The History of Dynamite

Mount Rushmore, the Panama canal, Hoover dam, the Nobel Piece Prize

What do they have in common… dynamite’s now on modern market.

Dynamite… its power is spectacular, and yet, when we stop and consider the technologies behind the world we live in, most of us probably wouldn’t give it a thought.

Computers, satellites, jets, atomic energy — these are the movers and shakers that transform our world and command our respect. But, if dynamite had never been invented, where would we have gotten all the wiring for the information superhighway we travel on every day?

Without dynamite, and steel, and aluminum for jets and satellites, the uranium that runs our nuclear reactors my goal had remained trapped in the earth.

Dynamite is a technological tool with which we rarely come into contact, and yet there are times when with a boom makes us pay attention.

Nearly a century and a half after it was first invented dynamite is often the explosive of choice and demolition business. Just a few hundred well-placed sticks can topple a huge building, with little danger of causing any peripheral damage. So tidy, so dependable, so affordable.

It’s still used because it’s a very safe product. And one of the most important things, when we use explosives, is to be safe. And so, that’s why dynamite still has a place in the arsenal that we use.

Eric Kelly is an explosives expert in the demolition industry. Together with his wife Anna Chang they work in a specialized field, armed with a special knowledge that only a handful of people share.

-We must respect the explosives at all times, but we cannot be afraid of it.

Eric, Anna and their crew have come to Tampa (Florida), their company engineered demolition has been hired to topple the skybox structure, that once offered prime seating next to «The Big Sombrero Stadium».

The wrecking ball and conventional demolition took care of the arena, but the skybox is a different story.

-We thought that the luxury sweets were best suited to be demolished by explosives just because of the fact of predictability. When you try to conventianally demolish these structures there were too much of a variable. If you tripped out one part of the building may come down another part might fail and come in the wrong direction on the operator. Under those considerations explosives were chosen because of the safety.

Eric and Anna are in the midst of final preparations for a shock, which is what the explosion is called. Blasting cups are inserted into the explosives, they are in turn placed and then tent into over 200 strategically positioned bored holes throughout the structure.  The crew works carefully to make sure the blast is controlled. The structure is situated after all in the heart of the city.

-Safety is our number-one concern from the time when we step in on a project, and it must be at any time something that we think about at all times.

Workers wrapped chain-link fencing and heavy cloth material around the areas that have been loaded with dynamite, keep rubble and debree from flying out of the demolition area.

Eric and Anna attend a last minute final meeting to ensure the safety of onlookers and news «choppers». In an age of world’s wildest wackiest videos an explosion makes good television.

-Can have our police helicopter up there. An he can chew away anybody to peace any area.

When the meeting is over Eric and Anna return to the site, they attach the detonation cord, master wiring that will coordinate the sequence of the blasts. Everything is nearly set.

It is Sunday morning, the following day, and just as expected the news choppers are out, for them it’s a bit of show business, but for Eric and his crew it is business as usual. Final details are checked and rechecked and then, just for some extra insurance, a moment of prayer.

-Jesus Christ, you allow all of us these abilities you’ve given us, make yourself follow through …

News crews have arrived, crowds have taken their positions, they’ve come to have a blast. Then the moment of truth.

-5,4,3,2,1… boom!…

Incredibly, when the smoke clears it appears especially reinforced column has withstood the explosion, but not for long. Weakened by the blasts all it tkaes is a shock by the earthmovers and down it goes.

-This particular shot was, in our opinion, a 100% successful shot, the entire structure is on the ground, we had no property or personnel damage. And contractor and all the people are entertained and they’re happy just like us.

And it all was made possible by dynamite. So, just what is the alchemy behind dynamites explosive process.

-The dynamite needs a shock to set it off. You need to hit it hard, so, this is why the detonators are in use to give it that hard hit to shock to shot the explosive to initiate the dynamite.

The detonator is a small exploding device which creates the initial shock wave, that sets off a fast-moving chemical reaction, so fast it’s measured in nanoseconds.

Behind the chemical reaction and abundance of hot gases form, that gas causes very hugh pressure. In front of the chemical reaction nothing has occurred yet. So, there is temporarily low pressure. It all happened so quickly — the difference between the two pressure systems creates a tremendous force in the host environment. A force that cannot be contained, the result an explosion, which breaks and heaves bricks, or metal, or rocks with great force.

