He was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833 but moved to Russia with his parents in 1842, where his father made a strong position for himself in the engineering industry. Most of the family returned to Sweden in 1859, where Alfred rejoined them in 1863, beginning his own study of explosions in his father's laboratory. He had never been to school or university but had studied privately and by the time he was twenty he was a skillful chemist and excellent linguistics, speaking Swedish, Russian, German, French and English. He builds up over 80 companies in 20 different countries.
