How it began
Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm in 1833. After the family business in St. Petersburg went bankrupt, he and his father turned to producing nitroglycerin in quantity for construction. In 1862 Nobel began manufacturing it in a small plant outside Stockholm. An explosion in 1864 killed several people, including his youngest brother Emil, and his experiments were banished from the Stockholm city limits. He first invented the blasting cap, then found that a siliceous earth called kieselguhr would stabilize nitroglycerin. He patented the result in 1867 as dynamite, a name based on the Greek word for power.
Before it existed
Gunpowder, also called black powder, had been the most potent explosive for centuries. Nitroglycerin, first prepared by the Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero in the 1840s, was far more powerful but highly unstable. The liquid was sensitive to movement and heat, and after dozens of accidental detonations some states and countries banned its use and transport. Sobrero himself said he was almost ashamed to be its discoverer.
How it works
Dynamite is nitroglycerin absorbed into kieselguhr, a fine earth made of fossilized algae. The mixture forms a putty-like substance that can be molded into sticks and wrapped in stiff paper, and it is much less sensitive to shock than the liquid alone. A blasting cap, in Nobel's first version a wooden plug filled with gunpowder and lit by a fuse, sets it off in a controlled way. Sticks placed in holes drilled into rock direct the blast outward through the stone.
How it spread
Nobel traveled to sell the new explosive himself, carrying samples to Britain in 1868, and it was also marketed as Nobel's Safety Blasting Powder. He became wealthy by setting up companies and selling patent rights to dynamite and related products worldwide. By 1895 he held 355 patents and owned nearly 100 explosives and munitions factories.
What changed first
Construction crews that had relied on blasting powder gained a safer, more transportable and more powerful alternative. Dynamite sped up the building of roads, tunnels, canals and railroads in the second half of the 19th century, and miners extracted more coal, copper, lead and iron with less labor. It was also used as a weapon almost at once: both sides used it in the Franco-Prussian War three years after its introduction, and it became a tool of anarchists and revolutionaries in the 1880s.
What lasted
Projects credited to dynamite include the Panama Canal, the Brooklyn Bridge, the London Underground and the Hoover Dam. Nobel went on to create blasting gelatin in 1875 and ballistite in 1887. Troubled by the destructive uses of his inventions, he left most of his fortune to fund annual prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace, first awarded in 1901.