While it lacks the sophistication of computers, the grace and speed of the latest military hardwear, dynamite holds its own in terms of its impact on the 20th century.

-Without dynamite we wouldn’t have our infrastructure that we have today: the railraods, the highways, tunnels, all these things that needed broken rock making ores for the many mineral production of cooper and iron and leaden zink, and all the other metals would be difficult  if not impossible if we had not had the introduction of dynamite at the time we had it at the United States Industrial Revolution.

Dynamite played a leading role in the building of dams, which gave us hydroelectric power to run our cities. It was crucial for the creation of the Panama Canal which united two oceans. It was even used to create art. Mount Rushmore was carved out of solid granit thanks to dynamite. This amazing chain of events all began here in a laboratory in Sweden, where its inventor dreamed he would change the world.

But thousands of years mankind thought of power source, one that could dramatically alter the physical world.

-Man has always needed to break into the earth if you will. Mining and construstion where activities that evolved, since the beginning of man man needed resources, man needed to break the rock to refine the rock to get the metals, to build his infrastructure.

In ancient times men built huge fires next to rock that they wanted to break open. Once the rock was red-hot they threw cold water against it, and the sudden temperature shift caused it to crack. 2,000 years ago the Romans sent legions of men to to task: building roads and tunnels. In the 1400s the Aztecs put thousands to work — mining gold and silver, but the dynamite would have made these endeavors much easier.

-From an economic standpoint there is a great advantage to be able to move a lot of material with a minimum amount of labour. When we think about building roads, digging tunnels, mining ore, we have to do it with a pick of a shovel, it take a horrendous amount of time. But if we can do it with an explosive, we can move a tremendous amount of material in an instant.

The story of dynamite begins a thousand years ago, when the Chinese invented the first explosive — gunpowder. Not realizing its enormous potential they initially used it for fireworks, signals and rockets. This magical mixture of charcoal, sulfa and potassium nitrate was a jealously garded secret.

Then in 1242 Roger Bacon, an English monk who was also a scientist, was conducting experiments  when he discovered the formula for the explosive Chinese invention. He was so terrified of its power that he wrote its formula in cide. But others soon unlocked the secret of making gunpowder. And it was introduced in Europe. It subsequently spawned a revolution. loli serves armed witth cannons soon rose up and overthrew the harsh feudal system.

Within four or five centuries gunpowder was also used in mining.

-It’s unclear why it took that long, it may have been that there was no way to drill, bore holes (prior to that time) to put the gunpowder in, to break the rock.

But even when gunpowder was introduced in mining activity it had its limitations.

-Gunpowder itself doesn’t detonate. You have to confine gunpowder for it to detonate. It actually burns (or we call deflagration) so, gunpowder burns, and as such gunpowder can only do so much work.

-The amount of energy that comes out of the reaction is very small. Its application for moving rock was very limited. It would loosen rock and push the rock aside, but then a great deal of manual labor had to be expende: actually hammer, and break, and shutter the rock into pieces — work be moved effectively.

Gunpowder — known in the mining industry as blusting powder — while being unreliable, was also quite dangerous.

-Sometimes it burns fast, sometimes it burns slow. If it burned fast (you hope it burns slow) you didn’t have a chance to get out away, and this baby would go off and bring the mine down on you.

-With all of gunpowder’s problems inventors were looking for an alternative.

In 1846 an Italian scientist Ascanio Sombrero invented nytroglycerin, but the yellowish oil like substance was dangerous to manufacture and handle, and was known to cause sudden explosions.

-Nitroglycerin as an explosive was an important breakthrough in that it opened a new family of explosives. It detonated, it gave a very high shock  factor, and it would break rock violently and with much more energy and breaking ability than blackpowder could ever have.

But Sobrero like Roger Bacon was frightened of his discovery.

The developer understood how dangerous it was and recommended in all his literature, and describing the formulation that it should not be used.

Nitroglycerin was incredibly explosive but also extremely unpredictable, which made it quite dangerous to use. While the scientific community was backing away from it, the son of a Swedish inventor was about to tie his faith to this new compound and changed the world forever. His name was Alfred Nobel.

-When he was 17 he went to Germany, and Italy, and to North America for two full years. And he went by himself. When he came back he had somewhat of a wordly education, but he was even at that time a somewhat lonely person and had a melancholy aspect to him.

