1. Alfred Nobel considered himself a failure. After a newspaper’s premature obituary dubbed him “the merchant of death,” the inventor of dynamite set out to improve his reputation by establishing prizes in peace, literature and the sciences.
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2. Only one scientist has won a Nobel for failing. In the 1880s, Albert Michelson tried to measure the “luminiferous ether” that scientists thought was the carrier of light. He couldn’t find it, because it didn’t exist. Michelson had inadvertently discovered that light carries itself, though it would take a patent office clerk named Albert Einstein to explain it. The short version: E = mc2.
