Kind: captions
Language: en
Most people don't know the real story of
Alfred Nobel.
One morning in 1888, Alfred Nobel sat
down to read the newspaper in his
conservatory. He scanned the pages
casually, but then he froze. The
merchant of death is dead. Dr. Alfred
Nobel, who became rich by finding ways
to kill more people faster than ever
before, died yesterday. It was his own
obituary. The newspaper had made a
mistake. Alfred's older brother, Lewig,
had died in France, and the journalists
had confused the two, but in that
moment, he saw exactly how the world
would remember him. Not as an inventor,
but as a butcher.
Now, the wording in the obituary, the
merchant of death and all that, well,
it's likely been exaggerated over the
years. We could only find an obituary
that described him as a man who can
hardly be passed off as a benefactor of
humanity. But reading this allowed
Alfred to see what others truly thought
of him, and it wasn't good. He had
earned his reputation building an empire
on one substance, nitroglycerin.
It's one of the most powerful explosives
in the world. Its blast pressure is over
100 times greater than gunpowder.
Oh my god.
Oh, that's so sick.
>> But that power comes at a price.
Nitroglycerin is so sensitive that if
it's dropped, shaken, or even just
bumped, it can detonate. And as a
result, hundreds of workers died trying
to handle it. So Alfred made it his
mission to tame this beast. But in doing
so, he created powerful new explosives
used in everything from blasting tunnels
to making bombs. tools that transformed
the modern world, but also contributed
to deaths of tens of thousands of
people, unleashing a level of
destruction that would come to define
him.
Alfred's father, Emanuel, was also an
inventor. He opened the first ever
rubber factory in Sweden and invented
the rotary lathe, which made modern
plywood possible.
But Emanuel struggled with business. He
went bankrupt shortly after Alfred was
born. So Emanuel set off to Russia to
start over, leaving his family behind.
Some of Alfred's earliest memories were
of watching his brothers sell matches on
the street corners of Stockholm just to
afford food.
He was often sick, bedridden with colds,
stomach problems, and bouts of
depression. He would later say, "Mine
was a pitiful half-life which ought to
have been extinguished by some
compassionate doctor as I yelled my way
into the world."
But soon after Alfred turned 9, a letter
arrived from his father asking the
family to join him in St. Petersburg.
You see, in the early 1850s, the great
powers of Europe were gearing up for
war. And Emanuel spotted an opportunity.
He realized Russia's capital was
vulnerable to attack from the sea. So he
approached Sar Nicholas I with plans for
a new kind of explosive device, one that
would float in the harbor and detonate
on contact with enemy ships, a sea mine.
Within months of his proposal in the
Black Sea just off Sinnup, the Russian
Navy sank an Ottoman fleet and the
Crimean War began.
Emanuel's invention was suddenly in high
demand, and the newly established Nobel
Armaments factory quickly grew from a
few dozen employees to over a thousand,
producing mines, torpedoes, and other
explosives for the Russian military.
With money now pouring in, Emanuel
decided to invest in Alfred's education.
At the age of 17, Alfred found himself
in a lab in Paris, studying under the
world's greatest chemists. And it's here
that he met an Italian doctor named
Escanio Sabrero who had a peculiar
demonstration.
Sabrero would take an ordinarylooking
piece of cotton and lay it on an anvil.
He would raise his hammer and
[Music]
it's like a bird ran into a window.
>> Yeah, that was a good one, right?
>> Yeah, that was a great one.
Soaked into that cotton was a new
explosive material, nitroglycerin. And
it was unlike anything the world had
ever seen before. See, until then, the
most commonly used explosive was
gunpowder. But it had a major drawback.
It's fast, but it's not that fast. When
we were doing it, it was much slower
than the speed of sound.
>> Jesus. That's because all the
ingredients you need, the carbon for
fuel, the potassium nitrate for oxygen,
and the sulfur to speed up the reaction,
they are all in separate grains. And if
they're spread far apart, the reaction
is just too slow.
>> Come on, you can do it. Go.
>> But if you contain gunpowder, that
forces these reactants closer together,
and it also traps in heat, which
accelerates the reaction. And this
allows the pressure from the hot gases
to build up until
[Music]
You see the explosion and then the
powder burst out and then it catches
flames.
>> You can see the whole bottom comes out
and it just catches up to it.
>> All these particles have to be in close
proximity and they also have to be small
enough and they have to be mixed well
enough to get this reaction. So it kind
of feels a little bit clunky. Like it's
not the ideal way you'd want to do this
where it's like all the molecules are
actually like right next to each other.
>> That's a great instinct putting all the
molecules beside each other. so that you
have them all available to react as
quickly as possible. But I think I can
one up that and that is can you put
everything you need in the same
molecule.
>> Okay.
>> And that's what nitroglycerin does.
>> No way.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> Okay.