That temperament was particularly suitable to spending long hours in the laboratory experimenting with nitroglycerin. Despite the dangers Nobel was convinced that if he could harness its energy, he’d revolutionized the use of explosives.

-The nitroglycerin doesn’t burn, it has to be initiated with a shock.

In the course of Nobel scientific work  he first developed a blasting or detonating cap used to set off or initiate the explosion with a fuse or an electrical charge.

-He realized that the best way to put a shock or a pressure pulse into the nitroglycerin was to build a small cap, fill it with a different material like gunpowder, that can be lit with a fuse. The fuse would burn down into the powder, the powder would burn very rapidly, created a small shock wave, and that shockwave would then in turn ignite the nitroglycerin. With that step nitroglycerin can now be detonated it with great accuracy.

By putting that small cylinder with it to touch fuse into nitroglycerine he created the first initiation system for detonating explosive.

But there was an awful price to Nobels experiments and the promotion of the use of nitroglycerin.Numerous accidents occurred and many people were killed.

-The nitroglycerin was handled in a very poor manner: it was sent on normal carriages and normal ships with no identification that it wasn’t  explosive, and many people were killed, and countries began to outlaw the use of his explosive.

One lab explosion took the life of Nobel’s younger brother Emil. Nobel was devastated, not only from the loss, but from the damage to his reputation. The death of his brother spurred Alfred Nobel to find a safe way to harness the explosive power of nitroglycerine. He tried combining it with many substances, finally he discovered that by mixing it with diatomaceous earth — a clay-like material formed over millions of years by huge deposits of fossils. He could stabilize it and control it.

-It formed a kind of pasty-playdough substance, and that was less sensitive, withstood shock much better, but still could be detonated with a detnating cap, and could be packed into four tubes and shipped all over the world, and was a very safe substance.

Alfred Nobel named his new product dynamite after the Greek word dynamos, which means power. The name was appropriate as his invention would change the world forever.

In 1867 after Alfred Nobel’s inventions of the blasting cap and dynamite, he and his surviving brothers Robert and Ludwig embarked on the world promotional tour. Everywhere they went enthusiasm for their product safety and usefulness was high, especially in America. The United States was rapidly undustrializing, expanding and developing the West. The building of the Transcontinental Railroad was a major endeavor.

-We had to build trains, build railroads, going in mine natural resources, that we knew — we were available! To us, so, there was a potential of great wealth, but it took a tremendous amount of work. And while we had cheap labor the amount of labor to do some of these jobs was just enormous, so the use of something like dynamite really hastened the development of the West.

When the railroad got to the west it met mountains.

-They had to be going around or going through and without the explosive dynamite these things ould have been very difficult, if not impossible in some cases to manage.

When the railway began, black powder was used for blasting. Then after 1846 nitroglycerin was used, but Chinese immigrants brought over to help build the railways, «were being» killed by hundreds from accidental explosions. So when they began using dynamite it not only speeded up the process, actually saved many more hundreds of lives. While dynamite was used to tame the west, there were those who were untameable and they sought to use it in criminal activity as ‘immortalized’ early on in film.

-‘Wadham’ dynamite was being transported across the frontier, beacause of that it was very easy for robbers and thieves to go out and steal it. So, then they could go dynamite railroad tracks, stopped trains, robbed trains, going to town attacked the local banks, and the product of choice would be dynamite because of its availability.

But the occasional problems with criminals were far outweighed by the many benefits dynamite offered.

Dynamite played a significant role in mining activities during the gold rush, and the gold rush returned the favor.

-It was the gold rush in the late 1800s that actually spurred the development of application of dynamite in the mines.

The giant powder company built the first dynamite factory in the US in 1868, though destroyed by a blast and later relocated, it was originally  built in the San Francisco Bay Area, where it erved the California gold mines. When water blasting known as hydraulic mining failed to expose the covetet ore, dynamite was used to break away rock reveiling rich veins of gold.

Gold may have produced the fever, but when the fortune seekers cooled down, they stayed and settled the West. While discoveries of ore deposites of copper, lead and iron didn’t produce fever, they created jobs and communities and helped build America.

-As we say in the mining industry ‘If you don’t grow it,  you gotta mine it!’ If it’s not an agricultiral product, it’s probably a mining product we have to mine or either underground mines or open pit mines, and for the turn of century and after the turn of century dynamite was really the explosive of choise, was used tremendously all over the United States and throughout the world to develop the mining industry.

