Name-dropping:
Alfred Bernhard Nobel (pronunciation: no-BELL) (1833–1896).
A smart Swedish kid who just happened to have a deep and incontrovertible passion for blowing stuff up. And so it came to pass that the most widely respected peace prize in the world was paid for, basically, by explosives.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
It’s admittedly unlikely that you’ll ever be at a party with a Nobel laureate. But should it happen, you’ll surely look dumb if you don’t have anything to say. Also, knowledge of Nobel’s exploits can be helpful when trying to explain your boorish behavior late in the evening. “Sorry,” you can say, “I’m more bombed than Alfred Nobel’s factory in 1864.”

The Basics
Like a lot of kids, the young Alfred Nobel loved blowing stuff up. But little Alfie just never grew up. As a young man, Nobel began experimenting with liquid nitroglycerin, an explosive compound that, while highly unstable, was much better at blowing things up than anything previously invented. In 1862, he built a factory to manufacture and sell nitroglycerin, and shortly after, he invented the first semisafe detonator for it. Later, he also invented the blasting cap, which proved a godsend for miners, and ushered in the modern era of explosives.

But nitroglycerin was by no means safe. In fact, Nobel’s own factory blew up in 1864, killing his younger brother, Emil. But Alfred still believed in the power of explosives, and in 1867, he invented, half by accident, a much safer compound that he named, “dynamite.” The big “D” made Alfred ridiculously wealthy, and the innovative Swede soon owned a host of factories around Europe.

Despite all this, however, Nobel never married. He seemed to find explosives more interesting than any woman, so he left no heirs. Instead, he put the bulk of his fortune (more than $9 million) to establishing a series of prizes. These awards—presented annually in the fields of physics, chemistry, economics, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace making—quickly became the most prestigious intellectual prizes in the world. In the end, Nobel would be better remembered for his prize than for his explosives used in modern warfare—which may be the very reason Nobel’s will ordered that the prize be named for him.

Worst Nobel Prize Winner Ever
Once a Nobel Prize is given, it cannot be revoked. Now and again, the award goes to someone who maybe did not deserve it, but the most undeserving winner has to be Antonio Egas Moniz, the Portuguese physician who won the prize for medicine in 1946 for inventing—yes—the leucotomy prefrontal (lobotomy). Egas Moniz’s surgery consisted of—if we may simplify it a bit—drilling a few holes in a patient’s skull and then repeatedly stabbing the patient in the brain. The lobotomy seemed to be successful at curing people of schizophrenic and paranoid psychoses, but they proved to have fairly serious side effects,
such as “becoming a vegetable” and “becoming dead.” Although lobotomies are rare today, thanks to an improved understanding of mental illness and psychosis treatments, they’re still occasionally performed in some parts of the world.

REPORTS OF MY DEATH…
Alfred’s brother Ludvig died in Cannes, France. French newspapers, never renowned for the fact-checking, somehow mixed up Ludvig and Alfred, and ended up running obituaries for Alfred instead. The headline in one paper read: “The Merchant of Death is Dead.” Some historians have speculated that Alfred was so horrified by the thought that he might be remembered only as a merchant of death that he decided to create a trust fund for the prizes–which would mean that we owe the Nobel Prize to poor reporting.

YOU COULD BE A WINNER:
Your best chance to win a Nobel Prize is to find work as an economist. The economics award usually goes to more than one person, and frequently goes to Americans. But whether you’re an economist, a poet, or just a schmuck who wouldn’t mind winning the Peace Prize (if Henry Kissinger can win it, then, by God, why can’t you?), here’s how to make it happen:

1. Get nominated. Unfortunately, you cannot nominate yourself. Nor can you have just anyone nominate you. Unless you know some former Nobel winners or the president of a sovereign nation, your best bet is to find a college professor teaching the subject in question and have her nominate you. Make sure to be nominated by February 1.

2. From here on out, you’d better be either exceptionally talented or exceptionally lucky, because the Nobel Committees are notoriously averse to bribery. But if they choose you…

3. The committee will submit your nomination to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Usually, the academy agrees with the committee’s nomination, in which case you’ll get an early-morning call sometime in October to inform you that you’ve won the Nobel Prize. Just be sure to thank mental_floss in your speech.

Conversation Starters
◆ According to Dr. Donald W. Goodwin’s book Alcohol and the Writer, half the Americans who won the Nobel Prize for Literature were most likely alcoholics. The drunks: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. The nondrunks: Pearl Buck, Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison.

◆ Mohandas Gandhi—Gandhi!!!—never won the Nobel Prize. Although nominated five times between 1937 and 1948, Gandhi was beaten out by the likes of Lord Edgar Algernon, R. G. Cecil, and Cordell Hull (who? our point exactly). After Gandhi’s death, the Nobel Committee publicly expressed regret for the omission. And although posthumous awards aren’t given, the Nobel Committee came as close as possible in 1948, the year Gandhi died, when they did not give out an award because “there was no suitable living candidate.”