiroshima hypocentre. He made it back to Nagasaki and was describing the blast to a disbelieving supervisor on 9 August when the second flash filled the window. He lived to 93. In 2009 Japan formally recognised him as the only official double survivor — though others were caught by both — and he spent his last years speaking against nuclear weapons, saying his survival appeared to have been given to him as a task.

Tsutomu YamaguchiRead card
Q1769
WonderEvolution

Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974, showed that early human relatives walked upright long before large brains evolved.

Lucy matters because she gives deep time a body. Her bones are not a complete person, but they are enough to show a small hominin who moved through trees and across ground, combining ape-like and human-like traits. The revelation is quietly radical: walking on two legs was not the final polish of humanity. It was an early experiment, older than the brain that later tried to explain it.

Lucy / Australopithecus afarensisRead card
Q1806
WonderMusic

Umm Kulthum became one of the Arab world's defining twentieth-century voices, transforming classical Arabic poetry, radio concerts and improvisation into shared cultural memory.

Umm Kulthum's art depended on control and surrender at once. She could stretch a phrase, return to it, let the audience's response shape the performance and make poetry feel communal rather than private. Radio carried her first-Thursday concerts far beyond the hall, turning listening into a monthly ritual. Her voice became not only a sound, but a room that millions recognized.

Umm KulthumRead card
Q1548
WonderHistory

Violet Jessop was aboard the Olympic when it was rammed, aboard the Titanic when it sank, and aboard the Britannic when it went down too. She survived all three and kept going to sea for another thirty years.

Jessop was a stewardess on the Olympic in 1911 when a warship struck it, a stewardess on the Titanic in 1912 when she was put into a lifeboat holding a stranger's baby, and a nurse on the hospital ship Britannic in 1916 when it hit a mine in the Aegean. Sucked towards the Britannic's still-turning propellers, she jumped from her lifeboat and struck her head on the keel — an injury she later credited a thick head of hair with softening. She went back to work on liners and retired only in the 1950s, to a cottage in Suffolk.

Violet JessopRead card
Q1551
WonderHistory

Abraham Lincoln's son was pushed off a crowded train platform and pulled back to safety by a stranger. The stranger was Edwin Booth — brother of the man who would shoot his father.

Robert Todd Lincoln told the story himself in a letter of 1909. Waiting for a sleeping-car ticket at Jersey City, he was pressed against a moving carriage and dropped into the gap; a hand seized his collar and hauled him out. He turned and recognised Edwin Booth, the most celebrated American actor of the age. Neither knew what was coming. Within about a year or two Edwin's younger brother John Wilkes Booth shot the president at Ford's Theatre — and Edwin, told later of the rescue, is said to have taken some comfort from it.

HistoryRead card
Next in the open archiveIn 1962 a Soviet submarine near Cuba, out of radio contact and under depth charges, prepared to fire a nuclear torpedo. Three officers had to agree. One, Vasili Arkhipov, said no.Q1598