-Dynamite had a great effect on the population of these areas, because some of these ores could not have been mined economically by the use of any other type of explosive.

Dynamite replaced gunpowder, which  had been responsible for many deaths in mining, as it had in railroading.

-When these old kinds of explosives were used anywhere, from three to five thousand miners were dying a year.

-Well, dynamite is a much safer material than gunpowder or blackpowder in that it is not ignitable simply by flame or spark. In the days of early minig miners used to candle under their cap or they used later on a carbide lamp, which is just simply an acetylene flame on their cap. Adrop of something burning and ember into a keg of black powder was a disaster in those days.

Nonetheless in its early incarnation dynamite itself also posed its own dangers.

-But over a period of time it deteriorates, there is a separation of nitroglycerine out of the mixture to the surface or the skin of the stick essentually. And it could actually puddle up and flood some of these old wooden boxes, that may have a half a case of dynamite in, so, they were still very very very sensitive, very dangerous.

-In cold weather nitroglycerine crystellized inside the sticks, making it sensitive to shock, and accidental explosions occurred. But over time Nobel and other scientists altered dynamite’s formula to make it safer under a variety of conditions. Nobel himself developed a gelatin version of dynamite, which worked in damp conditions, and even under water this alternative version of dynamite was used to deepen and improve harbors.

-Many companies began to produce the product, some under licence to Alfred Nobel himself, and some competitors, and all of these different companies had different ways of manufacturing the product, different product sizes and configurations, and there were very few regulations that were able to contend with these variations, so, the industry and the goverment agreed that it would be beneficial to form an organization to assist in codification or bringing together of recommendations for the explosives industry, and the Institute of Makers of Explosives was founded in 1913.

As the world embraced this new technology, its inventor Alfred Nobel grew rich, but the DuPont  family, headed by general henry DuPont, was heavily invested in the gunpowder business. They at first rejected dynamite as the eay of the future, but his nephew Lamont DuPont disagreed and secretly began to get the DuPont company involved with this new technology.

-As soon as the DuPont company saw that dynamite was in fact a good product, and it was beginning to make tremendous inroads on their sales of black powder, they began bying into these independent explosive companies. Surreptitiously at the beginning and then more openly, and by the mid 1880s they had already acquired a great stake in almost all of the explosive companies in the United States.

Eventually the US government grew concerned over DuPont’s monopoly position, and in 1912 broke up the DuPont explosives business into three separate companies. But while the DuPont suffered a setback, dynamite was just getting started.

in the 19th century Alfred Nobel’s duel, inventions of dynamite, and the blasting cap sped up the industrialization of America and the rest of the world. But in the 20th century their impact was even greater, they prvided men with an awesome power — the ability to dramatically change the face of the earth.

-Projects like Panama Canal probably culdn’t even be attempted if we didn’t have something like dynamite. If you had to rely on labor, it would take just a trmendous amount of time.

Remarkably the Central American Canal that would connect the Atlantic and Pasific Oceans was first proposed by Spanish Colonialists in 1529. They stood to benefit from the obvious ease of navigation between the two oceans that would have resulted, but it just was’t feasible. 400 years later dynamite made this dream a reality. At the beginning of the 20th century construction of the Panama Canal had begun.

-There was somewhere in the excess of 67 million pounds of dynamite used in that construction, and the way it was used was the way we use explosives in road cuts and mining. They drilled holes, they loaded them with explosives, and they blasted them, and they dug the material.

In 1914 the Panama Canal was in operation. Dynamitr had cut through 40miles of land and excavated a hundred and seventy-five million cubic yards of earth, enough to fill the Empire State Building 500 times. As the 20th century brought widespread changes in technology, dynamite played an important role in nearly every facet. In a sense,  dynamite put America on wheels. When Henry Ford’s Model-T began rolling out in the early part of the 20th century, the assembly line looked like it was where all the action was. Behind the scenes dynamite was making it all possible. As the key tool of the mining industry dynamite blasted out the iron ore for the steel frames and bodies, the copper for the electrical system wiring, and the lead for the batterie. And it was indispensible in creating our nation’s highways. It levelled rough terrain and it blasted gravel out of rock quarries, gravel that was used for the roadways.

As Americans bought more and more cars, they needed fuel for those cars, once again it was dynamite that played a key role behind the scenes.

