In Nobel began its manufacture in a small plant outside Stockholm—a venture that cost the life of his youngest brother, Emil.
Nobel persevered with his goal of developing a safe nitroglycerin explosive, first inventing the blasting cap and then discovering that a silicaceous earth, kieselguhr, would stabilize nitroglycerin, thus making dynamite.
Nobel became wealthy by setting up companies and selling patent rights to dynamite and related products worldwide. In he created blasting gelatin, a colloidal suspension of nitrocellulose in glycerin, and in ballistite, a nearly smokeless powder especially suitable for propelling military projectiles. Nobel, the man who had tried to make handling explosives safe for workmen, was deeply troubled by the destructiveness of his inventions and became concerned with establishing worldwide peace.
The Department of Defense replaced black powder with dynamite, granting the Military an exponential increase in power. In addition to using dynamite for static explosions, the Military applications for dynamite are virtually endless.
In the s, Military Departments began conducting significant research analyzing potential applications of dynamite in the Military. The modern grenade launcher is stemmed from a Military test carried out in which dynamite was loaded into an artillery weapon and fired over to enemy quarters. This mechanism was known as a dynamite gun, and while the gun itself was deemed too expensive to use, the concept of the gun still helped create a new niche in the weapons industry, grenades.
Today, the Nobel Prize became a set of annual international awards bestowed in a number of categories in recognition of scientific and cultural advances. The explosives industry was founded in this country during its very beginnings, when black powder was used to mine for minerals, break rock, clear fields and make roads.
It is not an overstatement to say that this nation was built with the help of explosives. In the s, Alfred Nobel, a Swede, invented dynamite and the blasting cap required to make it explode. He licensed it in the United States and the industrial revolution began. In , Pelouze and Maurey, one of the gunpowder commissars, reported on the use of guncotton as a war agent Pelouze and Maurey, This paper was an extensive critical report on the new procedures developed by the Austrian general Lenk for fabricating and using guncotton.
Between and this establishment had provided about kg of the product for the many experiments done in France to substitute by guncotton the gunpowder used in mines and fire arms.
Similarly, the Austrian Army had established large manufacturing facilities at Hirtenberg, under the direction of Lenk, but until their process remained a mystery, no foreigner having been admitted to the factory. In France, two main objections had been raised against the substitution, one based on the fragility effect that the new powder imparted to the walls of weapons, and the other related to the accidents of decomposition and spontaneous explosions that had been observed in France and aboard.
A strong explosion at the Austrian factory in had led to a substantial reduction of the manufacture, until Lenk had introduced some alleged improvements in the process. Although Lenk did not contest the possible exothermic reactions that could lead to the inflammation of guncotton, he believed that taking appropriate measures during the preparation process could prevent them.
The Lenk procedure was based on the same chemical reactions as the ones used at the Bouchet arsenal. The Austrian and French guncottons were a compound resulting from the immersion of cotton in a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids. The proportions of these two acids could be varied in a wide range without modifying the quality of the product.
According to Lenk, the method used at Bouchet, where g of cotton were reacted with 2 liters of acid mixture, did not yield the same product as the Austrian one, which used a substantially larger volume of acids and special equipment for mixing the reagents. This action retarded the development of gases and eliminated the traces of acid they might contain. The French researchers analyzed all the information available from Austria and compared guncotton prepared by the two methods.
Nitroglycerine was the first, and is still one of the most widely produced nitrate esters. It is used in dynamites produced by absorbing nitroglycerine in fine wood meal or other powdered absorbent. This process prevents the formation of micro bubbles and stabilizes the liquid. The nitroglycerine is also thickened or gelatinized by the addition of a small percentage of nitrocellulose, a process which assists in preventing "weeping" exuding or settling out of the absorbent material.
Because settling does occur, boxes of stored non-gelled dynamites are turned over at regular intervals to reverse the settling flow. As will be detailed below, Alfred Nobel, another of Pelouze's students, took the knowledge back to the Nobel family's defunct armaments factory and began experimenting with the materiel around ; it did, indeed, prove to be very difficult to discover how to handle it safely. Throughout the s Nobel received several patents around the world for mixtures, devices and manufacturing methods based on the explosive power of nitroglycerine, eventually leading to the invention of dynamite.
The development of nitroglycerine as an explosive Bellamy and De Modica, To Sobrero goes the credit of having discovered nitroglycerine, to Alfred Nobel and his family, of transforming it into an industrial commodity. Immanuel Nobel , Alfred's father, was a well-known building constructor, who during his stay in Russia became interested in explosives.
In he sent his year old son Alfred to Paris to further his scientific education at Pelouze's laboratory. During this stay Alfred became acquainted with Sobrero and his discoveries and on his return to Sweden the Nobel family initiated experiments on ways of taming nitroglycerine for use in mining and quarrying. They duplicated Sobrero's methods until they were able to produce nitroglycerine in kilogram amounts.