>> Right. Pretty cool. That is way cooler.
>> And because of that, it's way more
powerful.
We've loaded 15 g of gunpowder and 15 g
of nitroglycerin into test tubes and
then set them in clay blocks so we can
compare their destructive power. This is
a bikini gauge for measuring blast over
pressure. And it's called the bikini
gauge in reference to the bikini atole
because a analog blast over pressure
measurement device was used in the
nuclear tests in the Bikini atole. It
has a number of different diameter holes
and a film inside.
>> The larger circles have more area and so
under the same pressure they will
experience more force and so burst
first. The smaller circles take more
pressure to break because they've got
smaller area.
>> The smaller the circle that gets
punctured means the higher the blast
over pressure.
>> Okay. Black powder into clay.
>> Fire in the hole. 3 2 1
>> Yeah, it launched the block a bit.
Popped the top right off. Look, look at
that bikini gauge, which looks totally
intact.
>> Looks totally intact.
>> Yeah. I mean, I'm getting nothing. Yeah.
All right.
>> All right. So, we'll uh
>> we'll leave that for the nitro. When the
nitroglycerate goes off, it's going to
be like someone shooting a 50 g. So, I
don't know if you've been to the range,
but that's going to be a big blast.
Fire in the hole. 5 4 3 2 1.
>> Oh.
Oh my god.
[Music]
So, first thing I notice is there are
bits of clay that have just rained down
on me. I got bits of blue
all over me. That's crazy.
Right there.
>> Is there anything left?
>> Yeah, there is a bunch of clay.
on this window. On that window, on this
window, on bikini gauge. It's like a
Jackson Pollock paint.
>> There's no way got a frame there.
>> There's just instant light. Just
>> when it's fast on the Phantom,
>> then it's fast, right?
Nitroglycerin is incredibly powerful and
it gets this power from its molecular
structure. See, nitroglycerin is a
highly unstable molecule. It consists of
a chain of three carbon atoms with three
oxygens and then three nitro groups
attached to those which are just
nitrogen atoms bonded to two oxygen
atoms. These nitro groupoups are what
makes nitroglycerin so unstable. Oxygen
is more electrogative than nitrogen. So
these two oxygen atoms pull on the
electrons from the nitrogen which shifts
the electron density away from this
third oxygen. But now there's little
shared electron density between these
two atoms which results in a much weaker
bond between the nitro groups and the
main chain. So you get these weak spots
and all it takes is a little bit of
energy like from the shock created by
hammer strike and then those bonds snap
apart. So now you've got all these atoms
that are swapping partners and they form
much more stable products like nitrogen
gas, carbon dioxide and water vapor. And
this process releases a huge amount of
energy and heat and it shoots off the
products at high velocities. So then
these go on to hit other nitroglycerin
molecules which causes their bonds to
break. And if this happens for enough
molecules at once, well, it sets off a
chain reaction.
>> Now you've got a shock wave and now it's
going to propagate. And as it propagates
through, it's going to break bonds here,
here, here, here, here.
>> Its blast pressure is over 100 times
greater than the peak pressures that are
produced by gunpowder.
>> Lots of things will explode. Even, you
know, you pop a balloon and that's an
explosion. But the specific kind of
explosion we're interested in with
nitroglycerin is a detonation. And the
detonation is that chemical
decomposition that happens faster than
the speed of sound in the material.
>> What we see in our experiments with
nitroglycerin is all these things happen
really fast like less than 100 ftocs
fast.
>> I I don't operate in fto seconds very
frequently. How how fast is that?
>> Well, ftoc 1015 seconds.
>> That's crazy. So, a molecule of
nitroglycerin will decompose 3 trillion
times faster than the blink of an eye.
And it's this speed that is one of the
defining characteristics of high
explosives.
Yet, Sabrero never set out to discover
an explosive. He was searching for a
medicine to improve blood flow. During
one test, he mixed glycerol with nitric
and sulfuric acid when suddenly it
exploded. Sabrero survived, but shards
of glass left permanent scars on his
face. Deeply shaken, he concluded this
new substance, nitroglycerin, was just
too dangerous. He later wrote, "I am
almost ashamed to admit to be its
discoverer."
But Alfred disagreed. To him, the hammer
strike was like a pistol shot. It was
like somebody had kicked open the door
to his mind. It's a real shift in his
character because he's been this frail,
sickly boy. He kind of has trouble with
people and then he discovers explosives
and chemistry and changes. You know,
it's like whenever he's working, he
finally isn't depressed. You know, he
can kind of escape through his work.
>> And you know, at that age, you're
probably not thinking about all the
possible consequences of this. You're
just sort of excited about what it can
do.
Far from fearing its power, he believed
he'd be the one to unlock it and solve
one of nitroglycerin's greatest
problems. If I had a a jar sitting right
here and I wanted to detonate it, how do
I do that?
