The new stuff could also be used underwater, making it easier to tunnel through waterways and span rivers with dams. Nobel had also built a new instrument of war.
It was first used as a weapon during the Franco-Prussian War of , and between and , Irish Republicans planted dynamite bombs at government and military targets in Great Britain, injuring upwards of 80 people with more than two dozen devices. The first dynamite guns, named for artillery officer Edmund Zalinski, could launch an explosive projectile up to 5, yards.
Zalinski guns were installed as coastal defense in San Francisco and New York. The U. In fact, Nobel was a pacifist — albeit, a bit of a twisted one. By the time Nobel actually died, in , he owned nearly explosives and munitions factories, and dynamite had made him a fortune.
He left most of it in trust, establishing the Nobel Prizes, given annually to scientists, doctors, writers, and those who work in the pursuit of peace. More than years after its invention, dynamite is still in use. The military has mastered other high explosives, which can be deployed with more surgical precision. Dynamite is still the right tool for some tasks, says Fronapfel, but explosive technology has done what all technology eventually does: evolved. The real legacy of this world-changing invention—besides the Peace Prize named for its inventor—is the lithium in your cell phone battery and the silicon in your computer processor, both blasted out of mines.
Type keyword s to search. By Kate Morgan. Blasters in Texas load and tamp a dynamite charge for a "snake-hole" blast in the s. Three Lions Getty Images. Related Story. Heritage Images Getty Images. Alfred Nobel Bettmann Getty Images. The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled. Inert Sweaty Dynamite. Skip to the end of the images gallery. Skip to the beginning of the images gallery. Please Login to Order Favorites. Related Products.
To be a useful explosive, a substance has to be able to withstand, without detonating, the jolts and bumps both of its manufacture, and of its transportation to where it will be used. Clearly, nitroglycerin is far too dangerous for this, and many people lost their lives in the last century trying to use nitroglycerin for peaceful purposes like quarrying.
The man that solved this problem, was the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel. For several years Nobel had been working in Stockholm on developing nitroglycerine as an explosive. He manufactured it by carefully mixing glycerol with nitric and sulphuric acids. But several explosions in his laboratory, including one in in which his brother Emil and several other persons were killed, convinced the authorities that nitroglycerine production was exceedingly dangerous.
Alfred was not discouraged and in he was able to start mass production of nitroglycerine. To make the handling of nitroglycerine safer, Nobel experimented with different additives. He soon found that mixing nitroglycerine with a type of clay called kieselguhr , would turn the liquid into a paste which could be shaped into rods of a size and form suitable for insertion into drilling holes.
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