-Dynamite has a broad history in the oil industry. It was used to stimulate wells back in the 1860s. When the wells in Pennsylvania dried up. They dried up because there was a film of wax on the inside of the bored holes. It was found very quickly that if you put some dynamite or nitroglycerine down in those holes you could begin the flow of oil again, just as it was when the hole was first drilled.

Dynamite has also been used in the area of seismic exploration. By setting off blasts and measuring the shockwaves though the various strata below geologists could locate oil fields.

As America hit the road, dynamite also was key in building one of America’s great tourist destinations — Mount Rushmore.

-We know its characteristics very well, and so, when we use it in a particular rock we know how it’s going to perform, and we could actually sculpt the piece of art using dynamite. Because it’s so repeatable we can rely on how it’s going to behave.

Mount Rushmore was begun in 1927 and completed in 1939. In the end, the workers had blasted away a half a million tones of solid granite. As a visionary artist Gudzon Borglum had used dynamite to recreate nature in the image of man.

During the deprssion Hoover Dam wasyet  another enormous achievement made possible by dynamite.

-We could blast canyons to shape the surroundings to get a base, so the dam could be built, essentially carved them out, so that we can make dams, like the Hoover Dam.

But before the dam itself could be constructed, the mighty Colorado River had to be diverted from the dam site. This monumental task was accomplished by dynamiting the canyon walls, creating four tunnels, the gigantic 56 foot high tunnel, averaged three-quarters of a mile each, and carried the entire volume of the Colrado River.

Hoover Dam was completed in 1935, two years ahead of schedule, thanks in large part to the power of dynamite. It in turn is a power source, a hydroelectric generators of Hoover Dam supplying nearly 1.5 million kilowatts of electricity to Arizona, Nevada and Southern California.

Just as dynamite was used to build the Hoover Dam, it was also used throughout America and the world in the construction of tunnels vital to transportation.

In New York city dynamite was used in carving out the mouths of the Holland and Midtown tunnels, as well as the New York subways.

-The rock under New York is an extremely hard. Shift-type material which is extremely hard to drill, extremely hard to blast. It required something like dynamite. Black powder could not have done it.

An yet, despite the enormous legacy created by dynamite, which in turn was created by Alfred Nobel. When we hear the name Nobel today we don’t think of the violence of a dynamite explosion, we think of piece in the Nobel Prize.

The story behind the prize is as fascinating as the story of dynamite itself. When Alfred Nobel reached his 60s his health was failing, and he began to wonder how the world might remember him… The twist of fate he found his answer in the newspaper. When his brother died in 1888 Nobel got a chance to look into his own future, as he read the newspaper obituary he had an incredible shock: the editors had confused Ludvig Nobel with Alfred Nobel and had published the obituary of the inventor of dynamite. It summed up Alfred’s life by calling him «the merchant of death». Nobel was bewildered, but he really shouldn’t have been.

Nobel’s legacy had began with his father immanuel Nobel, who invented land-mines and water-mines.

-He went to Russia and was able to sell to Russians, and as a result he opend up a factory in St. Petersburg to build both land-mines and mines in harbours, and was very successful. The family moved from Sweden, all the Nobel family worked with the father to develop these devices used extensively by the Russians in Crimean War.

Alfred himself had profited from warfare, for he was the inventor of smokeless powder, technicaly known as ballast diet.

-Black powder when it would be fired would give off a lot of smoke. If you were shooting lots of rounds, you get a lot of smoke in the area, and it would be very annoying, also your enemy would use that smoke to find out where you were at, so they could target you, and so, the use of a smokeless powder so that you could fire ammunition and still have a clear view, plus the enemy couldn’t see you — was a great tactical advantage on the battlefield.

Historical evidence indicates that Nobel’s invention of dynamite had only a marginal application in warfare. Too late for the Napolionic Wars or the American Civil War was used to a limited extend for submarine mines about the time of the Spanish-American War. Experts speculate there may have been other applications.

-Dynamite in warfare could be used almost in the same way that it’s used in the construction, and mining, and demolition business. You could use dynamite to dynamite a bridge, to stop your enemy from crossing a bridge; dynamite rail, so that the trains would be stopped.

But dynamite on the battlefield could be as dangerous to those using it as to the opposition. Cartload of dynamite was a disaster waiting to happen, if an enemy sniper bullet hit a single stick, the shock would set off the entire load.