>> Need a long fuse.
>> But what's crazy about nitroglycerin is
that a regular flame won't cause it to
ignite. So if I even if I ran a fuse
into that that vial, it's not going to
explode. See, while a fuse can heat
nitroglycerin, which makes its molecules
vibrate faster, and it might even break
a few NO bonds, it usually doesn't break
enough of them at the same time to
detonate the rest of the liquid. So, it
doesn't explode. However, if you drop
it,
but even that effect isn't consistent.
We tried putting a vial loose in the
back of this RC truck, expecting the
bumpy ride to trigger it.
[Music]
and nothing.
>> It's always seems to be blowing up when
you don't want it to, and you can't
really get it to blow up when you want
it to. That's very paradoxical.
You know, my browser used to look like a
blast site, too. I had windows and tabs
scattered like debris. I had YouTube,
Wikipedia, random research articles.
some things that I swear I never opened.
But that changed when I switched to
today's video sponsor, Opera. With its
free built-in AI tool, Arya, I can use
the quick shortcut to write a prompt,
and then the chaos is gone. I can say,
"Close all my YouTube tabs," and it's
done. Or I can say, "Group my chemistry
papers," and it creates this tab island.
I can even hover one tab over another
tab. Boom, another island. Can expand
and collapse them as needed to save
space and stay organized. I also love
that I can ask Ari anything while
researching, like, "What year did Alfred
Nobel patent Dynamite in England?" And I
get the answer instantly without having
to switch tabs. It's really helpful when
Derek is patiently waiting for the next
version of my script.
If I'm going through an article and want
to take notes, I can just drag one tab
down, split the screen, and now I can do
both. No need for multiple browser
windows. And if I feel like listening to
some music in the background, Opera's
got a floating music player built into
the sidebar. It makes controlling my
music easy. I can access my favorite
streaming service from anywhere, even
while leaving the browser. So, if you
want a browser that helps you get stuff
done, try Opera for free by clicking the
link in our description. Thanks to Opera
for sponsoring this video. And now, back
to some explosions.
In 1852, when Alfred returned to Russia,
he moved into a cramped apartment with
his brother, Robert, and he turned their
kitchen into a makeshift lab. He was
searching for a reliable way to detonate
nitroglycerin, dreaming it could one day
power his father's sea mines. But when
the Crimean War ended in 1856, the
Russian government refused to honor the
contracts they'd signed during the war.
So the Nobel factory was forced to shut
down and Emanuel went bankrupt for the
second time. Alfred later wrote that his
father was quote a man of genius but a
failure all the same. And so Alfred goes
back to Sweden and he decides he's like
I'm not going to make the mistakes of my
father. Where does his mind go sticking
with nitroglycerin? like, if I can make
this, you know, I'll be successful on my
own terms.
By the summer of 1862, a 28-year-old
Alfred thought he was on to something.
Excited, he gathered his brothers by the
banks of Lake Melerin, just behind his
workshop in Stockholm, and he pulled out
a metal tube with a fuse extending from
the top. He ignited it and tossed it
into the water.
[Laughter]
[Music]
That's crazy. He had finally found a way
to reliably detonate nitroglycerin. In
its finished form, it worked something
like this. Alfred took a container of
nitroglycerin and inserted a wooden plug
and packed it with gunpowder. Then, when
the fuse was lit, the gunpowder inside
would explode, blasting down into the
container. And it was that sudden impact
that delivered the shock needed to
detonate the nitroglycerin. It was just
like the hammer striking the anvil.
We need a blasting cap for this.
>> All right, so now Jesse's going to add a
blasting cap. Alfred Nobel's first major
adventure.
>> I can just like my heart is just racing
more than usual. And I know that it's
safe, but yeah, I actually didn't really
expect to feel this nervous about it.
>> Fire in the hole. Fire in the hole. Fire
in the hole.
[Music]
5 4 3 2 1.
>> Oh my god.
>> Stay down.
>> Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. Got to stay down.
Okay. Got to clear the range.
>> All clear.
>> Oh my god.
>> All right, Henry. How do you like that?
>> Man,
>> is that what you came for?
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That was
that was insane.
>> Look at how it carved out the exact
imprint of the bottle a foot and a half
below. Okay, look. We even have puncture
on the second to last hole. The smallest
is not punctured.
>> Yeah. Wow. So, I mean, that's the entire
range of our measurement capability.
>> I'm going to get you through through
there. That's awesome. His invention,
the blasting cap, was refined to use an
even more consistent explosive than
gunpowder, mercury fulminate. It became
the first reliable way to detonate
nitroglycerin on command. The design was
so effective, it remained virtually
unchanged for decades. I think it'd be
hard to argue that this advancement
doesn't find its place into every other
explosive device that comes after it.
