Fossilised algae from the Elbe made nitroglycerin safe to carry
Nitroglycerin was far more powerful than gunpowder but so unstable it was useless for business. Alfred Nobel tried mixing it with cement, coal and sawdust before hitting on diatomaceous earth, a powder of fossilised algae dug near his Hamburg factory. The result, patented in 1867, he named dynamite, from the Greek for power.
Nobel came from an inventive family. His father, Immanuel, built bridges and buildings in Stockholm, founded Sweden's first rubber factory, and sought better ways to blast rock than black powder. After business setbacks he moved the family to Saint Petersburg in 1838, where Alfred was privately tutored. At 17 Alfred went abroad for two years, meeting the Swedish engineer John Ericsson in the United States and studying in Paris under Théophile-Jules Pelouze, whose pupil Ascanio Sobrero had first made nitroglycerin in 1847. Pelouze warned him off it.
He persisted. From 1857 Nobel filed hundreds of patents, mostly for gauges, while experimenting with nitroglycerin alongside his father and his brother Emil. He devised the blasting cap to set off a controlled explosion from a distance, and managed his first successful detonation of the pure liquid in 1863. Still, the liquid remained too dangerous to ship or handle.
Soaked into diatomaceous earth, it became a firm, portable explosive. Nobel patented it in England on 7 May 1867 and in Sweden that October, first planning to call it Nobel's Safety Powder. It quickly replaced black powder and raw nitroglycerin in mining and construction, and Nobel guarded his patents fiercely, shutting down unlicensed copycats.
A typical stick is a cardboard tube about 20 centimetres long holding roughly 190 grams and about one megajoule of energy. Strength is graded by nitroglycerin content, usually 20 to 60 percent. It keeps for about a year, and over time sticks sweat nitroglycerin that can pool, so stored boxes are turned regularly. From the 1940s, South Africa was for decades the biggest producer, supplying its mines from a factory De Beers opened at Somerset West in 1902.
Source: Dynamite