-The military needs to use explosives that are easy to handle, and are not subject to shock accidental detonations of shock.

In the 1880s the US military spent several years trying to create a gun that could launch dynamite. In 1889 the Navy enen built a dynamite gunship ‘The USS — Vesuvius’ and put it into service in The Spanish-American War. But because of the short range of these guns and accidental explosions occurring as the shock — sensitive dynamite was launched, they were far more dangerous to the crews than the enemy, and the idea was scrapped.

While dynamitehad little place in war Alfred Nobel was nonetheless going to be remembered for ‘the bad’ and not ‘the good’ he’d accomplished. Nobel vowed to set the record straight to clear the Nobel name. Nobel’s will instructed his executors to use his fortune to create an endowment with lofty goals.

-The Nobel Foundation was a product of his executors. Nobel left a very simple will in which he specified that his bequest be used for creating prizes in the fields of physics, chemistry, literature, piece and medicine. He gave no directions as to how this money would be put into a foundation, all that was left up to his executors.

Through judicious investment the endowment has grown to such proportions that each year the winners are each awarded about about a million dollars to pursue good work in the various fields Nobel outlined. But it is the Piece Prize which seems to hold the highest on.

Though dynamite is no longer widely used this explosive is nonetheless still utilized at the Millennium. One of its most spectacular performances was after the Gulf War. Dynamite was used to put out the oil field fires in Kuwait.

When it blew away the oxygen the fires couldn’t breathe and workers could then come in and safely cap the well.

Dynamite remains a popular choice for certain jobs in the mining industry and for demolition use in the constructing industry.

At New Mexico Tech a highly specialized scientific environment is used to test new kinds of dynamite as well as the next generation of explosives.

-Three-two-one.

-The energetic materials research and Test Center or EMR TC, as we call it, is a research devision of New Mexico Tech. It focuses on doing testing and research in the area of energetic materials from propellants to explosives including dynamite.

Today most dynamite used in the United States comes from the Dyno Nobel plant in Carthage Missuori. This is the last remaining dynamite factory in America. While the factory still produces tens of millions of pounds of dynamite a year, it represents a tiny fraction of the explosives industry in America. Dynamites popularity began to wane during the 1950s shortly after the successful introduction of ammonium nitrate explosives which had a number of key advantages.

-The ammonium nitrate and fuel oil are explosive material that is used in mining to the large extent is generally referred to as ANFO, and accounts for probably about a little over four billion pounds of product that’s consumed in the United States every year. ANFO costs about 30 cents a pound, while dynamite runs about 2 dollars a pound.

-In the mining industry coat is everything. You have to produce an ore at the cheapest possible price, and so the price of the explosives really factors into what you use.

But cost is not the only factor, ANFO has other benefits.

-What’s nice about ammonium nitrate it is not near sensitive to shock as dynamite. So it was easier to handle, easier to store, safer to store.

The new genaration of explosives come in a variety of forms including slurries and emulsions. They enoy industry popularity due to their ease of application.

-We can pump modern-day explosives through pumps. So we can use very large trucks, we bring them out onto a mining location, we pump the explosive out of the truck into he bore holes, can load 200 kilograms per minute of explosives. So, rather than putting in each individual stick we can now pump it into the hole, and do a tremendous amount of work in a very short period of time.

-All right, ho!

Another reason Dynamite is less popular is that its users have an occupational hazard. This job is one powerful headache, not for the reasons you’d think. The headaches come from exposure and handling the dynamite itself: nitroglycerin dilates the blood vessels in the brain that adds up to pressure and the pounding headache. As dynamite’s use may only last a few more decades what then is its legacy?

-From a scientific standpoint the greatest legacy that Nobel left us is the blasting cap. Actually dynanite was very famous and made a tremendous amount of money, but the blasting cap is still in use today almost in the same way that Nobel designed it over a hundred years ago. Dynamite revolutionized the world, revolutionized the construction and mining industry, but we’ve moved on past dynamite, we still use Alfred Nobel blasting caps.

But even if the use of dynamite fails, nothing can diminish the role it played in shaping our civilization.

-Looking at the history of dynamite I think the best thing about it is that it is created a world that we live in today, it’s enabled us to have our tunnels, our roads, our harbors, our metals that we’ve created, infrastructure with the metals we’ve created, our automobiles, our railroad trains, our railroad rail, and everything else that we use today. Without dynamite we’d have a far different world that we have today.