Basically,
>> probably the most significant
development since the invention of
gunpowder. The same idea, using a small
explosion to trigger a much larger one,
would later be used in atomic bombs to
set off nuclear chain reactions. With
the invention of the blasting cap, the
use of nitroglycerin finally became
practical.
>> It can break rock and make tunnels much
more effectively.
>> Nitroglycerin sped up industrial
excavation dramatically. In one mine,
the rate of tunneling almost doubled
from.76 to 1.34 m per day. And in
Mexico, crews reported that 15 men using
nitroglycerin could do the work of 25
with gunpowder. So orders started
pouring in from mining companies,
engineers, and railway builders from
around the world. To meet the sudden
demand, Alfred began producing
nitroglycerin in Sweden, enlisting the
help of his younger brother, Emil.
But on the 3rd of September, 1864, an
intern asked Emil for help moving a
heavy crate. The two began to lift.
when suddenly
the factory was ripped apart.
A witness wrote this of the explosion.
Most ghastly was the sight of the
mutilated corpses strewn on the ground.
Not only had their clothes been torn
off, but on some the head was missing
and the flesh ripped off the bones.
These formless masses of flesh and bone
bore little or no resemblance to a human
body.
Emil, just 21 years old, and four
others, the intern, a janitor, a young
laborer, and a passing carpenter, all
died in the explosion.
Alfred blamed himself, and he swore, "I
will never let this happen again. I will
make nitroglycerin safe."
The city of Stockholm declared
nitroglycerin too dangerous and banned
its production within city limits.
Alfred, however, refused to give up. And
so this is a moment where he's actually
a pretty savvy entrepreneur. He says,
"Okay, if I'm not going to do it on
land, I'm going to do it on the water."
So he set up a laboratory on a floating
barge on Lake Melerin. But as he was
experimenting, another one of his
factories in Germany exploded. Alfred
was fighting a ticking clock. With every
day that passed, more lives were lost.
Workers were terrified. No sane agent
would use it. A mining publication
reported, "We confidently expect within
30 days to announce another serious
accident."
See, he had addressed the problem of
detonation, but not nitroglycerin's
fundamental sensitivity. Because
nitroglycerin is so viscous, tiny
bubbles of air and water vapor easily
get trapped inside. As we zoom in,
you'll notice there are even more. These
gases are a problem. When a shock wave
reaches a bubble, it squeezes it,
compressing the gas and heating it up.
And it happens so fast that the heat
can't escape. And so the temperature
inside can increase by thousands of
degrees C in an instant. It creates a
hot spot. The gas molecules in these hot
spots carry so much energy that they
break the weak NO bonds in the
nitroglycerin molecules nearby. And so
these molecules then decompose,
releasing even more hot gases. But
nitroglycerin doesn't just have one of
these bubbles. No, it's filled with
them. So that's what makes it so
sensitive to shock. A single impact can
collapse many bubbles at once, which
releases enough energy to trigger the
chain reaction that detonates the entire
liquid.
Now, you might think to make
nitroglycerin safe, Alfred just has to
get rid of those bubbles, right? Well,
it's not that easy. You have an air
bubble trapped in it. It's like really
hard to get that out without like
starting to, you know, bang on it. And
then you don't want to do that because
you don't want it to go off. But even if
you could remove every single bubble,
you would still have a problem. That's
because nitroglycerin is a lot like the
liquid in this beer bottle. I replaced
it with water, and you can see, you
know, there aren't many bubbles. But if
I give it a smack,
[Laughter]
the impact drives the bottom of the beer
bottle down faster than the liquid can
follow, which creates this sudden
pressure drop. And that drop vaporizes
the liquid and creates bubbles. When the
liquid rushes back in, those bubbles
then collapse violently, and those
implosions sometimes release enough
energy to crack the glass. Now, a
similar thing can happen in
nitroglycerin. A strong impact can
create new bubbles inside the liquid in
a process called cavitation. And their
collapse again triggers the same chain
reaction.
So, Alfred realized that the only way
around the bubble problem was to change
the state of nitroglycerin from a liquid
to a solid. Working on his barge in
Germany, he tried mixing in powdered
charcoal, sand, wood shavings, brick
dust, and cement, but nothing really
worked.
Dejected, he looked down and noticed
something strange. A fine powder
whisping around his feet. So he looked
up and saw the same pale threads
drifting over the banks of the elb.
Millions of years earlier, that dust had
actually been living organisms.
Datoms, single-sellled algae that once
floated in ancient seas. But now in the
dunes above the river, all that remained
were their fossilized exoskeletons that
made for a fine silica powder that
carried on the wind. This material,
dietimmacous earth or kiesel, had been
appreciated by Darwin. He wrote, "Few
objects are more beautiful than the
minute salicious cases of the
dietmasia."
But Alfred saw beyond their beauty to
the microscopic holes in their
exoskeletons.
