Aileen Fife is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews, specialising in science and technology.

We know that in the 1890s, Nobel was in correspondence with several people involved in the peace movement.

One of his close correspondents was a woman who was involved in that.

She was interested in organising international peace congresses to try and bring people together and to try and bring countries together to better understand each other so they wouldn't go to war.

Nobel himself was a bit skeptical of that, but it's in correspondence with her that he first mentions the idea of perhaps having a peace prize.

Perhaps, he thinks, offering some kind of large amount of money occasionally.

maybe every five years for the next 30 years, because if we haven't solved it in 30 years, surely we're never going to solve it, he thinks.

On the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.

So he started to develop it.

Initially, you can make nitroglycerine.

It's a liquid.

It's highly explosive.

It's quite difficult to use, but it's really, really powerful.

So Nobel's quite interested in that and develops factories to do that.

But until he manages to stabilise it and make it into dynamite...

What was the means by which they were becoming visible and by which knowledge was being shared and made more public?

So I think he was quite a visionary, actually.

He's an example of a new breed of government scientist, I suppose, experts who are working for and with the

Aileen Fyfe is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews, specialising in science and technology.

And they're a different group of people from the university professors, for instance, but they're using technology some of that knowledge.

And they become very, very expert on whatever their particular field is.

But there were only two government inspectors of explosives for most of the 1870s.

I think they'd just got a third one in the early 1880s.

So you're looking at two or possibly three men who are overseeing the entire manufacture and handling of explosives in the United Kingdom, which is, of course, a massive scope.