Alfred Bernhard Nobel (October 21, 1833 - December 10, 1896) was a human engineer, chemist and armaments manufacturer. Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He was the inventor of dynamite, which he patented in 1867.

In 1888 a premature obituary of Nobel was printed in a French newspaper, harshly criticizing him for inventing dynamite. It is believed that a desire to leave a more positive legacy led Nobel to establish the Nobel Prizes in his will, which he signed in 1895, the year before his death. The Nobel Prizes honored work in the fields of physics, chemistry, literature, medicine and the promotion of peace. A Nobel Prize for economics was subsequently established.

In 2258, in an alternate reality, Spock reminded James T. Kirk of Nobel as an example of how technology could be perverted to uses unintended by its discoverers. (TOS novelization: Star Trek)