Stormy Saturday morning
September 3, 1864, began as a routine Saturday in Stockholm. People watched a show at a swimming school where the Queen herself was on stage, while others shopped for silks in the city’s upscale stores. The Royal Bolshoi Theatre was about to stage The Barber of Seville, or a Vain Precaution. In daily chatter, most residents discussed how the Denmark-Prussia war might end soon, as newspapers boasted that the Germans had avenged a defeat from a decade and a half earlier and retaken Schleswig from the Danes. It was, in short, a normal day in a thriving 19th-century European city.
At 11 a.m., Alfred Nobel, then 31, hosted his engineer acquaintance Bloom at home. His wife Andrietta tended to chores, while his father Immanuel and younger brother Emil were already in the laboratory working to simplify the production of nitroglycerin. A terrible explosion suddenly ripped through the city. The blast hurled Nobel and everyone in the house to the floor and showered them with flying glass. Windows shattered across the center, and merchants faced toppled shelves as the heavy column of black smoke loomed. It was clear to onlookers that the Nobel laboratory had blown. That lab had long drawn complaints from neighbors who feared its volatile experiments in a residential area.
Journalists arriving at the scene described a devastating sight: rubble filled the laboratory, bodies lay scattered, and identification proved nearly impossible. One observer wrote about a shapeless pile of flesh and bones that scarcely resembled a person.
Among the casualties were Alfred’s brother and his father, who, by the prevailing beliefs of the time, had perhaps been spared by divine intervention. They had returned from the laboratory to retrieve a letter when the blast struck. The nearby roofs were torn off, walls collapsed, and public anger surged. Why such dangerous experiments were conducted close to homes became a hot topic at the police hearing where Immanuel Nobel faced questions. Officials stated that no production was taking place, only small experiments that reportedly did not require special permission, and that only 130 kilograms of nitroglycerin were present. This estimate, however, seems far from the mark given the scale of the disaster. In the days that followed, Emil Nobel was widely blamed as the likely cause, accused of overheating a batch while temperatures rose too high and a critical safety check was missed.
As the dust settled, the court ordered Nobel to compensate the victims heavily. Some residents pursued additional damages, and one day they assaulted Immanuel, throwing him down stairs. Ultimately, the era of such experiments in the city was forced to retreat from public life.
More dangerous to man than to his enemies
Nitroglycerin, discovered by Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero in 1846, marked the first explosive with genuine explosive power. Historically, black powder burns but does so at a subsonic pace, creating a shock wave that is modest in scale. Its destructive reach is limited, which is why it found use in cannons and shotguns without endangering the barrel itself. Yet these properties also made powder bombs impractical for modern warfare or large-scale blasting operations.
When nitroglycerin made its appearance, the military initially paid attention but soon realized it could not be deployed as a reliable battlefield tool. There were two fundamental problems: nitroglycerin exists as a somewhat viscous liquid under ordinary conditions, making storage and handling in the field risky, and it is notoriously unstable. By contrast, black powder could be stored safely in sealed barrels with basic precautions.
With a liquid explosive like nitroglycerin, simple safeguards were no longer enough. Nobel’s firm established a remote facility near Hamburg a year after the Stockholm explosion and began marketing a mixture of nitroglycerin with gunpowder as Blasting Oil. Demand grew, but disaster followed repeatedly. German factories suffered regular explosions, crates from the Donner Pass Tunnel disaster in Nevada blew apart a San Francisco office, and nitroglycerin cans caused casualties across the United Kingdom, prompting government restrictions.
Thus, nitroglycerin never became a standard military tool. Its use was limited and largely experimental, with some mine operations exploiting the substance under tightly controlled circumstances.
In response to mounting dangers, Nobel explored how to make a more stable, solid form of the explosive. A partner suggested soaking an absorbent material with nitroglycerin, transporting the mixture to a site, and then drying it out. Early on, diatomaceous earth, a mineral powder left from ancient diatoms, served as the absorber. It soon became clear that separating liquid nitroglycerin from this filler was impractical, and much of the mixture wasted away. The breakthrough came when Nobel experimented with different fillers and proportions. He found that mixing a quarter part of mountain flour with three quarters of nitroglycerin yielded an almost dry mass that was less prone to accidental ignition, yet still required a fuse for detonation.
In 1867, Nobel patented the invention of dynamite and pursued enforcement to prevent counterfeit versions. Although dynamite had limited battlefield applications, it became indispensable for mining. The era also spawned derivatives such as explosive jelly and nitrocellulose replacing kieselguhr in some formulations. Since then, nitroglycerin largely faded from direct use as an explosive, though it found unintended roles elsewhere. One notable historical incident involved dynamite being used by extremist groups against high-level targets in a political context, underscoring how such inventions can be misused.
In the latter half of the 19th century, diluted nitroglycerin even found medical applications, treated for conditions such as angina to lower blood pressure. Nobel himself was prescribed liquid explosives late in life, a dark irony he acknowledged. Glycerol trinitrate is recognized today as a medical drug, though modern science reveals that its physiological effect stems from the conversion to nitric oxide in the body rather than the nitroglycerin molecule itself.
There is also a little-remarked, curious use. Nitroglycerin has found its way into lubricant compounds for certain condoms, claimed to aid vasodilation and, in some cases, to address specific impotence issues. Early research suggested such lubricants might be safe and could act faster than some popular treatments, though this application remains far from mainstream medical practice.