>> On the granular level, it's got lots of
little pores and places to absorb the
liquid into.
>> We're looking for what kind of
consistency.
>> Oh, it's going to be like thick and
solid. It will make the nitroglycerin
less sensitive. So the same hammer
impact that you would try with straight
nitroglycerin would take more force
because that absorbent material will
take some of that energy from the
impact.
>> This kind of feels like we're baking,
>> right?
>> In fact, kilog can soak up more than
three times its weight in liquid
nitroglycerin.
>> And so if it's porous now, if you mix it
with the nitroglycerin, the
nitroglycerin can kind of go into the
pores. What that helps do is separate
the nitroglycerin molecules from each
other. And within any individual pore,
there just isn't enough nitroglycerin to
propagate the detonation. So now when
it's bumped or shaken, the mixture won't
detonate.
And if we drop it in the exact same way
that set off the nitroglycerin
>> drop,
>> it didn't go. No.
>> So this new material won't explode when
you drop it. So can you still detonate
it? Well, if you combine it with
Alfred's other invention, the blasting
cap, the resulting shock wave is
powerful enough to compress many pockets
of nitroglycerin at the same time, which
triggers the detonation.
[Music]
>> The biggest explosion we've seen up to
now is 100 g of nitroglycerin.
>> Yeah, it'll be the biggest one we've
done so far.
3 2 1
>> Oh, that's so sick.
>> To all whom it may concern, be it known
that I, Alfred Nobel, have invented a
new and useful composition of matter to
it, an explosive powder.
To name it, he took the Greek word
dynamus, meaning power, and he made it
dynamite.
Alfred was determined to capitalize on
his new invention and he believed that
he could make the most money in England.
England is a jewel worth the rest of the
world. He said a dynamite company there
would have the entire empire as its
market. So, in the spring of 1868, he
set foot on British soil, carrying with
him a suitcase overflowing with dynamite
because he's going around and he's
inviting journalists to come to these
demonstrations where he would bring
sticks of dynamite in his backpack and a
stand. He would set up these huge
boulders basically and put a stick of
dynamite in there and like watch as they
like cleft into. Alfred was a clever
salesman. So, when Alfred created
dynamite,
nitroglycerin still had a terrible
reputation. And so his initial thought
was to name it Nobel's safety powder.
>> Oh, I like that.
>> Come on down and get your Nobel Safety
Powder and blow the hell out of this
rock. You know, whatever the name, his
invention came at the perfect time.
Around when Alfred introduced dynamite,
there were two other major
breakthroughs. The pneumatic drill and
the diamond drilling crown, which now
made it easy to bore holes in solid
rock. Perfect for a stick of dynamite.
These tools revolutionized construction.
Many of the iconic engineering feats of
the era, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the
Panama Canal, depended on dynamite.
One thing that I think is really
interesting to think about is Russia at
the time isn't the Russia that we think
of now. It was effectively a midsized
European country cuz they had this vast
wealth of resources, but it was cut off
by these mountains. And so without
dynamite, you actually wouldn't have the
Russia we have today cuz you would have
never been able to make the Trans
Siberian Railroad.
It's worth saying that dynamite is
different than TNT.
>> Yeah, I was going to ask about that
actually. Try nitroglycerin. Try nitro
taluine.
Try nitroine.
>> Yep. Try nitroine.
>> Those nitrogens are bound to carbons,
not to oxygen. And so that makes it much
more stable. So you don't have that
really weak oxygen nitrogen bond.
Because of that, it is much much much
less sensitive than nitroglycerin.
>> So that actually wouldn't be discovered
for another couple decades after
dynamite.
>> The TNT labels on the dynamite sticks in
the Looney Tunes cartoons never bothered
me when I watched them as a kid, but now
I'm just like, wait, that's not right.
They're not TNT in there.
>> But the main point is that dynamite
happened first, and no matter what AC/DC
says, it is not TNT. It's a good line.
>> Yeah. I mean, it's a good track, too.
>> So, dynamite was changing the world, but
the old dangers of nitroglycerin were
hard to escape.
In 1869, near Brenford, England, a barge
carrying dynamite exploded on the river
temps, killing three people and damaging
buildings 800 m away. Investigators
trace the cause to dynamite that had
been sweating beads of nitroglycerin.
See, wet kies from the riverbed has to
first be dried to remove moisture, and
that leaves empty pores ready to absorb
nitroglycerin. But the kiesel never
loses that strong attraction to water.
