Explosives, medicine and lubricant for condoms: what can nitroglycerin do? The explosion in Nobel’s Stockholm laboratory occurred 160 years ago 09/03/2024, 14:22

Stormy Saturday morning

September 3, 1864, began as an ordinary Saturday in Stockholm. Some were attending a show at a swimming school where the Queen was also on stage, while others were busy selling silks in one of the capital’s expensive shops. The play “The Barber of Seville, or a Vain Precaution” was about to begin at the Royal Bolshoi Theatre. The men discussed how the war between Denmark and Prussia would soon end, as all the newspapers reported: the Germans had finally avenged their defeat 15 years earlier and recaptured Schleswig from the Danes. In short, an ordinary day off in a prosperous European country of the 19th century.

At 11 a.m., Alfred Nobel, 31, received his engineer acquaintance Bloom at home, his wife Andrietta was cleaning, and his father Immanuel and younger brother Emil were already in the laboratory trying to simplify the production of nitroglycerin. At that moment, a terrible explosion was heard in the city. The blast wave threw Nobel and everyone in the house to the ground, and also showered them with broken glass. Windows were broken in many parts of the city, and the products of merchants in the center fell off the shelves. Judging by the location of the huge column of black smoke, the Nobel laboratory exploded; this was the same laboratory that neighbors had long complained about because they felt unsafe due to its explosive experiments.

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Journalists arriving at the scene began describing what they saw in vivid colors: only rubble remained from the laboratory, bodies were lying everywhere, and it was difficult to identify people. “A shapeless pile of flesh and bones that did not resemble a human body”

— wrote Among these corpses was Alfred’s brother, and his father – who, according to the ideas of those years, was saved by God himself – went home from the laboratory to pick up a letter shortly before the explosion.

The roofs of the houses around the laboratory were blown off, some walls collapsed. The public reaction was very angry: Why were such dangerous experiments carried out in the middle of a residential area? Immanuel Nobel at the police hearing spokeThey said that they did not conduct any “production”, but only small experiments that did not require permission, and they had only 130 kg of nitroglycerin (this estimate is significantly underestimated, given the scale of the destruction). The Nobel laureates acted on the principle of “blame the dead”, and therefore Emil was unanimously chosen as the culprit of the disaster that sent at least five people to the next world. Apparently, during the production of a new batch of nitroglycerin, he forgot to check the temperature of the mixture, did not cool the container with cold water, and eventually overheated it. This caused an explosion.

As a result, the court ruled that Nobel should pay a large sum of compensation to all the victims. Some residents of Stockholm bypassed the court’s decision and demanded compensation for moral damages, and one day they beat Immanuel and threw him down the stairs. In any case, I had to forget about the experiments in the capital.

More dangerous to man than to his enemies

Nitroglycerin, discovered by the Italian Ascanio Sobrero in 1846, became the first explosive in history to have explosive properties. Known since the Middle Ages, black powder, from a physical point of view, can only burn quickly (under certain conditions), but the combustion front moves at subsonic speed and does not create a shock wave. The destructive effect of the gunpowder explosion is not very large, which allows it to be used in cannons and shotguns without threatening the integrity of the barrel. However, the same property makes gunpowder bombs ineffective both in warfare and in blasting operations during construction.

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Tunnel built with nitroglycerin

Wikimedia Commons

Of course, when news of the unusually powerful explosive emerged, the military took notice, but it quickly became clear that it was not suitable for regular use on the battlefield.

First, because nitroglycerin is a slightly viscous liquid under normal conditions, there was no convenient or reliable way to store it in the field for long periods of time. Second, the substance Sobrero discovered was very dangerous and unstable.

Black powder can be stored in a tightly closed barrel, you just need to protect it from sparks and fire.

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Explosive jellies in reflected light (above) and in light (below)

A.E. Mann

With the new liquid explosives, such simple measures were not enough. When Nobel’s firm set up a remote facility near Hamburg a year after the Stockholm explosion and began selling a mixture of nitroglycerin and gunpowder under the brand name Blasting Oil, there was a demand for blasting. But its use was constantly accompanied by tragedy. Factory buildings in Germany regularly exploded, killing workers. In 1866, one of the oil crates left over from the Donner Pass Tunnel in Nevada exploded, destroying a construction company’s San Francisco office. Nitroglycerin cans also regularly exploded in the United Kingdom, causing casualties and forcing the government to effectively ban its use.

Of course, such an explosive could not become standard for military use, as it was more dangerous to friendly troops than to enemy troops. Nitroglycerin was used only in a few experimental types of mines.

Dynamite

The ban on nitroglycerin in many countries forced Nobel to look for a new type of high-powered explosive. At the very least, it had to be converted from liquid to solid. To do this, one of Nobel’s business partners suggested impregnating some absorbent material with nitroglycerin, transporting the mixture to the site, and then converting it back to liquid. At first, we chose diatomaceous earth as the absorbent – mineral flour, a remnant of the vital activity of ancient diatoms. But it soon became clear that it was very difficult to separate liquid explosives from diatomaceous earth, and most of them ended up as waste.

Then Nobel had an idea: it was necessary to choose an absorber so that it would not be necessary to isolate nitroglycerin. He tried various solid fillers, from sawdust to charcoal and nitrocellulose, but none of them could compare with diatomaceous earth. It was only necessary to choose the right proportion: it turned out that one quarter of mountain flour required three quarters of nitroglycerin. The result was an almost dry block that would not catch fire from an accidental spark, but required a special fuse cap.

Nobel patented the invention in 1867 and vigilantly fought against unlicensed copies. The explosive, soon called dynamite, was still of little use for military purposes, but was indispensable for mining.

Explosive jelly soon appeared as one of the derivatives of dynamite, and nitrocellulose was used instead of kieselguhr.

Since then, nitroglycerin has practically not been used as an explosive. However, a form of dynamite was used by Russian terrorists who killed Tsar Alexander II and the Moscow Governor-General, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Revolutionary terror was almost the only large-scale “combat” application of Nobel’s invention.

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In the second half of the 19th century, it became clear that pure diluted nitroglycerin could be a medicine. It was used to relieve angina and lower blood pressure. In the last years of his life, Nobel was prescribed liquid explosives. “Isn’t it ironic that I was prescribed oral nitroglycerin? They call it trinitrin so as not to scare the chemists and the public,” he said. wrote Glycerol trinitrate is still available today as a medical drug, but scientists have long discovered that it is not the nitric oxide itself that acts, but the nitric oxide into which the explosive is transformed during metabolism.

Finally, there is one use for nitroglycerin that was probably never imagined by either Sobrero or Nobel. to add It is found in the lubricant of some condoms. Nitroglycerin helps dilate the blood vessels in the penis, which is claimed to help with some types of impotence. Research showednitroglycerin lubricant is at least safe and works much better FasterThan Viagra.