Ludvig Nobel

Ludvig Immanuel Nobel ( ; ; ; 27 July 1831 – 12 April 1888) was a Swedish-Russian engineer, a noted businessman and a humanitarian. One of the most prominent members of the Nobel family, he was the son of Immanuel Nobel (also an engineering pioneer) and Andriette Nobel, and the older brother of Alfred Nobel (founder of the Nobel Prize). With his brother Robert, he operated Branobel, an oil company in Baku, Azerbaijan which at one point produced 50% of the world's oil. He is credited with creating the Russian oil industry. Ludvig Nobel built the largest fortune of any of the Nobel brothers and was one of the world's richest men. Following the Bolshevik revolution, the communists confiscated the Nobel family's vast fortune in Russia. Most of the villages focussed on by Nobel's humanitarian efforts, particularly in Ukraine, quickly descended into famine and death following collectivisation and the communist economic system. Some controversial sources blame his humanitarian efforts, which decreased child mortality, for raising the local population too high to a point it was unsustainable during the Holodomor and thus being "directly" responsible for extra deaths. Early history Nobel was born in Stockholm. At 28 years old, he was given by his father's creditors the technical management of the family business, Fonderies et Ateliers Mécaniques Nobel Fils, a factory making war supplies such as mines and steam engines. The company had been facing financial difficulties since the end of the Crimean War in 1856 due to a severe cut in the military budget ordered by the new Tsar Alexander II, and eventually, in 1862, Immanuel's firm was sold by his creditors. With some funds he had managed to save, Ludvig opened a new firm, the Machine-Building Factory Ludvig Nobel. Initially producing chilled cast-iron shells, the factory became in a few years one of the largest producers of gun carriages of Russia.