So if your dynamite is later exposed to
moisture, even just humidity in the air,
but water seeps back into those pores,
and the invading water molecules then
encounter nitroglycerin, which gets
pushed outwards. Now, moisture wasn't
the only culprit. Time and temperature
could also cause the separation, but
moisture just made the problem a lot
worse. Though, it actually wasn't
Alfred's only concern. See, Kiesel is
inert. And since dynamite was about 25%
Kiseler, that meant it would always
absorb a large fraction of the explosive
energy. And that power was wasted. It
reduced the strength of Alfred's
explosive, and ultimately it hurt his
bottom line. So, he kept experimenting
with new formulations and new
absorbance. Again and again he failed
but he was undeterred saying if I have a
thousand ideas and only one turns out to
be good I am satisfied.
Then one day while working in his home
lab in Paris he cut his hand. It was a
pretty deep cut and blood started to
pour out. So he grabbed a bandage,
pressed it to the wound and watched it
soak up the mess.
That night the pain woke him. But as he
was lying there in the dark, annoyed at
his earlier carelessness, his mind
drifted back to the bandage. How clean
it was, how fast it absorbed the blood.
He bolted upright and rushed down to the
lab. He thought, "If cotton is so good
at absorbing blood, maybe it'll be just
as good at absorbing nitroglycerin."
So, inside that bandage is this, and it
looks like regular cotton, but you'll
see it's not when I light it up.
I remember Yeah. watching this YouTube
video where they just light it on fire
and the whole thing's just gone.
>> Yeah.
>> And it is so counterintuitive and so
just crazy to see. It's like magic. I'm
sure it's used in like magic shows, too.
>> It's called gun cotton or nitroc
cellulose. And nitroc cellulose is made
by taking cellulose polymers, say from
cotton or wood pulp, and then replacing
the O groups with oxygen atoms bonded to
nitro groups, which are the same
unstable groups that made nitroglycerin
so explosive. So now when you ignite it,
these groups rapidly break down into
products like nitrogen, carbon dioxide,
and water, all of which are gases. So
there's no particulate to scatter light.
That's why the whole thing seems to just
disappear into thin air.
But what Alfred was interested in was
what happened when you combined it with
nitroglycerin. See nitro cellulose has
these chains that are very similar to
nitroglycerin chemically because of the
nitro groups. So because of that they
mix easily.
>> Now you have two things that are
soluble. They like each other. This is
very different from you know kieselore
water and nitroglycerin. And now when
you mix them, the smaller nitroglycerin
molecules slip between these long nitroc
cellulose chains, trapping the
nitroglycerin molecules and keeping them
apart. Just like in the dynamite, if you
mix in just a small amount of nitroc
cellulose, you get a stable moldable gel
that resists sweating. We're take a
little bit of the nitro cellulose like
gun cotton. Like this much.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. We're going to start with a little
bit. We're going to drop it in there.
>> You see that it soaks right in.
>> Yeah. Yeah. You keep on adding bits
until
>> until it soaks all up and then we'll
stir it around to make sure there's no
dry spots.
>> But that's not all. This mixture also
solves Alfred's problem of yield. The
matrix like the structure that it's
being held in is itself explosive. So
now you get perfect yield. No sweating.
Bing bang boom. And because the material
is a gel, it can be molded into
different shapes. Perfect for precise
controlled mining blasts. While it's
soft like this, we can put it into a
shape and then when it sets, it'll stay
that shape.
>> We going to have to do a VE.
>> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Let's make a VE.
[Music]
>> Alfred named it Gelignite, the world's
first moldable explosive. With Geligite,
dynamite, and the blasting cap in hand,
Alfred had fulfilled his oath. He had
made explosives safer for everyone. He
opened factories across the world in
Scotland, France, the United States, and
beyond. By the early 1870s, he was
running more than 90 sites in 20
countries.
But not everyone was happy. His father
never recovered from Emil's death. And
just weeks after the explosion in
Stockholm, Emanuel suffered a stroke. He
survived, but was never the same.
Emanuel became obsessed with death,
often rambling to Alfred about strange
inventions, including a scheme to build
a network of underground tubes that
would carry corpses directly from
people's homes to giant incinerators.
His dad never had the success that
Alfred's having, you know, financially,
and he's being lauded as this great
inventor. His dad, I think, is just
jealous essentially, but he claims that
Alfred had stolen the idea for dynamite
from him. So he says to his dad, "Rather
than regarding this idea as your own,
far from it. You laughed at it. Your
fatherly love seems to run ground on
complacency or vanity. It should not
seem strange that I, at the age of 30,
will not allow myself to be treated as a
school boy. It pains me, but when it
comes to serious matters, I've adopted
the rule of acting seriously."
Despite the confident front he put up
for his father, the truth was that his
wealth hadn't made him any happier. He
says, "I'm two steps ahead of my
competitors, but the accumulation of
money and praise leaves me totally
indifferent. My home is where I work,
and I work everywhere. I am a nomadic
atom with no attachments, no roots, and
no real joy in life." By 1876, he
couldn't take it anymore. Overwhelmed by
the loneliness, he placed an ad.
