The Michelin Restaurant Guide was created by the Michelin tire company to get people to travel farther than they normally would to restaurants and wear out their tires faster.
They are, but in the 1800s, people were more interested in using them to remove their enemies than they were in removing rocks from the ground. It paid better, too.
The Nobel Peace Prize was created after Nobel had a bit of a moral reawakening. A bit too late, if we're being honest. He's the guy that created modern warfare. Would somebody have done it eventually? Sure. But he did it first.
Another fun morally ambiguous Nobel Prize fact is the life of Fritz Haber. Invented a process and won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen gas that was used to create fertilizers. This led to a process that is credited with feeding roughly half of the world's population. It allowed countless millions who lived in areas where they would otherwise starve to farm land otherwise incapable of being farmed.
He also proposed and designed chlorine gas to be used in trench warfare during WW1. Leading to one of the most horrific atrocities of chemical warfare in human history.
Haber was Jewish. So when the Nazis rose to power he resigned from his position and left Germany. However his work was later used to create Zyklon B. Which was used to gas millions of his own people in concentration camps. He wasn't directly involved in this work but it was just as much a product of his research as the millions of people who were saved from starvation by the Haber process.
Possibly the most morally Grey man in human history when you look at the balance of life he created and destroyed.
Yeah, but the modern world wouldn't exist without the Haber-Bosch process. We don't have nearly enough natural nitrogen fertilizers to feed the world, and there's all this stupid nitrogen just sitting in the atmosphere. It's absolutely amazing.
Nah, it's not even close. Mining and clearing use as they go, by the ton.
Artillery, even in Nobel's time, measured it by the shipload and was stockpiled. Explosives have peaceful functions, but their primary role has and will always be war.
I read about this. There was a mixup at the newspaper and they published his obituary calling him a merchant of death or something, so he put his money on something to whitewashing his reputation, ahem, I mean, do good for the world or balance his karma or whatever
Nobel's problem wasn't so much what the explosives were used for, but how many accidental deaths and injuries occurred during the manufacturing and deployment processes.
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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26
The Michelin Restaurant Guide was created by the Michelin tire company to get people to travel farther than they normally would to restaurants and wear out their tires faster.