5-minute science: Explosives and Nobel Prize - A Summa of Human Achievement Founded in Vanity

Nitroglycerin

For centuries, the only dependable explosive for use was gunpowder (now called black powder) which contains carbon, sulfur, and potassium nitrate. How does this mix explode? When burned, those three ingredients react as follows:

3C (solid) + S (solid) + 2KNO (solid) --> N₂ (gas) + 3CO (gas) + K₂S (solid)

Notice that we start with 6 molecules of solid on the left and ends up with 5 molecules on the right (4 of them gases). It's those gases that propel bullets at high speeds. The higher the speed, the more deadly it is. Fun fact, butter stores more energy in its chemical bonds than most explosives! But explosives release their energy far more quickly. Explosives also have gases to hurl that energy outward and it's the gases that do most of the damage. Back to the equation above, getting just 4 gas molecules out of 6 molecules from the start is not that impressive and an Italian chemist named Ascanio Sobrero finally discovered a better alternative in 1846. He discovered nitroglycerin (C3H5O9N3). When burned, nitroglycerin reacts as follows:

4C₃H₅O₉N₃ (liquid) --> 6N2 (gas) + 10H₂O (gas) + 12CO (gas) + 7O₂ 

(gas)

The key point is that 4 molecules yield a whopping 35 molecules of gas! Even better, nitro releases those gases instantly (within a millionth of a second). Compared to gunpowder (few thousands of a second), nitroglycerin is far more efficient and deadly. The thing is, nitroglycerin is too unpredictable and too dangerous for routine use. Sometimes heat sets it off, the other times it simply burned without exploding, or it goes off without heat at all. The fickleness of this sugar bomb (glycerin is a type of sugar) was so unstable that it could not be handled with any degree of safety. It took twenty years for a lonely, unhappy Swede man to finally tamed it.

Alfred Benhard Nobel

Alfred Benhard Nobel was born in Stockholm to a father (Immanuel) who manufactured cannonballs, mortars, and other instrument of war. His family often suffered during times of peace. The year Alfred was born they went bankrupt. His father persuaded the Russian military to let him build naval mines for them and moved to Russia where he eventually prospered. Alfred was prone to illness as a child and because he's unfit for vigorous life, he focused on academics and excelled in several subjects including German, English, French, Italian, Russian, and as you guess chemistry. When his father once again went bankrupt after the Crimean War, Alfred Nobel decided to make nitroglycerin safer. It was a substance that fascinated him back in college where his tutor in St. Petersburg created a bang with just one drop of it -- one drop that bowled Nobel over, figuratively if not literally. 

People feared nitro because it seemed to explode at random, so Nobel reasoned that nitro needed a more reliable trigger and decided to combine it with the good old gunpowder. He designed a prototype bomb: a small vial of nitro, sealed canister of gunpowder to slip the nitro into, and a fuse with the hope that the fuse would ignite the gunpowder, liberating hot gas, and then detonate the nitro. It was a success when tested in a drainage but not in plain air because it just fizzled. After a year tinkering, he added a blasting cap that slowed the escape of gunpowder fumes just long enough to trigger the nitro. Turns out that underwater, the gas cannot escape because of water but in plain air the gunpowder gas goes away and leave the nitro unmolested. 

This breakthrough was a success but accidents after accidents happened. In a storage near his lab, 250 pounds of nitro exploded, destroying several buildings and killed 5 people including his twenty-year-old brother. In San Fransisco, a leaky crate of the oil attracted a few warehouse hands to pry the lid off with a crowbar resulting in explosion in the entire block with intact human brain lying on the floor founded by the rescue workers. Home and abroad, these accidents piled up and Nobel became a veritable public enemy. No one would sell him lab space anymore so he needed to convert a barge into a floating laboratory but the bangs and fumes gave it away so he needed to move from harbor to harbor like a fugitive.

Dynamite

In 1867 Nobel finally hit upon a solution to the problem. Chemically, we can think of nitro as a bundle of gases weakly bound together in liquid form and the liquid lacked the strength to confine this feral molecules. Nobel decided to reinforce the liquid by mixing it in a solid -- kieselguhr (a soft white clay). He named this mixture Dynamite after the Greek word for power and it became a big hit. Mining and construction firm clamored for it. London got the first subway thanks to it. But plenty accidents still occurred: a tunnel in Switzerland cost 25 lives per mile. Nobel became an international pariah, an easy target for newspaper and politician to blame him for minting his fortune from death. Despite that, Nobel's business boomed and people generally cared a lot more about train tunnels and canals than dead workers. He amassed a lot of fortune by commanding an empire of 93 factories in 21 countries. Dynamite become lowercase dynamite like thermos and zipper.

However, Nobel wasn't happy. As the world's disgust for him deepened, he began to despise himself as well for killing his brother and war profiteering. At his gloomiest he talked about opening up suicide emporium. Still, he didn't realize how much the world loathed him until his other brother died. A French newspaper, mistakenly thinking that Alfred died made a headline: Le marchand de la mort est mort ("The merchant of death is dead"), and went on to say, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." 

All those tunnels he helped to build, all the mineral wealth he helped uncover, but he was nothing but a murderer to people. So he determined to salvage his reputation and set up a prize fund to reward outstanding research in chem, physics, medicine, and literature (his boyhood dream is to become a writer). Nobel's health was always shaky since childhood and finally failed over the next few years. He had a stroke in December 10, 1986 and was found dead in a chair -- alone and unmarried, grown more and more distant with his family. When his four-page will was read to his relatives, they were shocked to find "their" money going to a prize fund. And years of petty wrangling followed. A secret paramour even threatened to spread Nobel's love letters all over the tabloids. We normally see Nobel Peace Prize as exalted, a summa of human achievement but it was actually an attempt of a dying man to whitewash his reputation -- it was founded in vanity.

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Optional read: Nobel's further entanglement with nitroglycerin

Nobel had long suffered from headaches. These headaches were caused by inhaling nitroglycerin fumes: when metabolized by the body, nitro release nitric oxide gas (NO) that causes blood vessels to dilate and floods cranium with blood therefore the pounding headaches. Most people build up a tolerance but Nobel never became immune to this. Besides headache Nobel also suffered from angina pectoris, a build up of plaque in the coronary arteries resulting in severe chest pain. Ironically, the prescription for this is nitroglycerin, because it helps to dilate the blood vessels when injected in small doses. However, Nobel refused to take it at first. The chemical already dominated his thoughts and business dealings, injecting it into his body seemed too much. In the end, though, he allowed this strange, deadly chemical to penetrate even his heart.