Wealthy, highly educated, elderly
gentleman seeks lady of mature age,
versed in languages as secretary and
supervisor of household. And into his
life entered Bertha Kinsky. She was an
idealistic woman, part of the budding
peace movement.
Together they took long carriage rides
where they discussed the role of science
in society and whether it could serve a
purpose greater than war. For a moment,
Alfred was happy. Hopeful, he asked if
her heart was free. But while Alfred was
away on business, she left to be with
another man in Austria. So Alfred was
back to being alone.
Alfred was heartbroken. He responded by
throwing himself even deeper into his
work. Alfred attempted to sell his
explosives to the French military, but
they weren't interested.
Then a year later, when war broke out
between France and Prussia, German
troops hurled dynamite at the French
positions.
Now, Alfred received a message. The
French wanted to place an order. One
thing that I think is important to like
think about in this moment is that
people have been stabbed, bruised, shot
with gunpowder, and all this other
stuff. But up till then, it would have
been totally foreign to see that level
of destruction on a human body. you
know, would have been unmatched in kind
of human history.
>> As he starts thinking more about war and
becoming involved with like the French
military, the German military, the
Italian military, they come to him with
a problem that's been plaguing them for
hundreds of years since the invention of
gunpowder, which is that on a
battlefield with black powder. When you
shoot, it obscures visibility, so you
don't really know how to shoot again.
Like, you can't aim very well.
>> Yeah. One thing you're seeing with the
black powder is that every time it
explodes, there's just this huge plume
of smoke that enemy fighters would be
able to see your location. So, it's just
this big problem where there's like a
literal fog of war. Alfred starts
contemplating that problem. What he
thinks back to is gun cotton? You know,
it doesn't create smoke. Can I use gun
cotton to replace powder? But the
problem with using gun cotton or any
high explosive mass in small arms is
that it detonates all at once, releasing
its energy in a split second. And the
pressure inside the barrel spikes faster
than the bullet can accelerate. So much
of the energy is wasted as heat. Instead
of propelling the projectile, it can
even destroy the barrel. What Alfred
wanted was a propellant that built
pressure gradually, so the force rose
smoothly as the bullet traveled down the
barrel. So he began experimenting with a
new nitroglycerin nitroc cellulose
mixture by adding 10 to 20 times more
nitroc cellulose than in gelignite. He
transformed it from a jelly into a
tougher substance, one that could be
rolled into pasta thin sheets. In Italy,
they even used pasta makers to do this.
These sheets were then stamped into
countless tiny little grains. When these
grains were packed into a cartridge,
they wouldn't fit tightly. Small gaps of
air remained between them. But that was
actually a good thing. Now, when one
grain ignited, a shock wave couldn't
just race through the entire charge at
once. Instead, each grain had to ignite
its neighbor and the one beside it and
the next one in sequence. This slowed
down the burn rate and allowed the
pressure to build gradually. So, they
were able to replicate the effect of
gunpowder. And because the fuel was a
combination of nitroglycerin and nitro
cellulose, both of which broke down into
clear, stable gases, it burned with
little smoke. So, Alfred had solved a
problem that had plagued armies for
centuries. And to this day, the
propellant in much of the world's
ammunition is still a combination of
nitroglycerin and nitroc cellulose. Just
like Alfred's invention, he called it
ballistite, the world's first smokeless
high energy propellant.
Alfred quickly received an order for
300,000 kg of ballistite from the
Italian army. So he opened a massive
armaments factory in Italy and began to
fall deeper into the world of warfare.
He developed landmines, early gun
silencers, and even experimented with
one of the first rocket powered
missiles. It flew over 4 km downrange
and allegedly captured this image.
The whole time he's in contact with
Bertha, like the woman who kind of
jilted him, and she's become pretty
important in the peace movement at the
time. She wrote this book called Lay
Down Your Arms that became kind of a
sensation and established these peace
congresses across the world. To her, he
insisted, "My rockets are meant not only
for war, but also for the rescue of
shipwrecked persons." He even took it a
step further. Perhaps my factories will
put an end to war sooner than your
congresses. On the day that two army
corps can mutually annihilate each other
in a second, all civilized nations will
surely recoil with horror and disband
their troops.
This is a a concept that we see a lot of
when people are sure to kill each other
with the modern weapons that I've given
them. No war will be possible. It's also
the same thing that we think about in
Oenheimer.
I feel like we've heard it so many times
that you just can't believe it ever.
>> No.
>> And then it's just marketing on the part
of all these guys who are selling
weapons. They don't want to come across
as evil guys who are like, I'm going to
make something that'll help you kill
more people than ever before. I mean,
that's kind of the truth of it.
Especially in the dynamite case, it
feels like a tremendous misjudgment of
human nature. It's like, yeah,
>> yeah,
>> this is not going to be used for to stop
war. And we definitely don't see that in
the decades that follow.