Their major problem was how to get nitroglycerine to detonate properly; sometimes it would explode without releasing all the available energy, sometimes, it would merely burn. Eventually, Alfred Nobel was able to develop a new type of detonator, which solved the problem.
The detonator was placed in contact with the explosive and set off by means of a fuse passing through the wooden stopper. After solving the problem of controlled detonation, the next obstacle was how to transport nitroglycerine without risk.
The alcoholic solution was packed in hermetically sealed cans to prevent the evaporation of the solvent and sent to any distance and in any climate without the risk of explosion. At the job site the nitroglycerine was recovered by adding water to the solution.
The process was still dangerous because any spilled alcohol-nitroglycerine mixture rapidly lost its methyl alcohol by evaporation leaving a dangerous coating of the explosive on the ground. George M. The frozen explosive was subsequently thawed before use. Mowbray was able to manufacture and sell about tons of nitroglycerine to mining and engineering firms, before closing his plant because of patent difficulties. Despite all efforts to transport and use nitroglycerine in the safest possible way, accidents continued to occur and led some countries to either completely ban its use or severely restrict its transport.
On September 3, , an explosion occurred in Nobel's laboratory, which was situated in his home, on the outskirts of Stockholm. Five people were killed, including year old Emil Nobel, Alfred's youngest brother. As a result of this accident the city of Stockholm enforced laws that experiments with explosives could not be made within the city limits of Stockholm. Nobel therefore temporarily continued production on a barge anchored in Lake Malaren to the west of Stockholm.
Nobel began now searching for a porous material, which would absorb nitroglycerine without diminishing its explosive capacity. Of the many materials tested porous silica, paper, paper pulp, wood waste, brick dust, coal, dry clay, etc. It was chemically inert and would easily absorb up to three times its weight of nitroglycerine; the resulting putty-like substance could be shaped into sticks ready for the user to put straight into the borehole, and while it was sensitive to shock, a blasting cap could still detonate it.
Dynamite established Nobel's fame worldwide and was soon put to use in blasting tunnels, cutting canals, and building railways and roads. Before very long, two groups of dynamites were being developed: a dynamites with an inert absorbent, e. The usual active absorbents are substances such as sodium, potassium, and ammonium nitrate, chlorates, and black powder, but they may also be a non-explosive material under ordinary conditions, for example, sawdust, sugar, and coal, which in the presence of a powerful explosive like nitroglycerine contributes to the energy release by converting to products like CO 2 and H 2 O.
Nobel continued to experiment in search of better compositions and in he invented a more powerful form of dynamite, blasting gelatin, which he patented the following year. Blasting gelatin is a gel-like mixture of nitrocellulose with nitroglycerine having a consistency depending upon the amount of nitrocellulose dissolved in the nitroglycerine.
Unlike many other dynamites, it does not absorb water and is almost unaffected by immersion in water. It also resists freezing better than the other dynamites. In Nobel introduced ballistite, one of the first nitroglycerine smokeless powders and a precursor of cordite. The camphor reacted with any acidic products of the chemical breakdown of the two explosives, but did tend to evaporate over time leaving a potentially unstable mixture.
Nobel's patent specified that the nitrocellulose should be "of the well-known soluble kind". Nowadays, ballistite is a double-base powder used as a rocket propellant. It is composed of two explosive substances, nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine, blended together with diphenylamine, which acts as a stabilizer. It burns with a considerable amount of flash and smoke, and generates a great volume of gas. Ballistite burns progressively, but at a rate dependent upon the composition and physical characteristics of the powder grain, the temperature of the powder grain before ignition, and the pressure during reaction.
By there were 93 Nobel factories in the world with an annual production capacity of 66, tons. The physiological influence of nitroglycerine Rossettani and Cervasel, ; Marsh and Marsh, Angina pectoris is a term for chest pain due to the heart not getting enough oxygen. William Heberden , a British physician, explained it for the first time in in a paper presented to the College of Physicians of London. Heberden described both typical exertional angina as well as variant angina, which eventually affected a patient only when he was in bed and was relieved by sitting-up.
In the late s several English physicians correlated the angina suffered by living patients with the obstruction of heart blood vessels found in post mortems of the same patients. Despite this early insight, many leading physicians through much of the following century blamed the chest pain on indigestion and treated angina with soda or chalk to relieve stomach acidity.
One significant fact is that it was in Nobel's dynamite factories in the late s that the antianginal effect of nitroglycerine was discovered. Two interesting observations were made.
First, factory workers on Monday mornings often complained of headaches that disappeared over the weekends. Second, factory workers suffering from angina pectoris or heart failure often experienced relief from chest pain during the workweek, but which recurred on weekends. Both effects were attributed to the vasodilator action of nitroglycerine, which quickly became apparent to the physicians and physiologists in local communities. Another significant fact is that Nobel himself suffered from angina pectoris and refused to take nitroglycerine, in spite of his doctor's advice.
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