When Countess Bertha von Kinsky von Chinic und Tettau, later Bertha van Suttner3 - Nobel Prize winner and world-famous through her Die Waffen nieder! - tried to interest him in her peace actions (for a short time, in fact for one week only, she had been secretary and housekeeper of the dynamite-maker Alfred Nobel, who was living in Paris), this was his reply: "My factories may make an end of war sooner than your congresses. The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops." And in 1876 he added, again in conversation with Bertha von Suttner, "I want to invent a material or an engine of such horribly destructive effect that it will make wars impossible.