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.
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.