Between the 1890s and the 1920s, over
7,000 bombings occurred in New York
alone. Imagine waking up, opening the
paper, and seeing another explosion
every other day for decades.
[Music]
The most common perpetrators were known
as the Dynamite Club. They were part of
a deadly new political movement on the
rise in America. They rejected
industrialization and longed for a
simpler world. Today, their name evokes
chaos and destruction. But at the time,
it was more literal. No ruler. Anarchos.
This was anarchy. They were so crazy and
so effective using dynamite that
Theodore Roosevelt addressed Congress
and he said the largest threat facing
the US is the anarchist threat.
>> Were they intentionally just killing
people?
>> Yeah. Their argument was that you know
if if one person dies at the hands of an
anarchist 100 people have died in the
industrial machine.
>> Yeah.
>> These people sound crazy. In fact, the
entire modern practice of terrorism,
using spectacular violence to advance a
political agenda, often targeting
civilians, well, that all began with the
anarchists and their dynamite. Dynamite
unlocked a new scale of destruction
previously unimaginable. With only a few
sticks in a coat pocket, one person
could walk into a crowded street and
wreak havoc. What began as an industrial
tool had become a weapon of mass murder.
In 1927 in Ba, Michigan, a man spent
months wiring the town's new elementary
school with dynamite. He hid the charges
in the basement and crawl spaces,
concealed them under floors and behind
walls, all while serving as the school
board treasurer. Then on the morning of
May 18th, just after classes began, he
triggered the explosives. As parents and
rescuers rushed to the scene, he arrived
in a truck packed with more dynamite and
shrapnel and detonated.
In all, 38 children, six adults, and the
attacker died. Another 58 were
grievously injured. The deadliest school
massacre in American history was not a
shooting. It was a dynamite attack. Of
course, Alfred couldn't know all the
ways in which his inventions would be
abused, but he had seen the destruction
in his own life, and he had heard the
pleas to change his ways. So, in 1888,
when he read that paper, something in
him broke.
Just a few years later, as his health
began to fail, as he took pellets of
nitroglycerin to ease the pain in his
chest, he couldn't shake the thought.
So, he called his lawyer and wrote a new
will.
With 94% of his personal fortune, 31.2 2
million Swedish croner or about $340
million today. He created a set of
prizes for those who during the
preceding year shall have conferred the
greatest benefit on mankind, the Nobel
Prize. There were five in total for
chemistry, physics, medicine,
literature, and finally peace.
On December 10th, 1896, Alfred Nobel
died in his villa in Italy. Just as he
had always feared, he died alone. At the
time of his death, he held 355 patents
and ran an empire of 90 factories that
produced explosives and armaments across
the world. And yet, in his final act, he
gave his fortune away for an idea.
So, did it work? Did it redeem him in
the eyes of everyone today?
>> Have you ever heard the name Alfred
Nobel?
>> Oh yeah. He was the creator of the Nobel
Peace Prize.
>> Nobel Prize.
>> Nobel Prizes.
>> Nobel Prize.
>> Anything else?
>> Um,
I should know more.
>> The Nobel Prize.
>> Is that it?
>> Yes.
>> I'm saying like nothing like dynamite.
Don't think about that at all.
>> Dynamite. Yeah,
>> he also invented dynamite.
>> Did not know that.
>> I didn't know about the dynamite. I knew
about the peace prize, but that's it.
>> I think uh the attempt has been to have
him portrayed as somebody who tried to
promote uh new understanding and
advances in science.
And so that's
>> that's his legacy.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> It would seem.
I
>> mean, if you're cynical, you say it's a
PR move.
And are you inclined to be cynical? I
think it must be at least somewhat a PR
move to me. Like Nobel Prize has always
been like the pinnacle of achievement.
If anyone wins the Nobel Prize, like
yeah, you're done. Like that's that's
all you need to accomplish in life. I
mean, in some ways, like maybe he was in
control of his legacy.
>> Yes.
>> And he took control of his legacy. He
decided he wanted it to be a positive
thing. There's a twisted irony to the
story. When Alfred Nobel created
dynamite, he was trying to make
explosives safer to prevent the kind of
accident that killed his brother. But by
making nitroglycerin easier to handle,
he also made it more accessible. And
that made it more deadly. So why then
did he create the Nobel Prizes? Was it
out of the goodness of his heart or a
desire to redeem himself in the eyes of
everyone who would come after? I mean I
think the idea that anyone anywhere can
be recognized for advancing science,
literature or peace is beautiful.
>> This award is not just a piece of metal
that you would wear or an award that you
would keep in your room but this is
really an encouragement for me to go
forward and to believe in myself to know
that there are people who are supporting
me in this campaign. So maybe it doesn't
matter why he did it, only that he
Deadwood.
[Music]