Explosions: How We Shook the World Page #5

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For this reason, one man had to always sit on a one-legged stool,

so there was no chance of him falling asleep on the job.

I mean, as if sitting next to a vat of nitroglycerine

was not stimulation enough!

Nitroglycerine could not be safely pumped.

So what they did was just let it flow under gravity

from the huts at the top of the hill to the factories at the bottom.

Once inside the factory, it got stabilised.

Now, this was what was Nobel's great achievement.

He discovered that if he mixed his nitroglycerine with an absorbent clay, a bit like cat litter,

it became a lot less sensitive,

a lot easier to handle without going off in your hands.

The clay he used came as a fine powder called kieselguhr.

Once mixed together, a dough-like substance was formed.

In fact, it was kneaded by armies of women into the shapes required.

This new compound was called dynamite and it was a revolution.

Now there was a high explosive that was insensitive to shock and heating.

You could actually set fire to it and it would burn with a normal flame.

I don't recommend it, but apparently you could,

but once you've made something that's this good,

that's this stable, this difficult to set off,

how do you get it to explode when you want it to?

That was Nobel's other great innovation.

And they actually still make those devices at his old factory.

In fact, Nobel's sand bunkers are the perfect place for me to find out more about them.

Well, Alfred Nobel being the very inventive guy that he was,

came up with the idea of a detonator

and this is a modern detonator,

but the basic principle is a device which delivers an explosive

shock to dynamite and that shock is sufficient to detonate it.

I do actually have a cutaway here.

At the top of the detonator we have an electrical fuse head

- and this is, in many ways, like the match.

- Yep.

This is designed to initiate not by friction

but by passing an electric current through it.

That generates heat, which causes this fuse head to burst with

hot gases and hot particles

which then initiate a pallet of sensitive primary explosive.

And out of more than just casual curiosity,

a detonator like that, with that much explosive in it,

how much damage would it do if just that went off?

If I was holding this in my hand and it and it were to detonate,

then I would lose the hand.

Really? OK.

- I'll be very wary of detonators, then.

- Absolutely!

'Of course, to demonstrate a detonator really doing its job,

'we need to attach it to a block of less sensitive explosive.

'Dynamite was the world's first mouldable plastic explosive

'and we're using its modern equivalent.'

That's a small sample, maybe about 30g of a new plastic explosive

that we've developed here at Ardeer.

I think I should double-check - I'm fine for handling this now?

Oh, yes, it is perfectly safe.

I guess because it looks like Play-Doh,

you instantly want to treat it like Play-Doh.

Well, it is a very special kind of Play-Doh, if you like.

It's got that plasticity that Play-Doh has, but as with all explosives,

they are very unforgiving when you give it the right stimulus.

- And that is a detonator.

- And that is a detonator.

I'm going to ask Jim to come in and set up.

Jim is one of our trained shot-firers,

and only a shot-firer can set up.

You've been handling that material with gloves.

Jim is not wearing gloves because there is a risk of static with the electrically-initiated detonator.

You'll notice again he's kept the detonator, the action end of the wires, in the box until the last

minute, so if there is any accidental stray current

he's minimised the chance of it causing any damage and then he just simply pops it into the holder,

to make sure that there's contact with the explosive

and it's now ready to go

once we've cleared the site and Jim has armed the circuit.

I feel my stomach change when he puts that in there.

I honestly do. It's just...

Like we're now... Shall we go?

- Yes.

- Right.

Stand by.

Effectively, that entire lump almost instantaneously goes from being

- a solid to a gas.

- Absolutely right.

- It's shockingly crisp.

- Yeah. That's what it's supposed to do,

but if you look on the other side,

you'll see something completely different.

And that's the pressure wave that's ripped that out.

Yeah, the shock wave travels through the plate, hits the underside and

then just blasts off the scab and if we dig around we might just find

the back end of that, because we've got a nice little hole here.

So somewhere down there is the piece.

Well, the secret is it's come all the way through

and there... Get the sand off it.

- I'm shocked.

- There's the scab.

It's come off the other side.

It's more impressive than going through there, because nothing

goes through railway sleepers, as a general rule.

Nobel's struggle to tame the power of high explosives and make them

safe tools for the hungry industrial world made him a very rich man.

By safely harnessing the shattering power of nitroglycerine's detonation

with dynamite and a range of other compounds, a new era

of civil engineering opened up and great construction projects

such as the Suez Canal, the London Underground system

and then the Panama Canal could now be undertaken.

And that might have been Nobel's legacy,

if it weren't for a mistake that occurred in 1888.

After the death of Alfred Nobel's elder brother Ludvig,

some newspapers mistakenly printed Alfred Nobel's obituary instead.

Where he was living in France at the time,

Le Figaro printed this small but damning paragraph.

It translates as, "A man who it would be difficult

"to describe as a benefactor to humanity died yesterday in Cannes."

Now, reading that must have been a bit of a shock, and it's said that

it made Nobel intent on changing his legacy to the world.

To that end, he left his vast fortune to setting up a foundation

which would award prizes for literature, science and peace.

Nobel's advances in explosive design were the result of long hours and hard work,

but some revolutions in the history of explosives are sparked simply by a chance observation.

In the same year that Nobel's obituary was accidentally published,

an American chemist, Charles Monroe,

was doing explosives work for the US Navy.

He was one of the foremost explosives experts

of the late 19th century.

Then many high explosives came in blocks with the manufacturer's name embossed onto them.

So I've got myself some high explosive

onto which I'm going to stamp a corporate name.

Now, as Monroe spotted, there was something very strange that happened

when these stamped blocks were detonated near steel plate.

Hopefully we'll get to see the same thing.

Prime...

That seemed big enough.

Here we go.

Yes. OK.

You can now see the BBC logo stamped into a block of steel

in the same way that the manufacturers' logos got stamped

into the steel back in the 1880s, but what Monroe was particularly

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