The Infernal Machine

地狱机器

99% Invisible

艺术

2024-10-02

28 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

The unexpected story of how Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite—designed to build the world—was co-opted by anarchists to bring about its destruction.

单集文稿 ...

  • This is 99% invisible.

  • I'm Roman Mars.

  • For most of history, there's really only been one way to blow things up.

  • Basically, gunpowder was invented sometime around 800 AD and you packed a bunch of gunpowder in as small a location as you could, and you set fire to it, and it blew it up.

  • And that was basically the state of the art for millennia.

  • That's Stephen Johnson.

  • He writes about science, technology, and the history of innovation.

  • And he explained how the second of the 1800s forever changed how we make explosives.

  • First came the discovery of nitroglycerin.

  • Basically, it's this extraordinarily unstable substance that just jostling could cause an explosion.

  • You know, you didn't need to kind of light a match to set it off.

  • You could just shake it, and it would blow up in your face.

  • Nitroglycerin was just too volatile to use.

  • It literally blew up in people's faces all the time.

  • And so one scientist named Alfred Nobel wanted to figure out how to create a controlled explosion.

  • Eventually, he hit upon this idea, which he referred to as kind of the blasting cap, where you would use basically just a little bit of gunpowder to trigger a small, little explosion, which would then set off the big shockwave explosion of nitroglycerin detonating.

  • However, working with these materials led to lots of unwanted explosions, including one which hit too close to home.

  • There was an accidental explosion at the lab that he had set up on his family's property in Stockholm, and his brother was blown to bits in this explosion.

  • To avoid these premature detonations, Nobel needed to figure out a way to safely work with and transport this compound.

  • And while tinkering in one of his labs off the River Elbe, he realized that the solution was in the dunes all around him.