Nitroglycerin - History

History

Nitroglycerin was the first practical explosive ever produced that was stronger than black powder. Nitroglycerin was synthesized by the Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero in 1847, working under Théophile-Jules Pelouze at the University of Turin. Sobrero initially called his discovery pyroglycerine, and warned vigorously against its use as an explosive. It was later adopted as a commercially useful explosive by Alfred Nobel. Nobel experimented with several safer ways to handle the dangerous nitroglycerin after his younger brother Emil Oskar Nobel and several factory workers were killed in a nitroglycerin explosion at the Nobel's armaments factory in 1864 in Heleneborg, Sweden.

One year later, Alfred Nobel founded Alfred Nobel & Company in Germany and built an isolated factory in the Krümmel hills of Geesthacht near Hamburg. This business exported a liquid combination of nitroglycerin and gunpowder called "Blasting Oil", but this was extremely unstable and difficult to handle, as shown in numerous catastrophes. The buildings of the Krümmel factory were destroyed twice.

In April 1866, three crates of nitroglycerin were shipped to California for the Central Pacific Railroad, which planned to experiment with it as a blasting explosive to expedite the construction of the 1,659-foot (506 m)-long Summit Tunnel through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. One of these crates exploded, destroying a Wells Fargo company office in San Francisco and killing 15 people. This led to a complete ban on the transportation of liquid nitroglycerin in California. The on-site manufacture of nitroglycerin was thus required for the remaining hard-rock drilling and blasting required for the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in North America.

Liquid nitroglycerin was widely banned elsewhere as well, and these legal problems led to Alfred Nobel and his company's developing dynamite in 1867. This was made by mixing nitroglycerin with diatomaceous earth (called "kieselgur" in German) found in the Krümmel hills. Similar mixtures, such as "dualine" (1867), "lithofracteur" (1869), and "gelignite" (1875), were formed by mixing nitroglycerin with other inert absorbents, and many combinations were tried by other companies in attempts to get around Nobel's tightly-held patents for dynamite.

Dynamite mixtures containing nitrocellulose, which increases the viscosity of the mix, are commonly known as "gelatins".

Following the discovery that amyl nitrite helped alleviate chest pain, Dr. William Murrell experimented with the use of nitroglycerin to alleviate angina pectoris and to reduce the blood pressure. He began treating his patients with small diluted doses of nitroglycerin in 1878, and this treatment was soon adopted into widespread use after Murrell published his results in the journal The Lancet in 1879. A few months before his death in 1896, Alfred Nobel was prescribed nitroglycerine for this heart condition, writing to a friend: "Isn't it the irony of fate that I have been prescribed nitro-glycerin, to be taken internally! They call it Trinitrin, so as not to scare the chemist and the public." The medical establishment also used the name "glyceryl trinitrate" for the same reason.