Alfred Nobel ended up taking his own explosive as heart medicine
In 1896, months before his death, Alfred Nobel's doctors put him on nitroglycerin for chest pain. He wrote to a friend about the irony of swallowing the substance that had made his fortune, noting that pharmacists sold it as Trinitrin so as not to alarm anyone. The same oily liquid that levels rock also relaxes blood vessels.
Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero first made the compound in 1846 at the University of Turin. He called it pyroglycerin and urged people not to use it as an explosive. It was the first practical blasting agent more powerful than black powder, but undiluted it is a contact explosive: a drop, a jolt, sunlight or a spark can set it off, and poorly purified batches grow even touchier with age.
Nobel took it up anyway, and the cost was personal. In 1864 his younger brother Emil and several workers died in a blast at the family factory in Heleneborg, Sweden. His liquid mix sold as Blasting Oil kept causing disasters: a crate bound for California destroyed a Wells Fargo office in San Francisco in 1866, killing 15, and two wagons exploded in the Welsh village of Cwm-y-glo in 1869. Britain responded with the Nitro Glycerine Act, and other places banned the liquid outright.
Nobel's answer, in 1867, was to soak the liquid into diatomaceous earth dug from the Krümmel hills near Hamburg. The resulting paste, dynamite, was far safer to handle, and rivals scrambled to find other absorbents that would slip around his patents. Blended with nitrocellulose, nitroglycerin also became smokeless powder for guns and artillery from the 1880s, and factories churned out hundreds of tonnes a week during the First World War.
The medical story runs in parallel. Physician William Murrell began giving patients tiny diluted doses for angina in 1878 and published his results in The Lancet the next year. The body converts it to nitric oxide, which widens blood vessels, though the enzyme responsible was identified only in 2002. It is still used today in tablets, sprays and patches.
Source: Nitroglycerin
