On Monday, March 27, 2006 19:34, Dr. Core wrote: > Bob Allen wrote: > > BTW: Alfred Nobel was a Swede who invented TNT, so maybe it's not that far > > fetched......... > > Off topic, but Nobel didn't invent TNT, he patented dynamite. Another > invention earned him huge fortunes and the title "Merchant of Death" > is smokeless gunpowders.
It's worth noting here that Nobel endowed the Prizes that bear his name partly as atonement for the later military uses of his inventions. Dynamite, which is essentially a stabilized solid form of nitroglycerine, and guncotton, a commercially-viable nitrocellulose, were intended for civilian use in mining, agriculture (tree-clearing), hunting, etc. as a replacement for the dangerously volatile explosives they replaced. Once a license had been granted to a manufacturer, however, Nobel had no further say over what could be manufactured. The guilt over the source of his enrichment impelled Nobel to seek balance by using the money as both a reward and incentive to those who developed humanitarian uses of science and technology. I've often wonder if Minovsky's defection was an echo of Nobel, but to date there's only been a single official side-story (Stampede: Minovsky Hakase Monogatari, Cyber Comix/Gundam Generation, 1988, Masaya Takahashi & Hajime Oki) and, possibly due to my own lack of fluency in Japanese literacy, his motivations have always seems ambiguous to me. On the other hand, there's never an Minovsky Peace Prize or anything remotely similar to it in all of the Gundam saga, so it'd appear that his defection was purely political... -Z- -------------------------------------------------- The Gundam Mailing List MK-II [email protected] Archives: http://www.gundam.com/gml Help: Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with this in the BODY: help list
