This biographical novel is based on real people and events.
It was La Belle Èpoque – the Beautiful Era. It was an exciting time. Europe was splashed with railroad lines transporting people, goods and ideas. Steamships crossed the Atlantic safely in days, not months. Cities and towns flickered with light at night, printed newspapers and books proliferated, education flourished, and scientific advances were made on every human front. The great inventor and industrialist, Alfred Nobel, had amassed a fortune in helping to advance and build this brave new world. It was into this world that a young Swede, Ragnar Sohlman, came of age.
In the fall of 1893, at the age of 23, Ragnar receives a telegram from his family in Sweden while working as a chemical engineer in America. Without explanation, and much to his surprise, he is summoned to the industrialist Alfred Nobel’s home in Paris to become his personal secretary – effective immediately. Ragnar is awed by the opportunity to work for Nobel. Although Nobel is one of the world’s wealthiest men, with companies on almost every continent, there is something that Nobel immediately sees in his young secretary. Two weeks after Ragnar arrived, he becomes Nobel’s personal assistant in Nobel’s own private laboratories. Over the next three years, fostered by a comfortable and collegial working environment, the friendship between the young engineer and the aging inventor grows.
In December 1896 Nobel suffers a debilitating stroke at his home in San Remo, Italy. Ragnar arrives in San Remo from Sweden late in the evening two days later. He had received word on the train that Nobel died earlier that day. He was grief stricken to learn that his friend had died alone. Through his grief, the weight of Nobel’s death cast him into a deep depression. So many questions swirled in Ragnar’s mind. Would he lose his employment at the loss of his mentor and friend? What happens to everything he and Nobel had been working on – will it now be put on hold or end permanently? Gone is the comfortable existence at the laboratories in San Remo and Sweden. Gone are the plans he and his new wife had been making to start their family.
Within days of Alfred Nobel’s death, Ragnar learns how much he meant to the aging scientist. The will has been opened in Sweden and Ragnar learns he is named as an Executor. There is language in the inventor’s will that presents a challenge to Ragnar. It is a challenge that puts him at odds with powerful forces, national governments, influential institutions and men with designs on his life. Alfred Nobel knew his man. After a night of agony and torment, the young chemical engineer takes the challenge, ready to face the danger, and sweep aside the risks.
Finding himself at the doorstep of history, the twenty-six-year-old decided to step through. The coveted Nobel Prizes are testament that Ragnar Sohlman triumphed and forever became Alfred Nobel’s spokesman for the soul.
This is his story.