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60 free Alfred Nobel trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Alfred Nobel never went to university, spoke six languages, held 355 patents, ran more than 90 explosives factories and wrote a blasphemous verse tragedy that his executors burned. Then, in a one-page will his family knew nothing about, he gave 94 percent of his fortune to reward people who "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." That contradiction is what makes him such good trivia. This Alfred Nobel trivia quiz runs 60 questions in two halves. The first covers the man: his inventor father in Saint Petersburg, the 1864 explosion that killed his brother, the invention and naming of dynamite, gelignite and ballistite, the Baku oil money, Bertha von Suttner, Sofie Hess, the villa in Sanremo and the famous premature obituary that may never have run. The second covers the prizes he created: the five original fields, who chooses each laureate, the December 10 ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo, the medals, the double winners, and the two people who said no. Every answer is verified against Wikipedia's articles on Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Prize, with the supporting sentence quoted under each question. Easy questions come first; the final third is for people who know their Sohlman from their Lilljequist.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Alfred Nobel was born in 1833 in which city?
Stockholm
The family was so poor at the time that only Alfred and three of his brothers survived childhood.
Q 02How many patents did Nobel hold during his life?
355
His first, filed in England in 1857 when he was 24, was for a gas meter rather than anything that exploded.
Q 03Nobel became fluent in how many languages?
Six
Swedish, French, Russian, English, German and Italian; he was good enough in English to write poetry in it.
Q 04Which Swedish iron and steel company did Nobel own and turn into a major cannon manufacturer?
Bofors
He bought it in 1894, and the Björkborn Manor that came with it is now a museum.
Q 05Which synthetic chemical element is named after Alfred Nobel?
Nobelium
Element 102 sits among the actinides, next to mendelevium and lawrencium, both also named for scientists.
Q 06Which body, of which Nobel was a member, chooses the laureates in physics and chemistry?
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
He was elected to it in 1884, and never consulted it before naming it in his will.
Q 07Nobel's father Immanuel invented which woodworking device that made modern plywood possible?
The veneer lathe
Immanuel also started work on the naval mine while running an explosives business in Russia.
Q 08After his father's bankruptcy, the Nobel family moved in 1842 to which city, then in the Russian Empire?
Saint Petersburg
Immanuel had gone ahead and grown successful there as a manufacturer of machine tools and explosives.
Q 09How much formal schooling did Alfred Nobel receive?
18 months at a Stockholm school
Private tutors did the rest; he never attended university, though Uppsala gave him an honorary doctorate in 1893.
Q 10Nobel wrote a prose tragedy, Nemesis, about which Italian noblewoman?
Beatrice Cenci
Almost the entire print run was destroyed after his death as scandalous and blasphemous; it was finally published in Sweden in 2003.
Q 11How many copies of Nemesis survived the destruction of its print run after Nobel's death?
Three
The rest were burned by people who considered the play scandalous and blasphemous.
Q 12In Paris in 1850 Nobel met which chemist, the man who had synthesised nitroglycerin?
Ascanio Sobrero
Sobrero strongly opposed using his discovery because it exploded unpredictably under heat or pressure.
Q 13While in the United States, the teenage Nobel worked briefly under which Swedish-American inventor?
John Ericsson
Ericsson went on to design the ironclad USS Monitor for the Union navy in the Civil War.
Q 21The 1867 patent text describes dynamite by what alternative name?
Nobel's Safety Powder
He wanted to distance his business from the earlier controversies over dangerous explosives.
Q 22Which jelly-like explosive, more powerful and stable than dynamite, did Nobel invent in 1875?
Gelignite
Also called blasting gelatin, it became the standard mining explosive of the Age of Engineering.
Q 23Ballistite, patented by Nobel in 1887, was the precursor of what kind of explosive?
Smokeless powder
It is still used as a rocket propellant, and selling it to Italy got Nobel accused of high treason in France.
Q 14Nobel's first patent, filed in England in 1857, was for what?
A gas meter
His first Swedish patent, in 1863, was for ways to prepare gunpowder.
Q 15The Nobel family factory produced armaments for which war before going bankrupt when it ended?
The Crimean War
It could not switch back to civilian production fast enough once the fighting stopped in 1856.
Q 16An 1864 nitroglycerin shed explosion at Heleneborg killed which relative of Nobel's?
His younger brother Emil
He lost his licence to make explosives and moved production to a more isolated site at Vinterviken.
Q 17In which year did Nobel patent dynamite?
1867
He had invented a detonator in 1863 and the blasting cap in 1865 along the way.
Q 18Dynamite works by soaking nitroglycerin into which absorbent substance?
Kieselguhr
Kieselguhr is diatomaceous earth, made of the fossilised shells of tiny algae.
Q 19Nobel first demonstrated dynamite in 1867 at a quarry in which English county?
Surrey
The demonstration took place at Redhill.
Q 20The word "dynamite" comes from the Greek word for what?
Power
He had first considered a blander name that stressed safety over force.
Q 24Nobel's brothers Ludvig and Robert made a second family fortune in oil, mainly in which city?
Baku
Alfred invested in their company Branobel, and a historian argues the Baku money is what made the prizes possible.
Q 25By his death, roughly how many explosives and armament factories had Nobel's business established?
More than 90
Quite a record for a man biographers describe as apparently pacifist in character.
Q 26According to a famous story, a French newspaper's premature obituary called Nobel what?
The merchant of death
The obituary supposedly ran after one of his brothers died in 1888; historians have never verified that this exact one existed.
Q 27The death of which family member in 1888 supposedly triggered the mistaken obituaries of Alfred?
His brother Ludvig
Le Figaro really did run a hostile front-page notice on 15 April 1888, retracting it the next day.
Q 28Nobel signed his final will on 27 November 1895 at which venue?
The Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris
His family knew nothing about it, and the will was not approved by Norway's Storting until April 1897.
Q 29What percentage of his total assets did Nobel's will allocate to the prizes?
94%
That came to 31,225,000 Swedish kronor; by 2022 the foundation's invested capital was roughly 6 billion.
Q 30How many prizes did Nobel's will establish?
Five
Physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace; economics was added by Sweden's central bank in 1968.