A dozen patents belonging to Swedish inventor and philanthropist Alfred Nobel and lost for almost 50 years were recently found in a Swedish couple's summer house, the Nobel Foundation told AFP.

Nobel -- who discovered dynamite in 1867 and created the Nobel Prizes in his 1895 will -- had hundreds of patents in several countries, most of them concerning production methods and uses for explosives using nitroglycerin.

"We got a call from a person working at an auction place," the head of the Nobel Foundation, Hanna Stjarne, told AFP.

"He had these documents that came to him from a couple in the southern part of Sweden, in Blekinge, who found those documents in their summer home.

"We looked into it and saw that these are really documents of great importance that we want to keep for future g

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