He made one of his most important discoveries when he found that by mixing nitroglycerine, an oily fluid, with kieselguhr , the mixture could be turned into a paste.
This material could be kneaded and shaped into rods suitable for insertion into drilling holes. He called his paste dynamite and went on to develop a blasting cap which could be used to detonate dynamite under controlled conditions. The Explanation: A lot of people use these two terms interchangeably, and the common misperception is that TNT is the chemical name and dynamite is the colloquial term.
But like any good misperception, that's just plain wrong. We'll start with dynamite. Patented in by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel as in Nobel Prize , dynamite was discovered when old Alfie was looking for a way to make nitroglycerin more stable and less prone to, well, exploding in your face. By combining nitroglycerine with diatomaceous earth the ground-up shells of microscopic diatoms, today used as a filtering agent in swimming pools and sodium carbonate found in baking soda and soaps , Nobel took explosives in a whole new direction.
And because it was stable and wouldn't explode from jiggling, like nitroglycerin, dynamite was initially marketed as Nobel's Safety Blasting Powder. In he created blasting gelatin, a colloidal suspension of nitrocellulose in glycerin, and in ballistite, a nearly smokeless powder especially suitable for propelling military projectiles. Nobel, the man who had tried to make handling explosives safe for workmen, was deeply troubled by the destructiveness of his inventions and became concerned with establishing worldwide peace.
Nobel died in , leaving his considerable estate as an endowment for annual awards in chemistry, physics, medicine or physiology, literature, and peace—all of which represented his lifelong interests. In E. Considered the father of modern chemistry, Lavoisier promoted the Chemical Revolution, naming oxygen and helping systematize chemical nomenclature. As far back as the s, writes Rebecca Rawls for the Chemical and Engineering News , the positive effects of nitroglycerin on people with heart conditions was being explored.
It helped ignite a field of research into heart medicine, write Neville and Alexander Marsh in Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology , and it remains important in heart care more than years later. Kat Eschner is a freelance science and culture journalist based in Toronto. Eight hundred pounds of dynamite exploding.
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