Upon Alfred Nobel, with his quick, impressionable temperament, this direct contact with Ericsson must have left strong influences. Perhaps he decided then that, should fortune favor him, he would leave a fund to aid scientists in their experiments and to protect them against financial duress during periods of discouragement. When he returned to Sweden and Russia, he coöperated with his father and brothers in manufacturing nitroglycerine and other explosives; he was constantly seeking for a compound which would be more powerful and less dangerous. In 1857, at St. Petersburg, he had taken out a patent for a gasometer. It has been said that the discovery of what was later known as dynamite came by accident to Alfred Nobel, during an experiment about 1865-66. Some nitroglycerine had escaped into the siliceous sand of the packing and this brought about a partial solution of his problem. Dynamite, which was composed of 75 per cent nitroglycerine and 25 per cent kieselguhr, or infusorial earth, was produced. He applied for patents in several countries, and sought for funds to start factories which he believed would make a fortune by manufacture of this new explosive. It was sometimes called “Nobel’s blasting-oil.” He told French bankers that he had invented “an oil that would blow up the world”; a facetious commentator declared, “French bankers thought it for their interest to leave the globe undisturbed” and refused him credit.[3] Napoleon III became interested and arranged for funds for Nobel’s factories in France. With some samples of dynamite in his hand bag, Alfred Nobel came to the United States on the same commercial mission. New York hotels received him with suspicion because of rumors about the “deadly explosive”; he went to California where, through the aid of Dr. Bandman, a friend of Nobel’s brother, a factory was started near Los Angeles. In a few years manufactories were in operation in Italy, Spain, France and Scotland, as well as England and Sweden. When Alfred Nobel was forty years old he was making his fortune out of this “giant powder.” For several years he lived in Paris where he had laboratories for further experiments with gelatin, balastite, and forms of smokeless powder. In his later home, in San Remo, he carried on developments and took out more patents in petroleum and artificial gutta-percha. He received the tribute of scientists and educators but the ignorant people regarded him with a mixture of awe and fear--“he had put the long hammer of Thor to work again among the giants.”